On 23 Jun 2002, at 0:14, Michael Edwards wrote:

> I've noticed that opinions seem to
> vary about whether it's worth upgrading Windows with older computers.  My
> Windows 95 does crash rather a lot, but that might be because I've been getting
> short on disk space for some time.

On the questions of upgrades, my philosophy has always been that you keep 
the OS the machine shipped with and never upgrade. The only exception is 
"patch" upgrades, such as Win95 OSR2 or Win98SE, which are the same OS 
but with lost of important improvements. The reason for this is that 
different versions of Windows have completely different hardware 
requirements, and a machine that shipped with Win95 is not likely to be 
upgradable at all to Win2K or WinXP, because the hardware simply isn't 
fast enough for it. However, most computers build since 1999 or so can 
probably support Win2K, and most computers from the last two years can 
probably support WinXP, but in both cases, RAM upgrades might be in 
order. For Win2K I recommend 256MBs minimum, and from what I've heard, 
WinXP works better the more RAM you give it.


As to Win95 crashing, well, what do you mean? The OS locks up? In what 
circumstances? What program produces the problem? Fix that program and 
your problem may go away. You also might consider a fresh install of 
Windows, which will clean all the crud out of the registry and improve 
reliability immensely. The easiest way to do that is to rename the 
existing Windows folder and then do a fresh install into a new Windows 
folder. Generally, this is better than wiping the hard drive because 
you'll have kept all your old drivers, and also many programs will run 
fine without needing to be reinstalled. When I do this, I generally copy 
the Desktop and Start Menu folders from the old Windows directory and 
then run all the applications in turn to see which ones need to be 
reinstalled. The programs you don't use you'll never need to install, or 
you can wait until you need them to install them.

-- 
David W. Fenton                         |        http://www.bway.net/~dfenton
David Fenton Associates                 |        http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

Reply via email to