Favorite OS of all-time.

[retsam]

eat that microcrap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:D

[saturnotaku]

Originally posted by retsam
the first commodor "vic 20 or 64 or 128"heheh it had a built in basic compiler and 16 colors and the most game ive ever had on a system. i had 100's of games and there were soooo many origanal games. not like today were all the games follow in the same footsteps as before. it was soooo much fun never worried about boot problems. it even just turned on!!!! gawd i miss that feature !!!!!!!!! all with 64 k or ram hehehe something xp cant doo with all the memory in the world

The Commodore was a system where blue screens were a good thing. :)

I loved my C64. I, too, had lots of games for it. And you're right in saying most of them were original. I never got tired of any of them. And the hardware was extraordinarily reliable, we never had to replace any essential parts except for my Epyx 500XJ joystick. :D

[Matthyahuw]

ULTIMA I-III on the C64 BABY!!! :D

[DadGT]

I voted Win2K because its just an overall good comprise between NT4 (great stability and solid but bad support) and XP (good stabilty but bloated.) Win95 holds a special place as Win moved from the dreaded Program Manager. I have used other OSes, but something about the NT kernel, software support and hardware support makes it my favorite.

Not to say any of them are close to perfect...

[retsam]

heheh its sooo funny its been what ..18 years since getting my first commodor. it just powered on no boot times no config.sys or boot.ini it just turned on!!!!! and why are all the new games the same!!!! what the hell happened in the laast 18 years werent we supposed to have hal in every house by now!!!!


rets

[Kevin]

I used to run Windows of various flavors, until they hit ME. I stopped at Win98SE, and stayed there for quite some time, as it was the LAST iteration of Windows with any sort of DOS that would at least RUN some of the old DOS apps that a lot of teachers are still running. (Cheap schoolboards won't even hire somebody to re-write the codebase for them :mad: . )

But then I discovered Linux. Mandrake 7.1 was my first Linux that I REALLY liked a lot, and even though it was rough in spots, it kept chugging along, and hardware detection got MUCH better, and other things kept arriving. It was like Christmas, and the best part was, it was practically FREE! So I ran both Win98SE and Linux, and on and off one or the other would be 'in favor'. The upgrade to 8.2 and the latest Office Killer App from Sun, namely StarOffice 6.0, and the new release of KDE, have rung the bells for Win98. I have relegated it to a 30g drive, and Linux inhabits the 40. I regularly use Linux in combination with StarOffice to compose all of my office paperwork, and I also use SO 6.0 for EVERYTHING else, as it comes with all the goodies in Office, and then some.

So I guess you could say I am a Linux convert. Windows is still on the other drive, but mainly as a way of running some of the games I play in Windows. But that may soon change, as new games coming out seem to be in three flavors, instead of the old WinXXX and/or Mac OS. Linux is sliding up the chart. Why not go whole hog, you say, and run the Windows stuff under Linux? Why?, I say. Windows 98SE works well for me, and I will keep it running for a while yet. After it finally dies a good death, I will simply allocate the space freed to Linux version Whatever is Current, and probably won't look back.

Both OS lines have good features. Windows is going in a direction where all the work is done by the programmer, and as long as you have somewhat current hardware, you can keep running it. But there's the rub. You upgrade your OS, you upgrade hardware, it all costs money. :( Linux, OTOH, lets you upgrade your version for a lot less than Bill Gates ever lets you do it for! :D So you get to plow a lot more money into your hardware, and still have a bit left to buy that new book you've been eyeing. :) . I guess I'm getting frugal in my old age. :rolleyes: . But after going thru dialysis and a transplant, I have found that frugal is a Good Thing. Enough about that. Lest some accuse me of singing praises to convert others, I can only say that this is personal testimony. No guarantees apply, and none need apply! :D . Others may not achieve the same mileage, due to other factors affecting performance of products mentioned here. (Huge smile, :D , nudge, nudge, ;), ;). If any take offense, I cannot offer apology, as I am sure I cannot understand your umbrage. Suffice it to say that everyone has their reasons for running what they run, and what it runs on. Infinite Life, Infinite Diversity.

L.L.A.P.

[VeritechK7]

I'd say win2k because it revolutionized the NT world w/ plug and play and multimedia functionality. I still recommend it to friends and others looking for a fast and stable operating platform and stil has good application compatibility

[de><ta]

then why on earth do i get so many memory dumps every time i use win2k???

