Mail Archives: djgpp/2002/02/17/06:00:04
from "Rob McCrea" <mccrea AT nospam DOT com>:
> sorry this ended up long.
> XP sucks, imho. I gave it a serious try for about 1 month. 3 games -- 1 dos
and 2 win9x -- wouldn't run properly on it (all close, but no cigar).
That's 100% of the commercial games I tried -- and it's a bitch to
thoroughly search for and try out potential fixes. .Since I only have 35
gigs of disks space, I decided I couldn't waste half a gig on XP anymore.
(And just because I'm here, I'll give you my initally evaultion of XP:
Good: on the fly user switching Bad: That worthless for power users; I
don't have enough "power" for myself let alone another instance. Good: was
very stable for me (in other words, apps crashed, not windows). Bad:
Couldn't find anyone that knew how to set an app's priority BEFORE
launching, for realtime games to run at high level which was needed (err, I
guess I could have tried lowering most other services in my attempt to get
programs to run as fast on XP). Suprising: I have some funky hardware, and
had zero compability problems contrary to popular rumor. Bad: DOS is (once
more) all but dead. Complaint: they advertise that "compatibility mode",
and my pre-XP programs seemed to run worse under compatibilty mode.
Complaint: Some pertty nifty extra feautres, but there's absolutely many
could not be released for win9x. Complaint: MS actively reports they
designed XP to startup in less than 30 seconds -- the day of my installs, it
took nearly 2 minutes (and got worse as I added programs, of course). This
Win98 usually shuts down in less than 2 seconds. XP took a long time to
shut down.
> I'd professionally recommend that as a home user with DOS interest, you
should put win98 on your new computer. You (and me, and everyone?) may
think "well, this OS I'm using is 5 years old -- I have to catch up to the
times eventually". All indications are that the times are going away from
Microsoft (operating systems).
(snip)
Actually, Win98 SE is still shy of three years old. I downloaded DR-DOS 7.03
in late 1999, think you can still download this from http://www.drdos.org/ or
http://www.drdos.net/
How much RAM do you have? From what I read, WinXP really needs 256 MB to
perform at reasonable speed, and you need much more than 1/2 GB disk space (for
XP itself) for a proper install.
There is FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org), though I don't really know if it's
up to strength.
Either of these DOSes, and likely others too, can be run in Linux with dosemu
from what I read, and DJGPP and DJGPP-compiled programs run there too, though I
have so far never set up Linux dosemu.
I don't like what little I've seen close up of MS-Windows, even 98, find the
command prompt more user-friendly than the Windows GUI. I had OS/2 prior to the
hard drive crash last April 6, where it was easy to get to full-screen or
windowed OS/2 or DOS command prompts, which I used, though I also used the GUI.
I think OS/2 Warp might have had the best DOS emulator, though I can't recall
running DJGPP there.
I get the feeling that MS-Windows and its applications pull the wool over the
user's eyes. I'd rather see what is really happening. DOS is losing ground
with newer computer hardware and Internet protocols. I see more future in
GNU/Linux or possibly other Unix-like OS.
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