On Fri, Dec 28, 2012 at 8:52 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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 is apps you will run under XP. > > As you mentioned, Firefox is a memory hog, but Opera is okay for very > light browsing and Gmail.
Current browsers assume you have current hardware and can support their requirements. I don't bitch about FF not behaving on low-end hardware with little RAM because I don't *expect* it to. >> 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. One of the folks on the Puppy Linux web forums managed to get a working Puppy install on a machine with *16MB* RAM. To do so, he had to strip out everything that *could* be stripped out and still have a running system, and he had to actually build the Puppy image on a more powerful machine, then transfer the drive with the Puppy image to the target system. The end use was a dedicated media server, not a general purpose machine, so it worked. >> 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). Since DOS apps weren't a concern to them (and aren't, for the most part, for me), I'm not all that bothered. And I'd turn off Aero anyway. I'd rather throw hardware at apps, not the OS. But the point was stop assuming the user was administrator with all powers. It was possible to have a Power User profile from NT 4, I think, and that should have been the default for the user. >> 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. I was actually a bit startled: I liked Symantec Corporate because it Just Worked and was low resource. I didn't care for McAfee, and wouldn't touch Symantec's Norton consume product with a stick. >> 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)! Only in attachments. It may be pure ASCII text, but it's executable on a Windows system, and Google takes a dim view of anything that can be executed directly from an attachment. These days, if I need to provide an executable, I wrap it up in a Zip or 7z file and put it on Google Drive, then provide a share to it to the person it's intended for. >> 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. The previous problem I had with Symantec came when an A/V update came in and it decided some ancient DOS utilities I still used were infected and quarantined them. I had to find out how to tell Symantec "Don't scan *this* directory and directories beneath it", then dig up the distribution archives and install fresh copies of the programs. It all lived under a directory tree intended for such things, so preventing a recurrence by telling Symantc "Don't look *here*" fixed things, but it was a PITA that it was necessary. >>> 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). I thought I recalled home as well as Pro, but I suppose memory failed me. > 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. I don't recall details, but XP added various things to the Win32 API that weren't in 2K and that a lot of programs relied on. I was amused to see uTorrent claim 2K was not supported but install and seem to work anyway. Other things said XP or better and just refused to install. >>> 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. :-(( Since I am not, as a rule, *using* graphical DOS apps, even under FreeDOS, I largely didn't care. >>> 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. Like I said, a VM solution. I'm in conversations elsewhere with die-hard WordStar fans wondering about running WS7 under Win7. If they get a 32 bit version of the OS, maybe. If they get a 64bit machine, it's a VM or nothing. My question is when it becomes more trouble than it's worth to try to keep WS running, and thay are better served by biting the bullet and switching. >> 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.) You can get graphical versions of Nethack, but I'm old skool, and prefer the character mode version. I also still play a DOS port of LARN. ______ Dennis https://plus.google.com/u/0/105128793974319004519 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Master Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL, ASP.NET, C# 2012, HTML5, CSS, MVC, Windows 8 Apps, JavaScript and much more. Keep your skills current with LearnDevNow - 3,200 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_122912 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