It is a lot better than nt and i agree it is great for networking, but nah it aint as good a folks feel it is.

[Gator]

I really like Win2k because it was a plug and play version of WinNT. I like it's stability, and was VERY excited when it came out and used it for very long time, even after WinXP came out. To date the only reason I switched to WinXP was it handled my USB devices better for some reason (me shrugs)

I noticded nobody voted for Win95B, and I wanna mention that is still a VERY important OS. Not only do we all use the win95 gui still, but I make sure I always have access to a Win95B partition. I like using VirtualPC for this, 95 is great for bootdisks, diagnostics, older games, it's just a good thing to keep around. I also like to use Win95B on older laptops that don't have much speed or memory. 95 can still run the same basic programs as WinXP, and it's requirements are very little (32ram flys with it, 64 is killer fast). Lest we forget our dare Win95B. Now Win95 original... BLEH!

[VeritechK7]

yeah i tend to like 95B myself ..it was quite responsive and quite stable really.

[Kevin]

I remember quite often sitting down at the keyboard of an old TI-994(a), and running TI EXTENDED BASIC, and programming sprites, 3D wire-frame sprites and only fixed sprites were allowed fill patterns in solids, but MAN were those games ever FAST!!!! At least when you consider it's MAN vs MACHINE, and the Machine was running at almost 1.5Mhz! Shoot, the first 386 machines only ran at 30MHz or so, and they were considered fast at first! Now, 2.0GHz machines, and still clocking faster and faster! What frequency in general does a human operate at, anyway? Quite obviously, when you look at the fact that 32fps is enough to make the human mind think it's unbroken sequences, we are pretty slow compared to a Machine running at multi-giga-hertz frequencies!

Also, when a lot of people complain about boot times, they forget that an old Commodore 64 was booting off of an ROM module that contained the whole bootstrap code base to make the machine wake up and read and write to a disk drive, a display, and a whole hockey-sock full of other stuff! Today, you boot a machine that loads and runs megabytes of code modules JUST to get the machine ready to take the OS into some segments of memory, and then load and offload other segments, while still running all the load of talking to the hardware, let ALONE running any software along with the OS!! :mad: So when you compare boot times between the machines, it's really a total wonder that today's machines can even BOOT in the space of time they take, let alone read and execute megabyte upon megabyte of code to get the machine talking in a GUI interface!!! :confused:

When you come right down to it, today, a machine really takes no more time to boot than a machine from twenty years back, considering the complexity of the task you are asking your machine to perform. They've only gone from 1.5MHz to 2.0GHz in clock speeds, and they are loading THOUSANDS of times more code than the old slow-pokes were ever even concieved of loading! I remember Wycove FORTH for the TI-994(a), and it came on a single density floppy that was barely filled with all the Assembler code for the full FORTH, along with the assembled FORTH itself, and that file was only 8Kilobytes. it included support to program in the Graphics Programming Language (GPL) that ran on the 994(a). The TI EXTENDED BASIC module you plugged into the extension port contained over 100Kilobytes of assembler code, by itself! I remember writing a version of Centipede, an old ATARI game, in FORTH on the 994(a). It took less than 4K of code to get the GPL graphic hooks written, and the assembler routines that made calls to the metal of the machine. That was all in a High Level Language. Or would FORTH be considered a L.L.L? Not many would care today, with Gigabytes of RAM, and getting into almost TeraByte (when you consider RAID arrays and such) sized storage devices! This is progress. More of everything to do more of what you want to do with your computer.

Infinite Life, Infinite Diversity.

L.L.A.P.

[NeoGeo]

DOS was the best! I never ever liked Win 3.1, Win95 was hopeless until OSR2 was released, then it became reasonably good, if a little slow, then 98 came out ad oh dear! Microsoft stabbed themselves in the foot!! 98SE was a 100% improvement, then WinMe, was just disgraceful... HOW do people use it? its soooooo unreliable! 2k was brilliant tho, and XP is def the right direction to go in, if a little slow occasioanally, but hey for games it kicks 98's ass :D

[Kevin]

Man, you have enough gear in that box for THREE computers! You have enough drive space there to start storing the London Library on it! How's the weather in Portsmouth? ;-)

[NeoGeo]

its actually very good today, nice and sunny :)

and nah my drives are full with divx movies and loadz of mp3s ;)

oh yeah, my old 386 was running at 20MHz, i still have it, its sitting under the bed! was amazing at the time, got a scsi interface on board, and a built in tape streamer :)

[Kevin]

