On Thu, Jan 10, 2013 at 12:53 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 1:49 PM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: >> On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 2:36 PM, David C. Kerber >> <dker...@warrenrogersassociates.com> wrote: >>>> From: dmccunney [mailto:dennis.mccun...@gmail.com] >>>> On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 11:13 AM, Rugxulo <rugx...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>>> > I thought WinME removed the real mode bootup, hence lower >>>> compatibility? >>>> >>>> Don't have it and haven't used it, so don't know. Everything I've >>>> heard indicates it should have been called Win98 Third Edition. I'm >>>> pretty sure there was still DOS underneath like in ME. Removing the >>>> real mode loader didn't occur till NT. >>> >>> Win NT4 significantly pre-dated Win 98; it came out in about '96. Many >>> people feel WinME was one of the worst pieces of software ever written, >>> while 98SE was very good. Win2k was the best, IMO. > > I don't know about that. Win2k was more stable, but it was also > bigger, slower, and had worse DOS compatibility. And lots of bugs. But > it was better for Win32 stuff, esp. Unicode. Yet barely anything still > supports it nowadays. I'm surprised (but glad) people still target XP > (which is both slightly better and worse than 2k in various ways).
If you had the hardware, it was quick enough. Windows likes RAM. I dual booted 98SE and 2K, but abandoned that when I went to a GB of RAM in the box, because 98SE refused to boot if it saw more than 512MB. (There turn out to be ways around that, but I had Win2K to the point where I simply didn't *need* Win98 anymore, so it went away.) I din't care about DOS compatibility - the DOS stuff I used all ran fine in an NTVDM. >> I ran NT4 back then, but as a server OS in a computer room. It was >> not an end-user product. It took Win2K for sufficient compatibility >> (like the ability to use FAT32) to make it a usable end user OS. > > NT 4.0 didn't support DOS LFNs (int 21h, 71xxh) nor FAT32. Though I > don't see how that's a huge deal breaker, no worse than all the other > compatibility problems forced on us. Also, FAT32 isn't supported very > much anymore, esp. Vista on up can't boot from it, so I'm not sure > support for it is here for much longer. (With exFAT and ReFS, who > knows?) I don't care about FAT32 support for the most part. It's still supported for read/write because every Flash drive in creation uses FAT16 or FAT32, but how often do you need to boot from it? Here, the answer is "never". On NT, I can't imagine using anything save NTFS. I've seen complaints that FAT32 is faster, but NTFS is far more robust. I've had file system problems I used CHKDSK /F on. On NTFS, CHKDSK fixed the problems, located the orphaned files, and put them back where they belonged under their correct names. On FAT16/32, I'd get a FILE000.CHK directory with a boatload of file fragments that were fun to identify and mostly just had to be deleted, and might well still have a mess that required reinstalling some apps to fix. The only time I've seen NTFS have a real problem was if a directory entry happened to be on a bad block, and even that was relatively easy to fix. >> 98SE was certainly an improvement over prior Win9X releases. I ran it >> longer than I really wanted because I was waiting for drivers for >> peripherals I used to arrive. When I finally had them all, I switched >> to 2K in a heartbeat. Despite my best efforts, 98SE reached the >> point where I was rebooting multiple times per day to be able to get >> things done. Win2K just ran, and got rebooted only if I installed >> software that required it or I was fiddling with hardware. > > Yes, it's more stable, but it doesn't run a lot of DOS stuff nearly as > well as 9x. Granted, it was "good enough" for "most" things (more or > less), but that support only got worse and worse, esp. with Vista. I > don't know, some people don't mind recompiling all their apps (or just > use popular GNU utils that are ported everywhere), but it seems > unnecessary. We shouldn't have so much deprecation every few years. (I > don't care how "old" or "uncool", it just works, so why break it?) Like I said elsewhere, it ran all the DOS stuff *I* used with no problem so I essentially didn't *care*. ______ 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. ON SALE this month only -- learn more at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/learnmore_122712 _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
