win xp is great just you need to keep upgrading it, campared to winME (space hog) xp is pretty good. I get to the internet via my dad's winME machine, and my mom and my sister have win98. I liek xp and its easy to set up too.

Thanks, Paul, this fills in some more pieces of the puzzle .

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I should've mentioned that I have XP Home (in wrapper).  That might not be quite as bad as Pro.

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Alas, I just read that XP does not support 16-bit device drivers, and apps that directly access hardware must supply an XP virtual device driver plus an XP 32-bit device driver, or they won't run.  Also "calls made by a 16-bit application must be translated for the 32-bit operating system. This translation process, called thunking [ ], adds to execution time." 

I thunk...er...think it may be possible to run some of the troublesome old apps, but with extreme effort and detective work

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Looks like I'm going to be using 56k for the foreseeable future.

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LOL

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Very interesting...I'll have to look into this.
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Very much so!!  Thanks for the detailed answer, Paul .

Doug

Yep I also have had no problems with XP in the 9 months I've been using it...

ok whats yur prob with winxp? if you get new hard ware you will be fine with winxp. The reason you are all hating xp is cuz you went out and bought xp for yur old systems and it wont work with em.  Xp is fine for me, i have a bunch of old games and they work. the oldedst i think i have is full throttle which is a win 95 game.

Same here,,  I just built an Athalon 2100,  2gig of DDR2700, Gforce4-MX440,,  and thought ,,"OK" lets try XP one more time,,,   well,,like I said, it's everything that's bad  about Windows,, just bigger and prettier,,

How we ever got to this point is insane.. An OS that's bigger and more complex than most of the applications that run on it is trouble from the get-go. 

The only redeeming quality of XP is the file format it uses,, but disk space is so cheap now,,that it doesn't warrant it's use and all the conflicts that come with it (dual-booting). And, if you ever need any encryption,, you should be "gaming" on a different computer altogether.

Power to the penguin my friends.

since you are upgrading to xp i agree dont upgrade, if you are buying a new computer though, then xp is fine because the company knows that xp will work fine with that hardware they put in xp compatable hardware (hopefully) and you wont need to downgrade. But you will have to haev xp soon cuz teh best os right now (win98) is being phased out of almost all games and software becuase of its oldness. So i would suggest that if you have an older pc get a new one that has winxp and you will be fine.

Also,................................... software.
This, you might think, is pushing it, for XpPro.....:
I install many different types of sftware on one of the pc's.   play, tinker, xperiment, get to know different progs, utilities, enhancements......... doin' it this way for years. (C-64 on up).   Any os becomes unstable.
When i get to the point where i'm satisfied with the pc's software and hrdware setup, fdisk, format, clean full install and stay.

If you hadn't noticed yet, XP is one of those love or hate things. Either you love it or you hate it, no in-between. I love it. (And I have used 95, 98SE, and ME extensively)

First let's take a look at the problems I've had with XP:

1 My 3-4 year old Oki Data laser printer would not work. The old 9x drivers wouldn't work and Oki Data did not put out XP drivers for it. Only option was to upgrade. Now I have a brother multi-function machine that works fine.

2 Couldn't get a few DOS based programs to work.

3 Some aircraft models will not work in CFS2/FS2002 using 2000/XP. There's a utility that will fix these quite nicely.

That's about it for major problems.

XP has lots of useful little details:

It's nice having side menus in each explorer window like this:



XP carries over from ME thumbnails as image icons, something that 98 doesn't have. These are very handy for working with images.



The start menu is divided into several sections. The top left section is made of programs you specify. Explorer and Outlook are here by default. The lower left section is automatically made up of the prorgams you use the most, if they're not in the upper section. This feature is very handy for quickly opening the programs you use all the time. Everything on the right is default.



Can't get a program to work? Try changing the compatibility mode. I've only had to use this once or twice though.



Finding files for uploading is easy with the file browser, you can use image thumbnails in here too. Nice for uploading to the screenshot forum.



About Hardware.

My computer came built with XP. Therefore I have not had to worry about the Mobo, CD-RW, etc. working. I've installed two video cards, a Geforce 2 MX and a Radeon 8500. Both installed flawlessly and work great. I've also installed a sound card and some other stuff. Never had a problem that way. My homebuilt throttle was detected and got caliberated right the first try, more than I can say for 98SE.

There are such things as signed drivers, if your driver isn't XP signed, XP will bring up a little warning message when you install the driver "May not be compatible" etc. I just click ok and install the thing, never had a problem with unsigned drivers.

XP has never given me a blue screen, it is much more stable than 98 or ME in this manner. I'm not suprised to get two or three blue screens a day in 98/ME. I have had the system restart its self for no aparent reason, but this does not happen often.

If you can get XP drivers for your computer components I would recommend that you try it out.

It's 12:30 AM and I'm getting bleary eyed. If you have any specific questions let me know.

kghhd said (among other things!), Quote:

Thanks very much for the detailed information; I really appreciate the trouble you went to, to give me and others making this decision a more complete picture of the comparison....

And thanks again to everybody else for your input.