Yup, I can remember running a 386 with a copy of DOS and Win 3.X on the teeny hard drives back then. MP3s and DIVX movies? Must have a high speed connection, or you like to sleep to the sound of a modem downloading big files at nite! :D

I am waiting for the sun to arrive so I can open the windows here, (and I don't even have to pay Bill to open THESE windows! :D ) and let the house air a bit. You should take your old 386 out of storage under the bed and put it into use as a backup for some of your files you would like to keep, but don't want access to immediately. If you have a SCSI interface and tape drive in the box, it will serve as a nice little backup box, or if you really want to get creative, you could probably run a little network and use it as a server and file storage and print server. There are Linux kernels around that will SMOKE on a 386 box, as long as you have some RAM in it and don't mind a command line interface to it. Tho I am sure there are a few GUI shells around that will run in 386 land. Have a happy! Don't break too many hard drives with all those MP3 files and movies!!!

[NeoGeo]

lol... i have a home network, and an internet server, which is also a print server ;) i have a 576k connection, and about 6 comps at the mo on my network....

my net server is a pile of crap! this old P200, but im actually building a K62/380 system right now to replace it :)

[Kevin]

Alrighty then! I guess the old 386 is just a boat anchor then, unless you can find a board to stuff the SCSI interface and tape drive onto, and use them. Sounds a nice network you have there. I have five on this one. My server is an AMD K6/2 350 with 196Mb of RAM and teeny drives ( A 5G and a 10G ) that I pulled out of a machine I was reconfiguring for my wife. ;) . That's how I keep myself occupied here. I keep rebuilding the network and adding workstations to it, after I upgrade everything else. Things sorta trickle down the chain, but the server is in the middle of that.

My personal workstation is an Athlon 1.3Ghz CPU, 512Mb RAM, Tyan S2390B Motherboard, which supports my TNT2 card (yeah, low end Nvidia, but I don't often play too many games. Just Diablo2 and RTCW every so often. ;) ) , a SBLive! card, the obligatory NIC (AON-325 10/100), and a 30G and 40G Western Digital hard drive. I have Win98SE on the 30, and Mandrake Linux 8.2 on the 40, and I use Linux for my day to day stuff.

My wife has my old 850Mhz Duron box, with 256Mb RAM, the same Nvidia card, a SB Awe64 PCI, 20G Western Digital hard drive, and she also has the flat bed scanner and printer attached to her machine. I just borrow the use of the printer now and again, thru the network.

I have a couple of low end machines for workstations around the house. A P200 and a P120! The P200 is running Mandrake, and the 120 runs OS/2 Warp 4. I know, but I had a guy GIVE me a copy, so I threw it onto a machine. I also have a few other copies of older stuff kicking about. Win95B, OS/2 Warp 3, WinNT 3.5 Workstation, and of course the ever popular DOS/Win 3.11 combo. I have a friend who is threatening to give me an old Mac of some sort, and it has a built in NIC, so I could probably throw it onto the network too, I suppose, but she keeps dancing around it. I'll wait. I keep collecting odd bits of machinery and run them to death, then recycle to bits I can, and REALLY recycle the bits I can't. :D

Good to see I'm not the only odd duck with a growing network in my house! Hmmm.... I wonder if you could consider a network a life-form? It has a brain, (More than one, it would seem.;) ) and the machines hooked in perform various functions, like listening and speaking (in a way), and I figure they must be intelligent, because every time I say that the network probably doesn't need an upgrade right now, it decides to break something so I'll get it a new toy!! :D

Gotta run off and eat or I'll starve to death, and then the network will take over the house in my place! :D

Have a good one! Don't work any harder than you have to!

Infinite Life, Infinite Diversity.
L.L.A.P.

[NeoGeo]

i only live with my parents!! we have systems everywhere tho! couldnt live without a home network.. makes things much easier, not just net access, but filesharing, and multiplayer UT when friends are round :)

[mr_oh_so_ice]

WinXP sucks, crap interface, bloated middleware, activation, unstable, POS.
Win2K sucks, poor games compatibility, application errors.
WinME sucks, see 98 below.
Win98 sucks, unstable, unexpected BSODs.
Win95 sucks, no proper USB, or AGP, or ACPI, unstable.
WinNT4 sucks, no USB, AGP, no DIRECTX or FAT32.
Linux sucks, only a handful of games, and it would be easier to configure a machine based on a Quantum Mechanical Physical Hyperspeed Architecture over Linux.
DOS sucks, no GUI, poor memory management, have to load TSRs and device drivers.
Win3.1 sucks because it just does, some of the weirdest BSOD screens I have ever seen, plus it just sits on top of DOS.
MacOS sucks, cause people don't like Apples.
All other OSes not mentioned here suck as well.

