Some comments on Marty Tippin's post - a lot of things were right on.
|I'm wondering what compelling reason there is to move to Windows XP?
|Especially for a ham shack computer??
|
|(Heck, even some of the best-known columnists in various PC magazines have
|come out recommending against migration to XP, so there must be something
|they know that we don't...)
I have seen a lot of these reviews, many of them are aimed at business
users. Most of the ones that I have read have concurred with Marty. "If it
ain't broke don't fix it". If your systems is *stable* and feels snappy,
then stay with it whether it's Win95/98/ME or Win2K.
On the other hand a lot of people that I know personally have *not* had
stability with the Win9x family of OSes. *If* their hardware is modern
enough to support XP and *if* they have at least 128Mb (min) or 256Mb
(better), then they will probably find XP a major improvement in stability.
If I had to pick today between Win2K and XP I would go with XP. Probably
Home Edition. A lot more work has gone into making XP make it backward
compatible with the Win9x lineage than went into Win2K. Obviously certain
things, like direct hardware access, went by the boards because that's what
it takes to provide the most protection to the OS from wayward drivers and
applications.
I've been running XP in some form (Pro and server) for quite a few months
now since I was part of the beta program. Even as early as beta 2 I saw
very good stability on my laptop with XP Pro and we ran it at FD this year
with WriteLog.
Regarding Marty's comments about memory... www.crucial.com has PC100/PC133
SDRAM memory sticks for $28 for 256Mb. Heck at that price you get 512Mb for
only $60! You should do that even if you *are* staying with a Win9x
variant - you *will* notice the difference! ;-)
I have two Win2K boxes, one running with Server one with Pro. The server, a
550Mhz box, was sent to me with 128Mb by my company. I spent the money to
add 512Mb to it. Almost all the disk "popcorn" that I used to hear starting
up applications or swapping windows (even closing them) is gone. My Win2K
Pro box has 756Mb and my Linux box as 512Mb. So for a grand total of $180
dollars all my boxes are over 256Mb (sweet) and each has an active "spare"
memory stick in it. If a memory card goes faulty I will only go down to
256Mb.
People with older boxes that use FPM or EDO will have to pay steeper prices
since SDRAM is where the bulk of manufacturing is today and there's a glut
of product on the market. For example last XMAS I paid over $199 for a 64MB
EDO SIMM for my daughter's 233Mhz HP. Outrageous - you bet (wish I'd know
about crucial.com back then). But she and her husband were blown away at
the difference in apparent speed between 32Mb and 96Mb. Crucial.com also
stocks the older RAM as well.
Hope this helps.
73s,
-ricK7log
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