On 8/23/10 4:19 PM, Brian Lanning wrote: Please allow me to point out, to people who know who they are, that I was NOT the person who posted this. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Brian Lanning wrote: errr, no. Linux distros are not stricken with the same affliction. While they generally are more "windows-user friendly" then they have previously been (which means more bloat to cover the expected features 'doze users are accustomed to) they can most readily be converted back to a leaner, meaner OS with little effort. I'm not going to allow you to throw that bone out there as a peace offering without some protest! Barry

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 4:09 PM, Barry L. Kline <blkline at attglobal.net> wrote: This is what I was referring to. Windows can also, but with a lot more work. brian

On 8/23/10 4:51 PM, Teo Zenios wrote: Well, for a few years now, the typical American way of thinking has been "if it's old, it's bad, and if it's not new, it's old". This mindset is the very essence of the "well-trained consumer", and it exists and pervades to the utter delight of salesmen everywhere. -Dave -- Dave McGuire Port Charlotte, FL

For once I did not write that, but I hardly need to say that I agree with it totally... :-) -tony

Mac OS 9 forever. (Seriously. Classilla 9.2.1 released yesterday.) -- ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ -- Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com -- A kindness done today is the surest way to a brighter tomorrow. -- Anonymous

On 23 Aug 2010 at 15:19, Brian Lanning wrote: The real problem is windows setup. Microsoft's default is to leave your "Documents and Settings", "Program files", temp folder and swap space all on the same drive. And then, there's the ever-expanding registry. It is possible to logically partition things and elminate all of the gratuitous services, and prune down the registry, but it isn't easy, so most people don't. Sells a lot of new machines and OS software that way. --Chuck

Am I the only one here who uses windows XP and windows 2000 for a LONG time (without reformatting) and everything works? :oO

On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:20 PM, Alexandre Souza - Listas <pu1bzz.listas at gmail.com> wrote: I do this too. (I think most of us here do this and we're the exception) I've never had anti-virus software installed on my computer, yet manage to never get a virus. Amazing! Most people allow their computer to get spywared, then wonder why it's going so slow and think they need a new one. When they get the new one, they immediately get spywared. brian

On Tue, Aug 24, 2010 at 09:55:05AM -0400, Jerome H. Fine wrote: Install the service packs and use a hardware firewall. Check out xplite, I have not tried it myself, but heard some good about it. http://www.litepc.com/ Not sure how it works with windows update though.. if it affects it at all. /P

At 09:38 AM 8/24/2010, Chuck Guzis wrote: That would presume a program could know what is unnecessary, and that there was a historical record of what was put there and who put it there. - John

Pontus Pihlgren [pontus at Update.UU.SE] wrote: I believe that the point is you take your XP CD and make a copy on hard disk, download the latest service pack and "slipstream" it into that copy, use Xplite to strip stuff out of what you now have, download the patches-du-jour and integrate those in (iirc xplite does that too), add a bunch of software you'd like to install automatically (if you want), and then burn the result to CD. Do it right (i.e. with an auto-answer file) and your re-installation now becomes: - pop in CD - quick format drive (if necessary) - kick off installation - do something else for N minutes When you come back you have an up-to-date XP installation. (OK, you might want to do a Windows Update because patches come out with quite monotonous regularity), but you don't need to baby sit it. At least that's how I believe you are supposed to use Xplite ... I do all the setup by hand because I'm odd like that :-) Antonio

On Thu, Aug 26, 2010 at 12:59:16AM +0100, Liam Proven wrote: I did read up on the subject, what I said was that I don't have first hand experience using it. Buut, as you said in an another post, you got it mixed up :) nlite looks interesting though, I think I read about it some years ago. Cheers, Pontus.

