A86: Re: [OT]: Sorry, I just had to share this

To: <assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org>
Subject: A86: Re: [OT]: Sorry, I just had to share this
From: "David Phillips" <david@acz.org>
Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2000 01:49:00 -0700
References: <a0.3558a5.25bb9307@aol.com>
Reply-To: assembly-86@lists.ticalc.org


For the past several years, Windows NT 4 has arguably been the best end user
OS.  NT is fairly stable and comes close to being a real OS.  2000 is based
on the NT 4 kernal, but has many needed improvements such as DirectX 7.  I
haven't ran it since beta 3, so I can't speak for the end product, but I
have been running NT both at work and on my own computer for over half a
year and have been quite satisified with it.  If you have a fast machine and
plenty of ram (I have 256 megs in mine, but 96 to 128 works quite well),
then NT will definitely beat out 95 or 98 in terms of performance and
stability.  For programming, it's a must, since it's much harder to crash
the entire OS.

I did have a few problems with beta 3, but in all honesty, the problem was
mainly between the chair and the keyboard.  I installed it three times and
gave up after the third time, but it is a pretty nice OS.  Either the first
or the second time, I screwed up the whole system by running some program I
found burried in some directory on the cd that someone at Microsoft
undoubtedly forgot to take out.  It "updated" some system files to the
versions for NT 3.51 (remember that 2000 is NT 5).  Needless to say, this
caused the system to bluescreen at boot-up before it finished loading the
kernal.  I don't remember what the other problem was, but it too ended up in
me having to reinstall.

All in all, I'm pretty excited about the release of 2000 (still trying to
find an ISO of gold :)  Being able to play games like Total Annihliation and
still have a rock-solid system will be great.  They seemed to have really
worked the bugs out of the release this time.  I heard from a reliable
source that they brought down the number of cases that would require a
restart from ~190 to 7.  That is darned impressive. Probably the most
annoying thing about NT is having to reboot after installing or updating
anything.  Let's wait and see how good the product really is before we pass
judgement.

> This was quoted from the Microsoft web site.  My question is, is this
> supposed to make us feel safe about our computers crashing now?