My proud history of survpc use starts with a trusty 486 for about 10 years, then a beginning 100Mhz Pentuim for another 5, running doe and win95 ( no yelling please).
Well I went and made an impulse buy and got an IBM 660Mhz PC with a 13 Gig disk , 128megs of ram, and windows 2000 `Professional' running on it, with an NTFS file system. Apparently, just under the amount of ram and processor speed to make a monster like win 2000 (or XP) run at decent speeds. Survpc PC types like me are not just fond of our old hardware, but of old windows, dos, even unix software that we would rather keep than try to replace. In this regard which windows might offer the best combination of welcome new features and backward compatibility? Many old programs, even windows 9x programs, do not speak nicely to the NTFS file system, and also can not talk to the `hardware abstraction layer' of the newer NT based windows, to access hardware directly. There are weak dos emulations, some third party tries at better ones (e.g., DOSBOX). Offhand I suspect win98 supports the most old hardware and software, whereas the newer NT based windows offer more stability, security, faster devices like USB ports, etc. What do we all think about this issue?