On 24 August 2010 15:38, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: No, it doesn't. Virtually none of the functionality is in common. Control Panel /hides/ components; XPLite ensures they were never installed in the first place. Utter piffle. I think you are thinking of some other program. XPlite is a tool that you use to create custom XP install CDs. It does not and cannot and does not even try to do anything at all to an installed system. It enables you to (say) take an XP install CD with no service packs, slipstream SP3 into it, remove IE, OE, WMP, MSN, Messenger, Movie Maker & all the other crapware, pre-load a licence key, put the OS on C:, the programs on D: and the user data on E:, set it for your country and keyboard, remove all the other languages, and then creates an ISO for you to burn which will allow you to install a custom system non-interactively. It is a brilliant tool. I don't know what you're attempting to describe but you are thinking of something entirely different. Perhaps you're thinking of 98Lite for Windows 98, which was both capable of performing stripped-down installations and of removing some components It does. Don't even know what that's mean to mean, really, but if you remove all the accessories and Internet clients from the Windows installation CD, then their registry entries never get created in the first place. Me, I just use TinyXP r9. It's on all the torrent indices. It's a custom distro of XP SP3 with most of the crap removed for you; you can choose whether you want IE/OE/WMP or not, a "bare" install with no accessories at all, and whether you want a collection of drivers preloaded. It's great. I run it in a VirtualBox VM under Ubuntu/64. The bare install took <9min from bootup of the VM to finished system, ran in 40MB of RAM and shifted like greased lightning. Even with drivers, tuning, updates & antivirus, it takes only ~70MB of RAM. For XP, that's nothing. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 26 August 2010 01:23, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote: Humble apologies. I have got my wires crossed. I was thinking of nLite: http://www.nliteos.com/ -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

Might you have a link? I am a complete dummy with Windows and I avoid it when I can. I am aware of that. I use my wife's system running Windows XP to initially download any files I need. Then, after I backup my Windows 98SE system, I download those few items which are too big to e-mail. When my wife was running Windows 2000, I had a connection over the router to move files back and forth. With Windows XP, my son says he is unable to make my wife's C: drive available even though I can still use the printer on my system to send stuff that I want printed while I am on my wife's system. Do you know of any way that I could establish a link over the router between my Windows 98SE system and the Windows XP system? Both system use FAT32 file structures, although that did not seem to matter when my wife used NTFS on the Windows 2000 system. By the way, my son is an expert on Windows XP and sets us up with a new system every 5 years or so. By the way, I requested FAT32 on the Windows XP system so that when I use Ghost during the backup, a text file is also created which logs the date and CRC value for each file in the backup image. On my present Windows 98SE system, that helps a lot. When I backup my wife's system once a month, that text file is created for her system as well. Ghost does not support that feature with NTFS. The problem is that a reinstall would be so difficult that I want to avoid that if at all possible. I backup my wife's system once a month and it now works out to about 10 GB within 5 files - compressed with Ghost from about 16 GB not including the 2 GB swap file which Ghost ignores. Since my wife has 2 * 300 GB drives, there is a lot of room to hold the backups on one of the partitions. In fact, I almost always duplicate all of the data on each partition on the other drive. So there are almost always 2 copies of each file on separate physical drives. I would prefer to use 4.7 GB DVD-R blanks since they are now so inexpensive. If the 8 GB DVD-R blanks ever get down to the same cost per GB, that will be the better choice at that point. I already have 3 * 1 TB SATA II drives on my new Windows XP system, so there is sufficient storage. Again, all 3 drives will be identical so that each file will be there 3 times on 3 separate physical drives. I learned that requirement on the present Windows 98SE system where I started out with 3 * 40 GB drives. Within about 4 years, all 3 drives failed. Fortunately, they seemed to fail completely over a period of about a week. That was sufficient warning to backup the drive with the C: partition while it was still working. By that time, the 160 GB drives were so inexpensive they were used as the replacement even thought the BIOS can see only 130 GB on each drive. So I now have 3 times the hard drive storage I started with in 2002. When I upgraded from the 266 MHz Pentium in 2002, I had been used 2 * 1.2 GB Hitachi ESDI hard drive running Windows 95. My strong preference is to make a backup onsite. I realize that is old fashioned, but old habits from 1960s are still with me. Early on I realized the necessity of backups and have never been sorry I spend about 10% of my time making and verifying backups. In fact, that is one aspect that I insist on. Every backup file must be able to be read back to the system and checked. These days I usually use MD5 to verify. On the PDP-11 when I used the TK70 tape drive, the RT-11 program BUP was able to verify that the image file was identical to the disk files. There was no compression and each 32 MB RT-11 partition had to be backed up separately. It took about 7 min to perform the backup and almost the identical time to verify. Very early on, I found that the TK50 had to be discarded. Not only did the TK50 drive manage only one 32 MB RT-11 partition per the tape, for a backup, but the time to verify was much greater than an hour if the verify was tape vs disk. The few time that I used a TK50 for backup, I ended up performing a recovery back to a different RT-11 partition, then comparing the original RT-11 partition with the recovered partition. The TK70 tape drive was used until I switched to Ersatz-11 around 2002 at which point I had managed to acquire a SCSI host adapter and Sony SMO S-501 optical drives and MANY media. The Sony SMO S-501 optical drives were able to work under Ersatz-11 on the Windows 98SE system, so they were used to do the migration. Jerome Fine

