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RE: Anit-Virus help for all of us??????

  • From: Vivien M.
  • Date: Tue Nov 25 09:42:39 2003

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On 
> Behalf Of Daniel Karrenberg
> Sent: November 25, 2003 3:42 AM
> To: William Allen Simpson
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: Anit-Virus help for all of us??????
> 
> 
> 
> On 24.11 18:20, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> > 
> > Brian Bruns wrote:
> > > 
> > > One thing that many people don't realize (from my personal 
> > > experience) is that contrary to popular belief, Win98SE is a good 
> > > all around desktop OS to use.  It can run most things like 
> > > productivity apps and games, and with 128-256MB of RAM, its quite 
> > > fast even on an old laptop like mine.  Unlike XP, it 
> doesn't have a 
> > > million services running, nor does it have the nasty UPnP 
> stuff from WinME.
> 
> I agree wholeheartedly.
> 
> if haveto(M$) 
> 	use(W98SE);

Have either of you actually followed this advice?

Win98SE is totally useless as a desktop OS due to the archaic GDI/USER
resource limits. When one average consumerish app (eg: a media player) eats
up 10% of those resources, one window in an IM program eats up 2%, etc... it
does not take much to bring down an entire system. Last time I  was running
Win98SE (which is about 3 years ago), it took about 20 minutes after booting
while running boring normal apps to get to a dangerously low resource level
(30%ish free). That machine got totally unstable needing a reboot after
about 3 days. On the same hardware (with additional RAM), Win2K could easily
run 3-4 weeks and run any app I wanted just fine. 

So, some people might say I'm a power user, but the average users I know
these days tend to multitask at least a web browser, an IM client with a
couple open windows, some bloated media player, perhaps a P2P app, and some
office app. This is already stretching Win9X to its limits, and I would
expect it to be worse (code just gets sloppier...) than it was three years
ago...

No wonder people think Windows is unreliable. 98SE may be preferable from a
security-from-external-threats POV, yes, but for any type of real use, it's
useless. Not to mention the other quirks, like needing to reboot to change
network settings, the lack of any local security (or even attempt at local
security), etc. I'll take rebooting every week or two for the latest XP
security patch any day over rebooting every day or two because Win98SE is an
unreliable piece of poorly designed legacy junk.

The way I see it, there are two uses for 98SE (or 95, 98, Me, etc) in the
modern world:
1) People who use their computers as game-only machines (or who dual boot a
real OS for non-game purposes)
2) Advertising for $OTHER_OS, where $OTHER_OS can be Win2K, XP, or your
favourite Linux distro with KDE, GNOME, etc. Anything that actually WORKS
reliably.

Vivien
-- 
Vivien M.
[email protected]
Assistant System Administrator
Dynamic DNS Network Services
http://www.dyndns.org/