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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Anit-Virus help for all of us??????
----- Original Message ----- From: "Vivien M." <[email protected]> To: "'Daniel Karrenberg'" <[email protected]> Cc: <[email protected]> Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2003 9:39 AM Subject: RE: Anit-Virus help for all of us?????? > 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... Yes I do follow my own advice. Back from the days when I was an OEM, I still have a box full of win98SE cd packs/licenses for when I build people new machines. Its what I put on them standard unless you ask for Win2k or XP or NT4 (or any other OS for that matter, ie Linux, BSD). I know full well about the resource limits. Its a PITA, but as long as you run a decent set of apps that don't suffer from resource leaks (Mozilla without a GDI patch does this for example) that eventually use up all GDI/USER memory, you'll be fine. I use Win98SE here all day with only one reboot needed most days, and I run WinAMP, Putty, K-Meleon, Outlook Express, Cygwin, mIRC, Xnews (which has a bad habit of crashing the whole system at times), as well as AIM, Miranda IM, SST, Yahoo Messenger, and various other tools. Thats all at once, multitasking. I know, I could reduce the clutter by letting Miranda IM do AIM and Yahoo, but thats not the point. :-) Many times, resource suckage comes from those ugly faceless background programs that run at startup. Kill as many icons as you can on the desktop and the task bar, and clean out your startup list, and you'll free up alot of GDI resources. > 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. Lets not forget those people who just don't have the CPU power or memory to support 2k or XP. Just because something is new and 'improved' doesn't make it better. Yes, 9x has alot of legacy crap. Yes, 9x has various issues with resource usage. But sometimes, its just right. -------------------------- Brian Bruns The Summit Open Source Development Group Open Solutions For A Closed World / Anti-Spam Resources http://www.sosdg.org The AHBL - http://www.ahbl.org
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