Operating systems

[Keatah]

I should take the time and re-build my AL440LX mobo. I believe I have the original memory, PII-266, and Riva-128 graphics.

 

Isn't the max supported memory 384MB?

[Hatta]

I believe it is. I have a PII-266 and 128mb in it. Plenty for late 1990s games. I have Voodoo2 SLI in mine. Descent is freaking sweet on that thing. Still it only supports up to 300 mhz PIIs, so one of these days I'm going to move the Voodoos to a 440bx PIII I have.

 

A nice feature of these motherboards is the built in YMF719 with wavetable. No GM header though.

[Vaughan]

If you've been into computer gaming for any length of time you'll have tried lots of different OS's. At the end of the day though, I've found various flavors of Windows to be excellent. I've never been an Apple fan, and in fact have a dislike for them now.

 

Windows XP was probably a high point. It was rock solid and I ran it for years. It was a JUST WORKS for me. Windows 7 though is excellent, and I've yet to have trouble with it.

 

DOS was great, simple, lean. But I also have memories of fighting with it tooth and nail. The main problem was memory. Memory management really didn't progress from HIMEM.SYS and SMARTDRV. Installing Expanded Memory and/or Extended Memory to eek out a little bit more was a fun exercise for a bit, but when you just wanted to play a damn game it could drive you mad. Still, old habits die hide - when searching for a file i still find the DIR command to be the fastest way of finding it. I always start MS Word by typing winword into the run line. Come to think of it, I still tend to favor 8.3 folder/file names.

 

I still have a set of floppies for WIndows 1.0 and OS/2 1.0 in storage.

Edited May 18, 2013 by Vaughan

[Osgeld]

I was that way with windows 2000, windows XP was just a bloaty consumer os chocked full of crap I never really wanted ... didnt switch over until people stopped supporting 2k in like 06-07 ... did not stay very long either jumped direct to 7

[Vaughan]

Windows 2000 was indeed a solid OS. Windows NT was fun, but the interface was old. If you ever used the Exam Cram series to get your MCSE for Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 then you might well have read one of my books

[desiv]

I do like how people say how fast Windows 7 is...

And then they go on to describe the multi gigahertz multi-core gobs of RAM machine with SSD they run it on...

 

That's the hardware being fast.. Not the OS...

 

desiv

[Vaughan]

You can't have MS Windows without hardware. It would be rather silly to try and run Windows 8 on an XT, or with virtually no memory just to prove a point.

 

If you know Perfmon well enough you could come up with some numbers.....

[desiv]

No, if you want to say an OS is fast, you compare it to other OSs running on the same hardware..

 

Perfmon or Task Manager with Resource Monitor on Windows 7 will only tell you how well the OS is running on the hardware.

But not if it's a fast OS...

 

Get a machine that runs XP nicely.

Put Windows 7 on that same machine...

 

Is it fast?

 

desiv

(I'm not complaining about Windows 7. Windows OSes pay my bills. But it's not what I call a fast or efficient OS. Of course, with the hardware today, it doesn't need to be..)

[Tenorman]

Gimme a break. I crashed the shit out of OSX all the time. No OS "just works". They all crash, they all do stupid crap, and they could all be better.

 

Agreed. I've had a couple of Macs over the years and although OS X is cool in some ways, I've had more stability problems with it than Windows. Mac OS "Classic" is even worse. It's like building a damn house of cards trying to load the extensions in the right order and then multitasking once the machine is booted.

 

 

My Favorites:

Desktop: Windows 7

Server: Linux (Most familiar with RedHat and Slackware, but I can find my way around pretty much all of them).

[Vaughan]

No, if you want to say an OS is fast, you compare it to other OSs running on the same hardware..

 

Huh? Of course not. OS's doing what? A box for say, SQL Server will have totally different requirements to a desktop running Office apps. It's nothing like a simple task.

 

Perfmon or Task Manager with Resource Monitor on Windows 7 will only tell you how well the OS is running on the hardware.

But not if it's a fast OS...

 

It'll tell me if it's faster than my last OS. The fact is though, most people buy a new OS when they buy new hardware because it comes bundled. Been like that forever.

 

Get a machine that runs XP nicely.

Put Windows 7 on that same machine...

 

As I said, it makes no sense to try and put Windows 7 on a low spec machine and try to draw conclusions from it. XP is finished, what do I care how it performs? DOS would fly on my laptop, but I'm not sure what it proves. DOS might therefore be a "faster" OS, but it'd also be rather rubbish.

 

Every OS has viruses. Every OS crashes. Every piece of hardware will eventually fail. tis life.

[desiv]

DOS would fly on my laptop, but I'm not sure what it proves. DOS might therefore be a "faster" OS, but it'd also be rather rubbish.

That's kind of the point..

 

desiv

[lisalover1]

I simply adore BeOS and OS/2 Warp, since they were both so far ahead of their time. The former because of its unheard-of multimedia capabilities, and the latter because of its sheer utility. OS/2 Warp, as I understand it, was the first OS that allowed a server to be run in the background, which was a huge deal for amaetur web developers.

[Vaughan]

That's kind of the point..

 

desiv

 

But what is the point?

