how good is windows xp?

smth like tht

I would say tht you make it much more enjoyable to run if it is cracked. If not cracked then microsoft knows much more than I wanted it to know, and makes the use of the OS very inconvenient if you are are messing with hardware.

heard this joke?

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a girl after a night with Bill Gates
"Now I understand why your company is called MICRO-SOFT"

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Re: Hey "f"

well it's not really a "can't do without" upgrade...continue useing what you're using, thats fine.....my point was more, that, if you want better than what you are using, then you could try XP.

secondly, I didn't mean "get XP or get lost", more, "don't knock it till you try it".

thirdly, your scanner problem is not uncommon, but it's not exactly a deficiency in the OS now is it? (sounds more to me like your scanner's manufacturer is screwing you....). WindowsXP actually supports more hardware straight out of the box than any other OS on the planet.....now that says something.

LOL....yeah thats it.

i don't disagree........but thats the way it is.........it would be fantastic if this wasn't. Peronally I'm willing to use the best OS on the planet, and live with some of the backwards thinking that goes along with it. (just to clarify, I didnt buy the damn thing either....nor would I [mostly due to it's outrageous cost])

 

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F

I didnt buy mine either, nor would I - far too expensive. I may pluck up the courage one day to install it; even partitioned an extra drive to put it in - when I have the guts!

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After reading [f]'s posts I was moved to make another post. It is not that I am against new OS's. I think that they have come a long ways since I first learned DOS to operate a computer. It is much simpler to click an icon that it is to go through all the boring typing of commands and switches to get the computer to function. It is also far better than the original Windows 3.x in ease of use and compatability. What we do with computers today was dreamed of as something that would be nice to do but beyond the capabilities of most users and programmers of yesteryear.

My issue is not with the using of Windows. It is the standard of most of the computing users of the world and if I want to take home any computer info, data, ect. from work then Windows it is. My beef if you will, is that computing software is one of the few things that you buy that comes incomplete and not ready for the world at large and we the public accept this as ok. I mean if you went to the store and bought a new shirt and got home only to discover that half the buttons were not there, how long would it take you to return the item to the store and demand a replacement? Yet we readily accept that there will be fixes and patches to complete the item we bought at a later date and accept that as the standard of business. What is wrong with this picture?

 

my only argument for that picture wet1 would be that, shirts (with buttons), have been around for say a thousand years.....and they've had that time to develop, and many different generations of people "putting thier thinking caps on", to try and make the design better. Computer software, or computers in general, have only had maybe 50 years of development, and what we might consider "real" software, even less time.

there's always room for improvement, bugs to fix, things to rework.

look at it this way, the first Ford motor car off the first assembly line was far from being the ideal automobile, or they would have stopped there.

I would say we're almost lucky that patchs for software become available, that would be a hard thing to do for a car.(but it does happen, in the form of recalls for certain things)

I don't disagree that there are times when software is released that is not final..or finished......and is rushed out to the unknowing public, I'm certain that happens on a daily basis. I imagine though, that you can only do so much testing of a specific peice of software for so long....due to manpower and time limitations. Then you get all you testing done, and 4 people all complain about one small bug, that you never encountered, and now you need to release a patch.

It would be an ideal world where everything we ever purchased was perfect right out of the box.


Red Devil....go for it man.....*kicks the ass of the devil*

 

wet1 ...

Apparently you never learned to write '*.bat' files to do the job for you.

On my old DOS/OS2 486 a single multiaction .bat file gives me immediate access to twenty eight programs by just typing in, for example: R(un)*space*N(orton)C(ommander) or F(rame)W(ork)S(pread sheet). By the time my monitor warms up the old clunker is running the program I want and awaiting further instructions.

A whole lot less aggravating that waiting a minute and a half or so for Win2k to present all those pretty icons.

 

Oh yes, I learned the batch files, boot disks, and assorted stuff that comes with the territory. But still you have to write them initially, If you save to disk then sooner or later they crap out and you have to rewrite them again. I finally retired my 486 when it took 20 minutes to boot up Win 95. It was not worth buying memory as clock speed of 16 Mz was the big hold up. Though I am thinking of getting another hard drive to revive my 166 for clunking around. After the lightning strike it is slowly getting more and more spots going bad in the HD.

