howard schwartz wrote: >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? > Get OS/2 warp 4. I've seen it auctioned for 20$. It can read NTFS. There's a version of Mozilla for it, and in 32 bit mode. The only hitch I see is your ISP, which may be using MS-CHAP, which the OS/2 ppp driver may not support. However, I have seen a new downloadable ISP package for OS/2 that should handle it.
Or- get XANDROS. Which is what I just ordered the other day from J&R, 75$/incl shipping. I have run the earlier version, COREL deluxe for several years. I'd suggest the COREL, but it's only got netscape 4.7 on the DEBIAN 2.2.16 kernel, and wont run recent flash crap. But I think it also does the NTFS, and the latest XANDROS, says it does, ... along with their own version of WINE, and some of the COREL win 9x apps, as well as almost any other win 9x program you are likely to have. The other thing I liked about COREL, which I expect to see with XANDROS, is that it will *automatically* find and configure all your peripherals, and that includes the drives. You dont havta go thru the usual LINUX 'mount' bullshit to access a drive. And it dont tell you dont have 'permission' to access a drive on your own computer. It reads & writes all of the windoz file systems, and can interpret all of the windows file formats for display or editing. And it's even got a damn good dos emulator. > >
