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OK all you XP diehards...

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I just got rid MSE and installed an alternative which will more than likely does just as good a job. Nag free for life :) yah!!!
 
Giving Panda Cloud a shot at moment. I'll throw Avast on another XP box for a try out. Avira is another option used a while back on an old machine since retired.
 
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Trixter said:
No, it's the opposite. 7 is quicker than both XP and Vista. Vista would have been quicker than XP except that they made some assumptions on how users would use their system which turned out to be wrong; the end result was a virtual memory system that was too conservative and a search indexing system that was too aggressive, both of which combined into a perfect storm of near-constant disk access even when idle.
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Yes, I experienced that and wondered what on Earth was going on, thought it must have caught a bug. Fortunately I disabled their Indexing and also their 'Customer Experience Program', which made a big difference to the amount of disk thrashing. I'm not sure if it's worth going to 7, but I'm more interested now than I was - thanks. Is there something that can be done to help with the virtual memory, I wasn't aware of the issues there?

That MS PC pic shows a 3.5" floppy, maybe MS are coming on-board at Vintage-Computer? ;)

Maybe for Win9 I can donate my 8" Floppy and 8" HDD for them? Actually, they might have advanced then enough to handle the Paper Tape Readers :D
 
Sleepwalker3 said:
That MS PC pic shows a 3.5" floppy, maybe MS are coming on-board at Vintage-Computer? ;)

Maybe for Win9 I can donate my 8" Floppy and 8" HDD for them? Actually, they might have advanced then enough to handle the Paper Tape Readers :D
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Wouldn't surprise me.
I mean they did away with full screen / split screen apps in Windows 2. Then they did away with a full screen program launcher in Windows 95.
Then they bring back both in Windows 8! :D They're going in reverse.

(side note, MS has announced start menu will be in an upcoming W8 update )
 
Yeah, One of the things I really hated when I went from 98 to Vista was that my old apps would not open full screen and only in a small window - What's the point? It's not as if you'd use the old apps if there was something that would replace it decently. They even deliberately forced standard old screen sizes to run extremely slowly in earlier Windows. The PowerBasic Console Compiler (PBCC) community found this and the difference was just crazy, an app could complete in maybe .001 seconds or 40 seconds, simply by altering to / from a standard screen size. This is a snippet from the PBCC help file for the 'Con.Screen' command, but there is more about it on their forum - "The size of the Console Window (and the buffer for each active page) is changed to the rows and columns specified. It should be noted that, when using Windows 95/98/ME, a change in the number of rows to a non-standard value (other than 25, 43, 60) will substantially increase the execution speed of CON.PRINT methods." When they changed to XP, it went back to normal. I really wonder what on earth goes through the mind of some of the MS decision makers.
That Metro interface looks positively horrid and useless, don't think I'll be going to that anytime soon.

About the only thing you could do with the small window was to run your old DOS app in DOSBOX (using D-fend reloaded), then you could have full screen. I've ended up having to rewrite a bunch of old legacy (but still very much needed) apps. I guess on the good side, I do now have a lot more memory to play with!
 
SpidersWeb said:
Wouldn't surprise me.
I mean they did away with full screen / split screen apps in Windows 2. Then they did away with a full screen program launcher in Windows 95.
Then they bring back both in Windows 8! :D They're going in reverse.

(side note, MS has announced start menu will be in an upcoming W8 update )
Click to expand...
IIRC all you needed to do in win 9x to get full screen with a lot of dos programs is atler the programs *.pif file. Some programs wouldn't wear this though so win9x gave you the option to run from dos direct. Of course this involved a few system restarts.

From memory the only reason windows two had tiled windows was because Apple threw a tantrum.
 
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Well if there was a work-around for this, all the people at PB and the PB forum, including the very clever (late) Bob Zale (Developer of Turbo Basic and Power Basic), couldn't find it. These are Win32 Console mode programs, not DOS programs. MS, restricting Windows Programs - that's the irony. They were Console Mode, not GUI, but why should that matter? They will only work under Windows, so they should have no restrictions, even for commercial reasons.
 
Oh, if you know of the setting, please let me know, I still have 98 in a VM, so could check it out. It's not important any more as XP onwards didn't put on this restriction, but it's still interesting as to why they did it - I'm glad this is off-topic, as it's not exactly 'Vintage Computers' ;)
 
Full screen console/text mode won't be available in Vista/7 by default. The only way its possible is if you are running an older XP video driver that does not support WDDM/Aero.
 
njroadfan said:
Full screen console/text mode won't be available in Vista/7 by default. The only way its possible is if you are running an older XP video driver that does not support WDDM/Aero.
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Well then I'm not sure why my system works fine with it (Vista Aero) and the commercial applications I've written have all worked in numerous Win7 machines, including Win7-64. Are you sure you are thinking of native Win32 Console applications and not DOS applications? Certainly DOS applications (if they run at all), won't go full screen (why MS forced this is beyond me, it's crazy).
 
They forgot the "Your computer will self-destruct in 10 seconds" part:

a5rns.png
 
You know, I just bought a "little" (ok bigger than today small) shuttle clone box at the last ham expo for $10. I didn't really expect it to work but to my surprise with it's 2.8Ghz processor, 1GB RAM, and 40GB drive XP boots up extremely quick (probably no antivirus). I booted it off a USB device to scan it and it looks ok although I'll probably back up the drivers and reload but it's pretty damn tempting to let it cruise at this speed.
 
I got a longer "out of support" warning before I started downloading that last batch of updates. I found it funny that MS couldn't wait until I finished getting support to put up a big red warning banner.
Didn't MS learn from the past, never do anything to discourage the downloading of official updates.
 
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