Sunday, April 16, 2006

After Windows XP - Windows 98 ?


No I didnt get it wrong. Its supposed to be Vista, right? Well it depends on whom you are asking. Seems weird, but I actually did it. I uninstalled XP and installed 98 on my home PC. Reason? insufficient RAM. Not for me, but for XP.
Windows XP came out with 64 MB as minimum requirement for RAM, and to be fair to M$, it was ok. Only nobody thought of service packs. Numerous patches and two service packs later, XP will run smoothly* on my system only if it has 256MB. Service pack 2 is a real monster. True, the monster keeps many intruders at bay, but having a pet monster to keep off your enemies has its own logistical problems. The first one - where to keep it? Occupies too much space. Two - how to feed it? Monsters are always hungry. I think i am stretching my metaphor a little too long. Ok, the thing is SP2 takes a lot of memory and a lot of new services are added (for our protection ) that drags the system. The result? The fancy new machine that I bought a few months back suddenly seems too old to play even Pacman.
With 256 MB, i was doing fine. But the real test came with my old PC.( Ya, thats right i have two PCs. Dont be jealous) I progressively installed in the following order: XP with SP2, XP with SP1, Plain simple XP, Windows 98. And I got better performance with each. Btw, may old machine suffering throughout all this had 128 MB RAM.
So whats my point? Am I (yet) another of those MS bashers? No. I ll tell you why. After I installed plain old XP, I connected to the net. Within 5 minutes my Avast started screaming.. all sorts of messages.. blocked this, blocked that... infact it was so bad.. i couldnt use my computer at all, all I could do was sit back and watch as dark forces from the ends of the net tried to take over my system. Only Avast** was holding them back.
Then I installed 98. Surprise! No more attacks. It seems those who write viruses have all but forgotten 98. But somehow, I didnt feel easy. Its hard to confess, but I seemed to have grown a fondness for XP. Ofcourse it looks better, but much more than that also. Come on guys even you MS bashers out there have to admit, it is much much more reliable than 98. Maybe not as much as Linux, but I will compare that only when I can get as many games to play on Linux as on XP. So back to my point. My point it 98 is crap as compared to XP. Wonder how I used to work with it before I got XP. So there I was, going back to XP, but ofcourse with SP1. It blocks most of the attacks, is not as much resource hungry as SP2, so its a good tradeoff. I am stil with it. So as you see guys, Bill gates is not that bad after all.. he learns from his mistakes atleast :-). Ofcourse we all would like it a lot if he doesnt make them in the first place, but until Google decides to do something about it, we will have to live with that.
*smoothly as in after you click on something, you dont get enough time to go and check whats on Tv and come back.
**avast, the best antivirus you can get for free, including cracked versions of Norton. You can get it here : http://avast.com/eng/download-avast-home.html

3 comments:

KK said...

Good to know you blog. I expected you to do this long ago. Expect my regular reading this, so the blogs better be high standard... :=)

Anonymous said...

Where did you find it? Interesting read »

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