[A83] Re: Assembly Studio 8x [OT]

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[A83] Re: Assembly Studio 8x [OT]


 ..Don't start an OS flame-war, please..

> Van: David Phillips <david@acz.org>
> 
> > Do you have an old copy of NT then? Something that runs on a P100 with
> > 40mb RAM? :-)
> 
> Unfortunately, 95 is probably your best bet for Windows on there.  I
> think if you had at least 128mb RAM then NT would run fine, but I
> wouldn't try it with only 40.  Heck, even GNOME or KDE would crawl on
> that.  95 ran alright on the P133 32mb laptop that I just sold.

This sucks, Win95 runs with 8mb quite smootly even when running Word 6.
Anyhing above that uses far more memory (they even gave you 128mb memory
banks when you bought WinXP here in Holland), and doesn't give you anything
specialy new. (yay, true alpha blending.. ?why? should I need that?)

btw, Suse 6.4 runs about good here. X (from before 4.x) is a bit slow,
indeed... Tends to take approx. 16mb of RAM even with simple window
managers.

Win95 (with appropriate programs) runs right on anything that has 16mb or
more, even with an 386. If you use good programmed software you can do
about anything non-3D/Video on a Pentium (MMX). Even skinning programs
don't tend to slow down things a bit. Then why does the interface take such
a big heap in WinXP/2k? btw, When using XP/2k on a non-MS network (or just
without a network) you can 'tweak' the system so that it loses 30mb of
'weight' in RAM (that's about the amounth of free RAM I have now). That's a
feature...

> I actually do have a legit copy of NT Workstation.  It came with the VC++
> 6 Professional (I guess MS knew that it sucked to develop apps on 95).

Just out of sudden interest, does anybody have betas of Win95 laying
around? I know these sucked tremendously in terms of stability, but they
seemed to have all kinds of wierd abstractions (layers?) beteen desktop and
internet/network and the such. Just wonderded what was real and what is
fake about articles from that time. Probably just some fuzz that Microsoft
made, they are still good at such things.

> If you mainly do programming, then you might be happy running Linux (or
> FreeBSD) using XFree86 with the FluxBox window manager:
> 
> http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/

KDE and Gnome of the 1.x version run quite happily here. It's just that my
little sisters use it more than I do, they thing KDE games are great. :-)

> > I think I'll buy a new PC late summer...
> 
> http://cr.yp.to/hardware/advice.html

I'll take a look there, had already made a (current, so ..old..) hardware
list, made it with the possibilty of upgrades in mind. A not that great
system but quite capable if 'living' another 6y like my current system (old
HD died some weeks ago).

Wondered that nobody had made such an advice site before. Haven't looked
that good, but major sites like Toms Hardwareguide even miss such a page.

> > My favourite is still Win98SE Lite, and then follows your list. Win95
> > OSR 2.1 is also very stable. Know someone who runs at work a P266 with
> > about as much RAM (that probably does it) as (mega-)clock-cycles. He
> > uses about only MS-Office97, MS Internet Mail and News (no viruses),
> > Seti and off coarse.. IE.
> 
> Yes.  RAM is the key to having a fast computer.  The more RAM you have,
> the less time the disks have to be accessed.  Disk access is about the
> slowest thing a computer has to do.  Of course, I don't think 95 actually
> uses more than 128MB, so you need a better OS to take advantage of it.

Wasn't that a 256mb limit? Win98 gets unstable when you install more than
512mb, but there are ways to encompass that. And I don't mean installing a
RAM-disk, though that is a nice option, it doesn't mind the swapfile or
windows-directory -or both- there.

> > BTW, I AM searching for a DOS-emu, since that would probably be more
> > stable. When the DOS program crashes / loops / whatever it isn't
> > running in the same process, like with the DOS-window now.
> 
> On NT, everything is seperate.  A rouge application usually won't bring
> down the entire system.

I know, and on Win9x 32bits programs have separate processes, though they
will almost certainly share some common unstable DLLs (ehm, kernel32.dll?).
So if there's a "32bit DOS-emu" than I'd be happy. Goofy that noone made it
in the few years that Win9x is around. MS didn't provide good info for
Win9x programming, so that's the problem mainly.

btw, the well known crashing-problem of Win9x sucks, but that's not the
only thing. Just crawl a bit around in your Windows and win-setup
directory, read the INF files, read about anything that's readable. I can't
imagine that NT5 is that much better without getting major compatibility
problems for all strange ways you can (and Micros~1 does) use to acces
anything on the system. Especialy the INF files have much win3.x legacy.
And the improvement of Win3.x was the graphical interface. What I'm talking
about is files and such, so it's probably even from Win2.0... (?1982-85?)

Micros~1 is good at recycling old ideas and cut-'n-paste (DLLs with
hundreds of similar if-then blocks). Linux "is" good at not doing that,
which isn't always a good thing either. These hundreds of config files
laying around everywhere in your filesystem... More than 10 different ways
to add a directory to you path, etc.

	Henk Poley <><
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