 

Old, outdated machines may be sneered at by bulky, bloated OSs, but Linux will hug your machine, and make it feel loved again.

And it won't make you register before it'll work.

 

I don’t come here often although perhaps I should since one of my principle hobbies is building PCs.

I have upgraded 2 of my machines to XP Pro, one is a desktop and the other a laptop, and another 2 to XP Home (both home built desktops), one of which was a fresh install, but that is my crash and burn machine. All my others are on ME or Win2K.

Thanks [f] for your sanity.

Activation.

You have 30 days before you have to activate. In that time you can change as many pieces of hardware as you wish. If you are designing and building a new machine then 30 days is probably long enough.

Changing a piece of hardware does not necessarily require re-activation; even changing the motherboard will probably not require re-activation. If you change many pieces at the same time then that might indeed invoke a re-activation requirement. If you typically change one item at a time then you may not have any needs to re-activate ever. NICs tend to be the exception.

Note that MS do not keep track of all your hardware. Their technique is to take a few digits from the serial numbers of multiple components. Each piece of information is insufficient for them to determine what hardware you have. The actual algorithm that determines whether a re-activation is required is still a secret. Although I can tell you the bit patterns of the code and which parts correspond to which components.

You do not have an open ended count for reactivation. I think the current count is about 6 times after that you will have to contact MS and negotiate. For MSDN users (Miscrosoft Developers Network) the count is significantly higher.

Is this an issue: For me with so many machines, well I can’t admit to ever breaking license agreements, so of course it isn’t a problem.

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Owning Software versus Licensing.

Sorry to disappoint any of you who think you have bought software and think you own it and think you can do with it whatever you want. In nearly every case for OS software you have only purchased a license and you are not legally free to copy or use that software as you would like.

What MS has done with XP is to start a trend to protect their legal rights. I strongly suspect that many other software makers will follow their courageous lead and we will see more of software activation techniques. Software piracy has and is a major problem and should really be seen as theft. It is estimated that the majority of MS OS’s running in China are pirate copies.

To continue to obtain quality software with substantial and quality upgrades we need to invest in those participating companies. Had MS received all the income from all the pirated copies of Windows then I suspect the increase in development and quality of Windows is likely to have been tremendous.

Knocking Microsoft.

Despite your criticism MS remains by all standards the most successful company for software development in the history of the industry and maintains the highest standards of software quality and integration compared to any other company.

It is a shame that success attracts criticism, it shouldn’t, success is an American Ideal that most of us strive to achieve, and most people remain failures but enjoy criticizing those who have made it. I think that is hypocrisy.

Is Ms software perfect? No of course not. Can you get the same quality and integration anywhere else? No you cannot. Should we look to competitors for alternatives? Most certainly; to keep MS on their toes. But in the meantime if you decide you won’t use MS software because you don’t like MS then you will simply lose out because there are no other equal or better alternatives.

Lack of drivers for older hardware is not an MS problem. All equipment manufacturers have had considerable time to test their hardware with XP and generate appropriate drivers. Call your hardware maker if you have a problem, and don’t shoot the messenger (MS in this case).

And no I do not work for MS, although I do have a tee shirt that states NT-SDG, so maybe I have had some past connections.

XP.

This is probably the best news for the home PC user in the history of personal computing. The final abandonment of the single threaded, farcical memory management, abomination of the Win95/98/98SE/ME family is a breakthrough in sanity.

MS now has only a single OS base (NT). This must help MS concentrate all its OS resources in the same direction rather than trying to support largely incompatible OS’s.

For those of you who have experience of NT (I go back to NT 3.5) then you should appreciate the quality and stability that should be apparent in XP. Combine that stability with the features that home users have come to expect then you have a winning solution.

Will there be problems? Certainly. This is a major move for MS, far more major than most home users will ever realize. While the software is called Windows, underneath it is fundamentally different to the Win95+ family. What of all those games that would only work on Win95+? They should all work in XP. MS has added code that will detect and emulate the routines that the once incompatible games used. But I suspect there will be some occasional oddities that MS has not anticipated. In the future new games will be written for XP and they should be superb.