[Osgeld]

I know on my electronics machine win 7 is snappier and more responsive than XP (notice I did not say faster) course it consumes 4x the resources doing so

 

just for the record the machine is a athalon II x2 2.5Ghz 4gig ddr2 800mhz ram, IDE disk drive and onboard nvidia 7 series video (which sucks, but I dont need my 9600GT to look at a pdf)

[slinkeey]

IBM i (OS400)

Edited May 19, 2013 by slinkeey

[SSG]

Ubuntu!!

[flashjazzcat]

Hey, here's a great OS rant from Neil Stephenson:

 

http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

 

Well worth reading, and it's lots of fun too. When thinking about all that has happened in Operating Systems, I find that read lucid and highly entertaining. Enjoy!

Thanks for posting that: a great read.

[Segataritensoftii]

I'd have to say that my favorites are Mac OS 9.2 and Windows 98SE. They're good at letting you get work done without being too overblown or hard to understand. Runners up include BeOS/Haiku, AROS, and OS2/eComStation.

 

Everything else is either too simplistic (DOS), too overwrought and slow (Windows 7), or breaks compatibility at the drop of a hat (desktop Linux in general, Mac OS X)

[SSG]

My favorite is Zorin. I love its feel.

[jmetal88]

My first operating system was System 7.5 on the Mac so I have some nostalgia for that, but my favorite is Mac OS 8.6. Even though I run Mac OS 9.2 on all of my legacy hardware, Mac OS 8.6 had that perfect balance between stability and lean RAM usage along with some of my favorite features:

 

I also like Mac OS 8.6, but I only use Macs to play around with (and I only use pre-Intel Macs, because I see them as unusual). I'd rather do any of my serious computing work on a PC. I prefer operating under KDE in Linux, but it leaves something to be desired in terms of user-friendly engineering software and commercial games, so if want to play games or if I have to do circuit simulations or write lab reports, it gets done under Windows (preferably 7, though my laptop came with 8 so I'm forced to use that from time to time). I'm hoping Steam's embrace of Linux will change the part about gaming soon, though, haha.

[Rhomaios]

I'd place Windows 7 and Linux Mint Debian on the same level. They're both solid, look nice, and give me little problems. I don't think they quite got to the level of Windows 2000, though, which was my favorite.

 

Local computer stores that I knew dropped it and kept selling machines with 98 Second Editon. Microsoft was still fighting with itself instead of just going with their NT kernel (which they ended up doing anyway).

It wasn't as horrible as people ake it out to be - but it was a wrong turn, methinks.

 

It was as horrible as everyone said it was, and then some. I was too young at the time to really pay attention to what anyone was saying about it, but when I installed it, I was aghast. Not day #1, not day #2, but after blue screen after blue screen by day #3 I knew I missed Windows 98. I soon scrapped it when a co-worker gave me Windows 2000, after listening to my complaints, and I instantly knew that I made the right choice in dropping that PoS OS.

 

Now, I think Vista wasn't as bad as everyone made it out to be, and certainly not nearly as bad as WinME. It wasn't great, but it gave me far less trouble than ME ever did.

Edited October 23, 2013 by o.pwuaioc

[Hatta]

98SE was fine. Best of the 9x series, if a little memory hungry.

[Draikar]

Well I always liked the hated Windows 95 since it was the first graphic OS I got to fool with and own. I think most of my computers are running Windows 3.0 / 3.1 that's not bad but would like to play with DOS more. I would like to get into more text OS but don't have the time to get into it other the some of the commands.

[Algus]

Windows 2000 was indeed a solid OS. Windows NT was fun, but the interface was old. If you ever used the Exam Cram series to get your MCSE for Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 then you might well have read one of my books

 

I do have to admit, I get nostalgic for Windows 2000 sometimes. We got them on the computers at school when I was a Junior (we were on NT before that). Spent many an hour on Pinball...err I mean on assignments LOL

 

2000 was the design that really made the 95 look finally become a bit dated. Although looking back, it still looks pretty rough now lol.

 

I never thought Vista was that bad, it just had some serious issues with support for legacy software from games to productivity. Businesses weren't going to buy new software packages for their systems (or contract out new development if their stuff was highly specialized) when they already had systems that worked. And Gamers just wanted to be able to play their games, period. I was on Vista from close to Day 1 until well into the Windows 7 era and I mostly enjoyed it. The desktop eye candy was great and the interface was nice and modern. I never thought XP's Luna theme looked very good and I ran in classic mode for most of my time with XP.

 

I've been using OS X for a little bit now as I just bought a Mac Mini and I may be in love all over again. I really appreciate the way Unix organizes a file system and I find that OS X satisfies me about as much as Debian-based Linux without having the headache of trying to get all my hardware running.

 

For me Windows is like, whatever. You can get it to run alright if you buy the right hardware (I was happy booting 7 from an SSD) but I tire of some of its crap like all the updating and the security nagging. I guess I'm glad it is the most popular one so malware authors are targeting it instead of the system I use but meh. I was really digging Chrome OS on my chromebook but ugh, until the software gets better I just can't rely on it as my daily driver.

[KiwiArcader]

I liked Workbench