On 25 August 2010 14:22, Jerome H. Fine <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> wrote: I see no reason why this shouldn't work. The #1 most common gotcha is that whilst a standalone XP box can have user accounts with blank passwords, you can't use network sharing to or from XP if the user accounts in question have no password. You *must* set a password and it must be the same on both ends. Ensure 98 is entirely up to date; there was a patch for it to enable encrypted SMB connections, which IIRC is what XP uses by default. There is still an ancient version of Windows Update for 98, I think, & you can also download a very handy 3rd-party "service pack" for 98 which rolls up all the MS updates ever released for it. Share drive on 1 machine. Connect to it from the other. Ensure that both have matching user account names and passwords. For interop with 98, this means: * single-word username with no spaces or punctuation, <10char * single-word computer name with no spaces or punctuation, <10char * 98 only allows one user "account", so make sure you know what name & password is being used * create an account with the same name and password on XP. If you're connecting from 98 to XP, the account need merely exist; you don't need to be that user. If you're connecting from XP to 98, you must be logged in as the account that is currently in use on the 98 end. With all due respect, he doesn't all that expert to me; this stuff is not hard to get working. Even 3-4y ago I was meeting "IT professionals" who had never seen a version of Windows older than XP, and had no clue how to do anything at all on any OS other than XP. It may be that your son knows nothing about 98 & how it works. [Shrug] I wouldn't know, I rarely use it. Me, I have a 32MB FAT16 primary boot drive with DOS on it on all my desktop PCs. Then you can run DOS apps from an actual live booted-off-the-HD copy of DOS and they can write whatever logfiles they like on there. XP is perfectly happy to boot off a honking great NTFS volume in an extended partition; it just writes a couple of boot files to the primary DOS FAT drive. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 24 August 2010 14:55, Jerome H. Fine <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> wrote: Netscape 7.2 was horrible when it was current and it is ancient now. Do yourself a favour, update to SeaMonkey. It's the same codebase, but a decade more polished, and it uses the same file formats for mail/news as Netscape Communicator, the old Mozilla suite and Thunderbird. The reason being that it's the latest version of the same code as Netscape 7.x and Mozilla Suite. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 26 August 2010 01:54, Jerome H. Fine <jhfinedp3k at compsys.to> wrote: I'm sure it does, but it's old, slow, can't cope with a lot of modern site features, and has many unpatched security exploits in it. For browsers, you really should run something current. [?] It is the 3rd link on Google: http://www.seamonkey-project.org/ No. Abandon Win98. It was not a good version of Windows when it was new and it's a positive liability now. XP is overall a far more pleasant experience. If you *really* want to stay with a "retro" version of Windows, Windows 2000 is still fairly usable, but a lot of modern programs and drivers won't work. AFAICR it's the same codebase; there should not be any /major/ issues. Frankly, you'd be better off with Thunderbird and Firefox, which are the email/news bit of Netscape 7.x/8.x and the Web browser bit split into standalone apps. Still fairly comfortable and relatively familiar, but more modern and streamlined. It does pay to turn off a few of the new features of Thunderbird 3, though. However, if you prefer the all-in-one approach and as familiar a tool as possible, SeaMonkey is the way to go. -- Liam Proven ? Info & profile: http://www.google.com/profiles/lproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/GoogleTalk/Orkut: lproven at gmail.com Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884 ? Fax: + 44 870-9151419 AIM/Yahoo/Skype: liamproven ? MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? ICQ: 73187508

On 8/23/10 4:49 PM, Fred Cisin wrote: It's very odd to me that Apple's OS X needs at least as much CPU, RAM, and disk as current Windows, but nobody beats on it for being bloated. Mind you, I'm typing this at a Mac Pro, and all my systems except back-end stuff are Macs. I just think it's funny that nobody - including me - seems to mind the huge resource needs of OS X. Doc

Dave McGuire wrote: I'm not by any means a fan of Windows (or Mac OS, really), but I have Windows 7 and Mac OS X 10.6 installed on the same machine and they're both roughly the same speed. I have a couple of much faster OSes installed on the same machine (which supports test environments) that run significantly faster, but that's neither here nor there. Peace... Sridhar