Knowing me, I'm sure I'll eventually make the plunge to XP, being somewhat foolhardy when it comes to biting off more than I can chew.....but not this Saturday morning .

Doug

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LOL....  Thanks for the input, Zedman .

I'm still letting indecision be the deciding factor (still have win 98 and Me installed), but I'm hoping to hang on and outlast 98 for a few years .  Uncle Bill is going to stop supporting it soon, later this year I believe.

Wow it still lives (the thread)  <snicker>

I'll admit, I've worked around "some" of my XP issues and do have it running on one PC (no choice,, just too many people use it, and I trouble-shoot/repair a lot)..

However, for FS and GMAX I wouldn't trust it with even a test installation (I'm paranoid and still don't believe that pesky hardware counter/monitor code isn't  lurking about,, waiting for Uncle Bill to activate it).. we all know the lines exist     plus,,  I blew an entire day on a friends machine, trying to get an old Voodo card and cabel modem working (they work just dandy in ME)..  I call it being  "Windowed"  and it's happened so many times, I just go home and stare at a LINUX installation, if for nothing else,, it's comforting to know,, that it will never turn "blue"   

I hope it's only a matter of time before there is a decent slection of games (oh please Linus,, build us a flight simulator) for LINUX, because that is the ONLY thing keeping me from going M$-free....

Tryed XP, Printer, scanner, camara, and joystick
driver not suited for XP, down loaded the "new"
drivers from HP, Mustek and M$, half the "features"
that I bought the hardware for did not work!!
Like photo card reader in printer "not found"
All the enhancement on the scanner, "not found"
Auto download on camara "not found" and the best
my M$ joystick, one year old. Feed back "not found"
I returned the thing to Walmart and had my old
woodburner updated a little and saved about
$2000.00 by not buying new printer, scanner, camara
and joystick!!!!!!!

x

I got nothing against it, in fact, I think it's great.
I upgraded to it recently from 98. So much faster. My load up screen is about 5 times faster than 98. It sped up my computer all together too. Plus the changed icons are all 3dish. If anything, I recommend XP. (Pro)

Floppy Drive... What's that? :p I use ZIP disks or CD, or even better, Network drives.

I was given a copy of XP about a month ago and useing ME at the time i had to reboot at least 10 or more times a day for some unknown reason. So I figured what the heck ill try it (afterall it was free). saved everything to cd and wiped the drive clean and did a clean install. Everything worked beyond belief. i have only had to reboot once in the last month. Only had two problems, First i set it up with two accounts one for me one for the wife. Both were administrator accounts and no matter what i did i had to install things in both accounts to get them to work right like my sound card and graphics card.
So deleted the wifes account and viola' problem fixed (although I get the daily thrashing over the ever changing aircraft wallpapers  ).
Other problem was i bought a new GeForce FX 5200 Ultra 128mb AGP card and had to not only update the drivers but also had to update the MoBo drivers and AGP slot drivers to get it to work. OF course only the drivers for the card were an XP issue and that wasn't that big a deal. I guess what im really saying is I know that alot of people have some major gripes about XP but it comes down to each persons experience with it, mine has been an awesome improvement over my ME problems and i wouldn't go back for anything. Anyways i say go ahead and try it, if it is bad for you  then you can always go back to the older version. Good luck

Presently I have WIN98SE in my PC and it has served me fairly well - except that I believe WIN98SE will handle only up to 512M of RAM without causing "Out of Memory" warning, has something to do with the VCache. If, I can get more RAM (up to 1 GIg) using the 98SE, I will stay with it.  I'm upgrading my PC and am contemplating buying and loading WINxp. Is this a necessary cost-effective move?

Hogans Alley

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Hogans, if you end up with XP, I'd expect you to still have '98 on some dual boot setup or other.......

If so, and your machine for XP has more than 512MB, simply(!) goto your Start menu (in '98) goto "Run" type "Msconfig" click "Advanced" and check the Limit Memory bot and enter 512MB for the ammount of RAM for '98 to address. You should be sorted out.

As ever, in this wonderful world of windows, what works for me may not work for you however!!!!!

Regards,

Paul.

XP has performed much better than any of the Dos based windows OS's for me.  I much prefer it to 98SE.
Some initial problems with drivers but they should be updated periodically anyway.  MS has an upgrade compatability check and it might help. 
On another computer with Abit BE-6 MB and Highpoint HDD controller gave installation problems because Highpoint will not issue XP driver.  I used their beta version from the net (not from their site) and system works ok.  Others used the W2K driver.  The problem is not the OS but Highpoint.

Yes, it is.  And if that's not bad enough, the computer that has 95 on it only has 64mb of RAM!   

Not sure what I was thinking when I said it had 64 mb of RAM.

I realized on my way into the office this morning that it's only got 24...for real.

I know most of you won't believe this, so I'm going to post a screen of it.

Shocking, I know.



ROFL....and people ask why I hate my job.  haha

i used to see windows xp as just a nicer looking version of earlier OS's but once i upgraded from windows 98 on my new machine....i found it to be quite useful and easy to use. my new machine wouldnt take 98 for some reason wouldnt load up anything took days to figure it out so i just installed xp and everything worked fine first time.. im quite pleased realy