Hi, On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 1:49 PM, dmccunney <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:36 PM, David C. Kerber > <[email protected]> wrote: >>> From: dmccunney [mailto:[email protected]] >>> On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Rugxulo <[email protected]> wrote: > >>> > I thought WinME removed the real mode bootup, hence lower >>> compatibility? >>> >>> Don't have it and haven't used it, so don't know. Everything I've >>> heard indicates it should have been called Win98 Third Edition. I'm >>> pretty sure there was still DOS underneath like in ME. Removing the >>> real mode loader didn't occur till NT. >> >> Win NT4 significantly pre-dated Win 98; it came out in about '96. Many >> people feel WinME was one of the worst pieces of software ever written, >> while 98SE was very good. Win2k was the best, IMO.
I don't know about that. Win2k was more stable, but it was also bigger, slower, and had worse DOS compatibility. And lots of bugs. But it was better for Win32 stuff, esp. Unicode. Yet barely anything still supports it nowadays. I'm surprised (but glad) people still target XP (which is both slightly better and worse than 2k in various ways). > I ran NT4 back then, but as a server OS in a computer room. It was > not an end-user product. It took Win2K for sufficient compatibility > (like the ability to use FAT32) to make it a usable end user OS. NT 4.0 didn't support DOS LFNs (int 21h, 71xxh) nor FAT32. Though I don't see how that's a huge deal breaker, no worse than all the other compatibility problems forced on us. Also, FAT32 isn't supported very much anymore, esp. Vista on up can't boot from it, so I'm not sure support for it is here for much longer. (With exFAT and ReFS, who knows?) > 98SE was certainly an improvement over prior Win9X releases. I ran it > longer than I really wanted because I was waiting for drivers for > peripherals I used to arrive. When I finally had them all, I switched > to 2K in a heartbeat. Despite my best efforts, 98SE reached the > point where I was rebooting multiple times per day to be able to get > things done. Win2K just ran, and got rebooted only if I installed > software that required it or I was fiddling with hardware. Yes, it's more stable, but it doesn't run a lot of DOS stuff nearly as well as 9x. Granted, it was "good enough" for "most" things (more or less), but that support only got worse and worse, esp. with Vista. I don't know, some people don't mind recompiling all their apps (or just use popular GNU utils that are ported everywhere), but it seems unnecessary. We shouldn't have so much deprecation every few years. (I don't care how "old" or "uncool", it just works, so why break it?) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
