Hi, On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 6:59 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Dec 26, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > > XP itself should run in it. The question if apps you will run under XP.
As you mentioned, Firefox is a memory hog, but Opera is okay for very light browsing and Gmail. > I recently inherited an Acer notebook originally belonging to the late > husband of a friend. She didn't need it, and figured I could put it > to use as a traveling device. It came with XP Home. After applying > all available patches since it had last been regularly used (a couple > of years ago), then removing unneeded startup programs and turning off > unneeded services, I got the base memory XP required after boot down > to about 275MB. The box has 1.5GB RAM, so I have some headroom. My old second-hand P4 [sic] with 128 MB of RAM could just sit there blankly "only" using 64 MB, so I had a little room to spare. XP was bloated compared to Win9x, but it is also a dream compared to Vista or 7. > The biggest net win was likely what they did with Vista and have > continued with Win7: the default user has a "Power User" profile, > which can run things, but not install them. IIRC, the whole UAC method was a bad kludge. I'm not saying it's all bad, but when it flags (DOS) files just because they have "install" or "update" in their file *name*, that left a bad taste in my mouth. And I never was sure if it was even possible to create a suitable (working) "manifest" for DOS apps. Not to mention the (driver?) bug that made my old laptop screen go black for five seconds while waiting for the UAC prompt (eventually worked around by disabling Aero entirely). > On my old Lifebook, my Win2K Pro install got hosed by a Symantec A/V > update, and I had to do a clean re-install and rebuild my config. McAfee also accidentally hosed some XP systems too a while back. That was because they didn't test well enough. You'd think XP would be ubiquitous enough, but apparently they too fell for the "Win7 is teh bestest!!!" hype craze and focused too much on that. Sad, really. > The biggest vector for viruses is email attachments. I use GMail as > my primary email account. GMail is web based, and mail resides on > Google's servers. Too bad Google still whines about .BAT files (pure ASCII text)! > I no longer run A/V in Windows. > > A/V does nothing to stop malware. That I deal with by not running > IE, and using Firefox with the NoScript addon that blocks scripting if > the site isn't in a whilelist. I have a few anti-malware tools like > Malware Bytes and Spybot, but I *don't* run the resident extensions > intended to do real-time blocking. I run the occasional on-demansd > scan, and never find anything worse than "tracking" cookies, which I > can block in other ways if I care. Usually, I don't. It's horrible when the a/v tries to scan all the archives and old Service Pack install caches, esp. on single core. Worse is all the false positives (hi Japheth!). It really is sometimes worse than the problem it tries to solve. >> IIRC, Win2k didn't need activation and had smaller footprint, hence >> why many prefer it. But it wasn't ever targeted for home users, only >> pros. Still, you could probably find a copy on eBay. > > Win2K had home and pro variants. It does have a smaller footprint, > but a lot of stuff expects XP at minimum, and complains or won't > install if it doesn't see it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000 That says it only came in Pro, Server, Advanced Server, or Datacenter Server. And IIRC, WinMe came out slightly later than 2k! So it wasn't really official until XP that "Home" editions were available and "DOS" was "dead" (to them, i.e. not needed to install). As for lots of stuff expecting XP, that's because XP was #1 for so long (something like five years or more). I don't know why, but presumably because 2k was harder to test (as it was less easily available for home developers). I do know that Win2k and up are commonly mentioned as minimum due to Unicode support (despite MSUL for 9x, which nobody seemed to ever use). But I think some runtimes (e.g. latest MSVC) only target XP SP3 [sic] on up these days. So it depends on compiler, libs, etc. >> When XP came out, it had much higher requirements than Win9x. But it >> offered a lot more, including better stability. But of course the DOS >> compatibility is much lower. :-( > > All of the DOS apps I've played with work fine under XP. But I'm not > a gamer, and while I have a couple of old DOS games in my mix, they > are character mode No, XP is fairly horrible at DOS games and indeed NT is bad at DOS in general. Sure, XP halfway works, but DJGPP devs had to workaround some bugs (and others were unfixable). In particular, graphical stuff barely (if ever) works in XP, hence the oddball situation of running DOSBox while under XP 32-bit. :-(( >> Though XP is light years slimmer and more functional (for DOS) than >> later versions, even with the bloated SP3. So I would definitely not >> use Win7 in any capacity for DOS stuff unless you were willing to live >> exclusively inside emulators (DOSBox) or hypervisors (VirtualBox), aka >> slow and buggy. > > Unless you run a specifically 32 bit version of Win7, you have no > alternative to a VM solution. 64 bit Win7 does not support 16 bit DOS > apps. True, it doesn't, but you can run VirtualBox (or similar) with VT-X extensions (if available) if desperate. That way is much faster than DOSBox. >> I know it's not saying much, but I suggest you find other games that >> you like that are better supported. Heck, even GoG.com sells lots of >> old DOS stuff (DRM-free) that usually works in DOSBox. Or stick to the >> super portables like Nethack or Quake or Freecell or similar. ;-) > > I have an SDL port of Nethack that runs on a PalmOS device... :-) Upcoming SDL revision will drop a lot of platforms. And technically DOS never had a port. But I suppose you could maybe try to use the Win32 one with HX if you have (some?) MSVCRT (or were bold enough to recompile with OpenWatcom, which I never had the guts to attempt). But anyways, Nethack doesn't "need" gfx at all, and it's fairly stable (old?) by now. (BTW, I like roguelikes, but most of them seem infinitely too complex for their own good. I suggest Rogue Clone or Moria or classic DC400b26 or similar, but YMMV.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master HTML5, CSS3, ASP.NET, MVC, AJAX, Knockout.js, Web API and much more. Get web development skills now with LearnDevNow - 350+ hours of step-by-step video tutorials by Microsoft MVPs and experts. SALE $99.99 this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122812 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
