Posted by member 1885 on 2005-09-05 05:11:41 link
Yes, I have to agree with Amejin here. There's just no conceivable way the benefits of Windows 98SE can outweigh those of Windows XP.
Aside from that XP is also a M$ product, which of course means that various aspects of it will inevitably suck, I don't really have many bad things to say about it. Windows 2000 was also solid and stable but it was a pretty terrible gaming OS -- maybe it's better nowadays after all the SPs, I don't know. But with XP gaming is good and I happen to like the cosmetic stuff that was added. Well, at least the visual style system, which in my experience is a lot faster and more stable than Window Blinds. The lack of real mode DOS is indeed a good thing, not a bad thing, and should you need to access your machine in real mode, well, a bootable floppy will do the trick. Remote Desktop can be useful sometimes -- before me and my girlfriend lived together I often used her machine to access mine at home via Remote Desktop -- even though I normally keep it disabled for security reasons.
System Restore, well, I don't use that. It simply doesn't work as advertised so I think it's just a waste of space and processing power. NTFS, hm, I'm sure that's a good file system in a multi-user environment, but on a single-user system like mine you really have no use for its features (and it's also nice being able to access your drives from a DOS boot disk, should you need to). I also dislike some overly "user-frienly" features of the OS, e.g. annoying hardware/driver wizards that refuses to do what you tell them to do. Contrary to what the Windows developers seem to think, stuff like that doesn't actually make it easier setting things up. Novice users normally don't mess around with hardware installations and driver upgrades, and more experienced users already know how to go about it.
Many people who complain about XP being slow and having too much useless stuff running aren't realising that this is an OS that ships in vast numbers, and to be able to handle all possible hardware configurations it might encounter it has to have certain services and programs enabled that most of us won't need. You can't just go setting XP up and expecting it to work great right away, like 9x. You have to tweak this and that, optimize the OS for your hardware. Then, only then, can you really have a valid opinion about its performance.
Anyway I don't really see myself using Windows for very much longer. I have no intention of moving to Vista, and XP will surely be phased out once it's released. I won't go through another Windows migration with software and drivers that won't work, hardware becoming "legacy", exploits and security holes -- I just won't. I've always been reluctant to move to Linux since there's so much good software I use that I wouldn't want to be without (LiteStep, for example) but somewhere deep inside I know that I'm destined to go down that path sooner or later. :)
Aside from that XP is also a M$ product, which of course means that various aspects of it will inevitably suck, I don't really have many bad things to say about it. Windows 2000 was also solid and stable but it was a pretty terrible gaming OS -- maybe it's better nowadays after all the SPs, I don't know. But with XP gaming is good and I happen to like the cosmetic stuff that was added. Well, at least the visual style system, which in my experience is a lot faster and more stable than Window Blinds. The lack of real mode DOS is indeed a good thing, not a bad thing, and should you need to access your machine in real mode, well, a bootable floppy will do the trick. Remote Desktop can be useful sometimes -- before me and my girlfriend lived together I often used her machine to access mine at home via Remote Desktop -- even though I normally keep it disabled for security reasons.
System Restore, well, I don't use that. It simply doesn't work as advertised so I think it's just a waste of space and processing power. NTFS, hm, I'm sure that's a good file system in a multi-user environment, but on a single-user system like mine you really have no use for its features (and it's also nice being able to access your drives from a DOS boot disk, should you need to). I also dislike some overly "user-frienly" features of the OS, e.g. annoying hardware/driver wizards that refuses to do what you tell them to do. Contrary to what the Windows developers seem to think, stuff like that doesn't actually make it easier setting things up. Novice users normally don't mess around with hardware installations and driver upgrades, and more experienced users already know how to go about it.
Many people who complain about XP being slow and having too much useless stuff running aren't realising that this is an OS that ships in vast numbers, and to be able to handle all possible hardware configurations it might encounter it has to have certain services and programs enabled that most of us won't need. You can't just go setting XP up and expecting it to work great right away, like 9x. You have to tweak this and that, optimize the OS for your hardware. Then, only then, can you really have a valid opinion about its performance.
Anyway I don't really see myself using Windows for very much longer. I have no intention of moving to Vista, and XP will surely be phased out once it's released. I won't go through another Windows migration with software and drivers that won't work, hardware becoming "legacy", exploits and security holes -- I just won't. I've always been reluctant to move to Linux since there's so much good software I use that I wouldn't want to be without (LiteStep, for example) but somewhere deep inside I know that I'm destined to go down that path sooner or later. :)