BTW, do NOT take the above post as a flame or something, I am merely pointing out where each OS falls short and why we multiboot most of the time.

[intercede007]

You know, I often wonder where all this instability mumbojumbo comes from concerning WindowsXP and Windows 2000. The PC I am on now is a WinXP machine that I do everything on..game, internet..whathaveyou. The machine beside that is a Windows 2000 box that runs nothing but Folding@Home. Both machines are powered and number crunching until this wonderful florida weather manages to knock out the power. I have never once come home from class to find either stalled, blue screened or otherwise incumbered. The only blue-screening/crash I ever had was trying to hook up a crappy external CD-R drive from IOMEGA that didn't have XP compatibility. That was my own fault. BTW, both machines are VIA/AMD boxes, so by all acounts I should be in PC blue-screen hell..but I'm not. Hmm..perphaps I'm just lucky..or incredibly good.

[[Corporal Dan]]

Originally posted by mr_oh_so_ice
WinXP sucks, crap interface, bloated middleware, activation, unstable, POS.
Win2K sucks, poor games compatibility, application errors.
WinME sucks, see 98 below.
Win98 sucks, unstable, unexpected BSODs.
Win95 sucks, no proper USB, or AGP, or ACPI, unstable.
WinNT4 sucks, no USB, AGP, no DIRECTX or FAT32.
Linux sucks, only a handful of games, and it would be easier to configure a machine based on a Quantum Mechanical Physical Hyperspeed Architecture over Linux.
DOS sucks, no GUI, poor memory management, have to load TSRs and device drivers.
Win3.1 sucks because it just does, some of the weirdest BSOD screens I have ever seen, plus it just sits on top of DOS.
MacOS sucks, cause people don't like Apples.
All other OSes not mentioned here suck as well.

BTW, do NOT take the above post as a flame or something, I am merely pointing out where each OS falls short and why we multiboot most of the time.

Jesus christ, have you ever installed a win2k service pack in your life??!? All those issues were eradicated in sp1!

nt4... , for an os intended for low-end machines, you sure want a lot from it. And fat32? Gimme a break, what a POS as far as filesystems go.

And osx is unix... the way to go.

[VeritechK7]

uh... which version of mac os? i mean X an the ones below it are starkly different from one another . .

[Cereal-Killer]

OS/2 :D

[mr_oh_so_ice]

Originally posted by [Corporal Dan]


Jesus christ, have you ever installed a win2k service pack in your life??!? All those issues were eradicated in sp1!

nt4... , for an os intended for low-end machines, you sure want a lot from it. And fat32? Gimme a break, what a POS as far as filesystems go.

And osx is unix... the way to go.

I knew my rant would set someone off. :)

Yes I have installed NT Service Packs before, in fact I have 2000 installed, however even with SP3 some of my programs still don't work and probably never will. As far as SP1 ERADICATING all of those issues, thats BS. If SP1 did ERADICATE all of those errors there would be no reason for SP2 or SP3. In fact SP3 still introduces some new application patches.

NT4 was not intended for low end machines it was designed for business computing on high end machines. I wanted FAT32 support which alot of people wanted back then so they could dual with 98. There is nothing wrong with the FAT32 filesystem, its fast and gets the job done, NTFS kept things secure for business users who need encryption, and recovery options. Go ahead and use NTFS on your gaming rig after all those gaming applications are quite mission critical aren't they?

MacOSX is pretty good, but in the PC world forget it, I just threw it in for the hell of it, plus I didn't mention anything bad about it except the fact that some people don't like apples.

Oh yeah OS/2 I used to use Warp version 3.0, in fact I still have my copy. Strong multitasking that beat the crap out of NT back then. Too bad it wasn't supported, that OS could even run DOS games with FULL SOUND and FULL SPEED something XP can't fully do yet.

[Nephilim]

OS X baby!

I love my PC, but for chrissakes, I installed OS X on my ibook about a year ago and the OS has YET to crash (of course, that says nothing about 3rd party software. Apple software = works great, 3rd party = needs some work sometimes).

OS X 10.2 just made things even sweeter.....

XP's okay too, I guess....I'm using Win2k on my PC though.....