Microsoft has decreed that Win98 is "no longer supported" hence the software vendors and web designers feel safe in assuming that it is "no longer used" or at least, that anyone who still uses it is utterly irrelevant to them.
For reliability and security reasons, if we have to run Windows on these older machines I use XP but strip out the unneeded "features" as much as possible. It works at least as well as Win98 did but needs the memory pushed to max. The P3's that still run Windows all have the maximum 512MB of RAM. The ones that run Linux have been performing equally well with 128 or 256.
It's amazing how much the load goes down in Windows if you get rid of junk like screen savers, wallpaper, icon themes, and background "notifier" tasks that run out of the Systray. Turn off the warning sounds too, especially since these machines have no speakers anyway though they do have sound cards.
Web designers irritate me the most. Today they assume that everyone has at least DSL or cable bandwidth. (Wrong, in the US 35% of users have no access to anything but dialup speeds.) They also assume that everyone is running a maxed out hyperthreaded machine like the one they use to develop on (and probably play massive games like WOW.) Worse yet, they assume that everyone is running Windows and Internet Explorer, rather than sticking to standards that are supported by multiple browsers and other operating systems. And, out of sheer laziness, they rely on gimmicky crap like Flash when they could do what is needed in simple HTML or with server-side scripting. They have no sense of the bandwidth and CPU power consumed by scripting stuff in Flash, because it has no impact on their own supercharged world.
Amusing stuff leaked out of Microsoft this morning by inside friends:
The computers being used to show Powerpoint presentations and videos for the Win7 release party are all running XP. (Probably because 7 isn't stable enough yet and might embarrass someone, and Vista requires more expensive hardware than what they have readily available.)
At least one MS exec admitted that Ubuntu Linux is probably "better" than Windows 7. (After all, it's free, does everything Windows 7 does, needs less powerful hardware to run, and is about as user friendly as Windows ever was.)
MS staffers received t-shirts as party favors. The t-shirts are dark blue with white lettering on them, which makes them look like the infamous Windows blue screen crash announcement. (Great planning, Microsoft.)
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2009-10-22 02:57 pm (UTC)For reliability and security reasons, if we have to run Windows on these older machines I use XP but strip out the unneeded "features" as much as possible. It works at least as well as Win98 did but needs the memory pushed to max. The P3's that still run Windows all have the maximum 512MB of RAM. The ones that run Linux have been performing equally well with 128 or 256.
It's amazing how much the load goes down in Windows if you get rid of junk like screen savers, wallpaper, icon themes, and background "notifier" tasks that run out of the Systray. Turn off the warning sounds too, especially since these machines have no speakers anyway though they do have sound cards.
Web designers irritate me the most. Today they assume that everyone has at least DSL or cable bandwidth. (Wrong, in the US 35% of users have no access to anything but dialup speeds.) They also assume that everyone is running a maxed out hyperthreaded machine like the one they use to develop on (and probably play massive games like WOW.) Worse yet, they assume that everyone is running Windows and Internet Explorer, rather than sticking to standards that are supported by multiple browsers and other operating systems. And, out of sheer laziness, they rely on gimmicky crap like Flash when they could do what is needed in simple HTML or with server-side scripting. They have no sense of the bandwidth and CPU power consumed by scripting stuff in Flash, because it has no impact on their own supercharged world.
Amusing stuff leaked out of Microsoft this morning by inside friends:
The computers being used to show Powerpoint presentations and videos for the Win7 release party are all running XP. (Probably because 7 isn't stable enough yet and might embarrass someone, and Vista requires more expensive hardware than what they have readily available.)
At least one MS exec admitted that Ubuntu Linux is probably "better" than Windows 7. (After all, it's free, does everything Windows 7 does, needs less powerful hardware to run, and is about as user friendly as Windows ever was.)
MS staffers received t-shirts as party favors. The t-shirts are dark blue with white lettering on them, which makes them look like the infamous Windows blue screen crash announcement. (Great planning, Microsoft.)