The XYL just upgraded the family PC to a compaq running Windows XP.
While this has some trappings of Windows 9X when you start looking inside
its really Windows NT.
The wife is, among other things, a certified microsoft NT administrator.
She set the PC up as a windows NT with separate log ons for all of the
family and two of us have passwords. But only she has permissions to load
new software. I was working with the PC and started to install Norton
Anti Virus 2002. I did as the software told me and stopped to shut down
any other software running and not only did the norton desktop short cut
disappear but so did the software. The wife starting searching for it
and found it in the systems area which only the systems admin can get to.
While looking thru the systems folders she ran across the main XP folder
which calls the Windows NT folder.
Compaq and other PC vendors are now only loading XP. The tech at compaq
says the merger of Windows 9X into NT is 90% complete. The main
advantage of XP is that it runs
9X software without requiring conversion to NT. There is no DOS there so
you have to load Dos 6 (Dos 7 was the limited version under 9X). Guess
the DOS software gang are in for tough sledding!
Being NT this should make for much easier networks as NT has (so does W
9X) has networking built in. The difference is that NT fully supports the
break apart of server and client even if they are on the same box. We
had a contract with a major airport where software was written for NT but
tested on W9X. It took almost another conversion to move fully to NT.
After the first phase we put the development PC on NT and made life
simpler! The easiest way is to make one PC be the server and attach a
number of clients at each station (for multi ops). The question is how
much of writelog should remain on the server and be shared by each
client. The wife thinks the logging software for sure but perhaps each
client should have all the interconnect for keying, rig control, and DVK.
Plug in modules may be on the server or the client although the RTTY and
PSK31 types lend themselves to the client. You still can run keying on
the LPT port if the clients are all W 9X. The current wireless networks
run on 2.4GHZ. They claim they can run in very hostile RF environments
(multi op stations??). Hopefully this is true.
The next shocker is that Micro soft is planning to support only two
operating systems in the future. Some version of NT and the clients will
all become CE thin client.
73 Dave K4JRB
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