Enough for now.
Have fun.
Cris

 

Cris

Thanks for the informative mail Cris - quite interesting. I have now installed XPPro as a dual boot, until I decide that I no longer need Me. However, great problems ensued with the installation of XP, not with the prog itself but what it will support. My scanner is non existent according to XP and I find that, in the XP update catalogue in MS, very few drivers are supported. I know that will change but, until then, it is a novelty and nothing more........

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Red Devil,

Before the install there is a compatibility check procedure. Did you run that and did it find that the scanner would be a problem?

XP doesn't promise to find all the issues but it has for me so far.

But I agree that there is no need for everyone to rush to XP. Many software and hardware vendors are not yet fully up to speed. That will change over the coming months.

I've had mixed results with dual-boot systems and avoid them now. Also I wanted to move to all NTFS which I have now done, no more FAT or FAT32 file systems. No more 2Gb/4GB limits to movie files.

Have fun though whatever.
Cris

 

Just an FYI ...

The only 'dual boot' system that was bulletproof, at least for me, was DOS Ver.6.2/OS2 Warp ... Still running it on the old 486.

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Cris

As a dual boot it is working fine. The scanner was picked up as ??? before booting so I knew that already. The only other glitch noticed is that Norton 2001 in Me works fine but I installed Norton 2002 in XP (off the add-on)and the windoctor in Me told me there were "faults" with it, and adjusted it! Now Norton 2002 is running 2001 in XP from Me!!! doh! I may have to reinstall 2002 into XP some time soon!

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Bowser

I got a modem fried in an electrical storm. So I went out and bought a surge protector extension. Cost me about $60 US and is guaranteed for $50,000 damage cover - for life! Worth the money! Oh I had to buy a new modem too!!

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KMGURU - dont buy it! XP professional I mean - get a cracked one; so much easier!

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WindowsXP's New Blue Screen

I am running WindowXP. Every day or so, I get a screen with a register dump and the message that my machine has been halted in order to protect it. Guess what? The screen is blue.
Oh, just in case someone knows what the problem is, here's the register dump. There is no other information of value on the screen. [0x8e(xc000001d, x804e8ac4, xff317c08, x0)]
I find Windows XP to be MUCH MUCH FASTER on my 1.33 ghz Thunderbird system than ME was. So far, it has been less stable.

 

my advice, get a cracked version. I don't know the couse of this particular problem, but I know tht XP has a delicate register program. If you change your hardware often or a lot at one time, etc, it orders you to reregister again via inet. A real problem.

So get a cracked version and no problems.


It might be some bug though. Duno, if it is really annoying reinstall windows.

 

Actually, I'm about to buy a legal version. I am running a cracked version now, because I wanted to see how much trouble I had before committing. I bout a Windows ME upgrade that didn't work. I had to spend more $ to buy a full version. Scraping with the vendors takes more time ($) than just getting new version.
I suspect an incompatible driver. I just don't know how to find it. Maybe the online updates will help once I have the legal version installed. I've replaced all drivers I know of with XP versions where available ... and stopped using items for which I cannot locate one, such as my scanner.

 

about scaners. I knoow tht win xp has problems with finding them. there was even a list of companies which scanners XP doesn't find. I suggest you wait for the XP patch, there has recently been published 1st servise pack for xp, but I doò't know is tht particular problem with scanners has been fixed.


How much did you pay for cracked win xp. I bought one for 3.5$ and it works fine, but my pc is too dated, so I will install it permenantly when I get a new pc.

 

The cracked version was given to me by a friend. I think he downloaded it for free. He's afraid to try xp. It's up to Visioneer, the maker of my scanner, to produce an xp compatible driver. They've already stated that my scanner model is too old. They will not be producing one. I cannot get my 56K modem to work, either. The MS site warns that my particular modem will not work. I'm not complaining. When I upgraded from a 400 mhz/128 meg machine to my 1.33 ghz/256 meg DDR machine, I hardly noticed a difference with ME. XP really brought it to life. BTW, I suspect my Pine nVidia TNT2 M64 4x AGP video card driver of being the problem, even though I have downloaded a newer, XP driver for it. I'm going to drop back to an older PCI video card for a few days to see if that makes a difference. Also, I may have a very old version of XP. When I purchase a newer version, I may get some relief. I'm just not sure what will happen when I try to install XP over XP. I want to avoid disk formatting if at all possible.