Win98 Users SOL

[DoomRater]

boris said:

I don't give a fuck about "A+" people. A lot of those people are full of shit. Any why should the home edition be less stable than the pro version? That just doesn't make sense.

Don't ask me, ask Microsoft. I jsut know Home's not worth the money. o_O

[Bloodshedder]

I don't really care how you're certified, but this air of superiority you seem to be carrying just won't cut it.

[DoomRater]

Bloodshedder said:

I don't really care how you're certified, but this air of superiority you seem to be carrying just won't cut it.

Oh well, I've only seen the results with one computer and heard about it all overthe place with techs... maybe they're wrong, I've avoided the OS as much as I can.

So actually, you guys are right, I DON"T know.

(edit) In any case, I'm often more concerned how fast the OS boots. And in that case, I'd choose 98SE over the others since I can tell that OS not to backup my registry every time it loads... and actually use the registry backup instead of having to assume it's corrupted like the one in the system... and it's not a RAM hog... so what if a DOS lockup freezes the whole computer, it's not like I have tons of DOS progarms that crash...

Meh. I'm done ranting about 98 and bashing Home. I'm running 2000 at my house anyway! (so ends edit)

[Murdoch]

The Flange Peddler said:

A lot of people aren't willing to pay £100s for new software/hardware everytime a new game comes out. How do games producers expect the casual gamer to be interested in their products if they have to spend all this money on new hardware and software everytime a new generation of games comes out? I really don't see what the PC games market has to offer to casual gamers, who have other things to spend their disposable income on too.

That's a self defeating argument. People expect progress. Games cannot become more advanced unless they need beefier hardware.

DoomRater - I'm really at a loss to understand you. I may not be A+ certified, but I've working with computers (and I mean working - tweaking, fixing, upgrading hardware, virus cleaning) for 12 years - half my life - and have a few qualifications. You speak of Home and Pro as if they are two different codebases. They are not. They are the same OS, with the latter having additional features to support the... well, "pros". There is nothing in the pro feature set which would offer superior stability or better RAM utilisation.

I've dealt with a number of computers running XP (I do fix it work in my spare time) with specifications and manufacters running the gamut, and of the 8-10 only one has been running pro. All performed equally well in the context of their specs.

Tech guys have a way of blowing things out of proportion. Some guy deals with Home on a computer with a RAM fault which causes it to lock up and suddenly Home is to blame. There's a lot more to the equation than the OS, often shitty software is the culprit. The software that came with my TV tuner is a shining example. If I do something using too much disk activity it locks up the machine (this happened under 98 SE too) and if I try and full screen it before the picture has drawn it crashes.

[boris]

JoelMurdoch said:

stuff

You're absolutely right. BTW, it's the same with Linux. On my old Duron both Red Hat and SuSE liked to randomly kernel panic. I never figured out why, yet I don't say they suck, since I know they can run better (SuSE never crashed on my K6).

The XP home edition is quite a bit cheaper than the pro verison. Win2k pro is even more expensive than XP pro IIRC. And Win9x isn't an option.

[Vroomfondel]

boris said:

Can you give any facts? I take it you need remote desktop, multi-processor support, automated system recovery, dynamic disk support, IIS, file level access control, active directory, group policies, roaming profiles, multi-language support etc. at home?

The only disadvantage I can see is that it's not 1337 to use the home edition.

How 'bout dual CPU support?
Multi-language is fun too...

[The Flange Peddler]

JoelMurdoch said:

That's a self defeating argument. People expect progress. Games cannot become more advanced unless they need beefier hardware.

Obviously you need hardware progress by some degree for games to get more advanced. But with the speed at which PC hardware progresses, you aren't going to attract many casual gamers who aren't willing to shell out hundreds for up-to-date software and hardware every time a new generation of games comes out. That is one thing good with consoles. The games programmers have to juice all they can out of the hardware. When the SNES first came out you would never have thought you could get doom to run on it, but they did it in the end (to some degree at least). I think I would just like to see PC hardware progress to slow down a bit, so that programmers are forced to really get everything out of the hardware we currently have.

[LexiMax]

The sheer amount of stupidity in this thread is going to kill me.

On the exact same system, Windows 98 choked on Unreal Tournament 2k4, while XP ran it flawlessly. I remember someone on a reputable forum saying something aobut how 2000 and XP are actually better for game developers, but as I'm on 56K right now, I don't feel like digging it up.

And Windows 98 is a steaming pile of garbage anyway. Unstable, unreliable, I've been using Windows NT based operating systems for about a year. Trust me, DOS compatability is a small price to pay for a system that doesn't crash every 48 hours and yet still plays fairly recent games. Granted, I miss my bash prompt from Fedora Core 2, but XP is fine.

And I am running XP Home at work and XP Pro at home. The bottom line is that XP Pro is very similar to 2000 (or can be configured to be that way) and XP Home is the exact same OS. Let me say that again, THE UNDERLYING OPERATING SYSTEM IS ALMOST EXACTLY THE SAME but without the options to make it work like 2000 (For example, you're forced into using that super happy fun time login screen, and can't get a Ctrl+Alt+Del menu that does anything but brings up the task manager.) Oh, and XP Home doesn't support SMP either. Like any of us use it. Oh, and I don't think it supports some sort of networking features that I have never used.

So yeah, all of you are being really friggin stupid. Any of you who are concerned about any Micro$oft LOL conspiracy are going to have to try a little harder. Until then, put away your tin foil hats and shut up.

EDIT: Oh yeah, I almost forgot to include my opinionated view about any 'certifications' you people might have. I dont care what you're certified in. I've known 'certified' people who couldn't tell a DOS prompt from the thing between their legs. A certification is a nice thing to have if you already know what you are doing since it might look good on a resume, but if you think that just because you are certified that you're practically walking on water and are the be all and end all of competer knowledge, you need to get out of the industry. Now.

EDIT 2: To address the point above me, don't you think that Carmack already did that with Doom 3? Everyone speculated that you would have to upgrade to the latest and greatest, but it seems that it can run great on two year old (or more!) hardware. Carmack's enginges have always been incredably scaleable, from the bleeding edge down the the bare minumum, and it seems that Doom 3 is no exception.

[captmellow]

boris said:

You're absolutely right. BTW, it's the same with Linux. On my old Duron both Red Hat and SuSE liked to randomly kernel panic. I never figured out why, yet I don't say they suck, since I know they can run better (SuSE never crashed on my K6).

Memory problem? Sounds like something flaky w/ the hardware, anyway.

/me likes slack, btw

[myk]

AlexMax, I'm prescribing 1 chill pill every 8 hours. This will make you feel better, and will avoid the more drastic secondary effects of the stupidity amplification posting syndrome; like permanent Submit Reply button malfunctions, sudden bizarre titles your mother wouldn't be proud of, bright colored threads in your wake, and whatnot.

[Little Faith]

Alexmax, someone of us actually CARE about those old DOS games.

Besides, Win98SE has not crashed at me for ages.


But I do agree it manages memory like a retard.

[myk]

Have you tried a memory manager on it? Some of these get rid of the issue where it only frees memory when its about to run out... which is naturally a pretty sucky event while playing a game. I use this version of RAM Idle.

[boris]

captmellow said:

Memory problem? Sounds like something flaky w/ the hardware, anyway.

/me likes slack, btw

Yes, it was probably some hardware's fault. And that was my point. You can't just say that an OS sucks just because it crashes on your computer.

I'm using Debian. And it never crashed. It only unintentionally rebooted twice, because of power outages ;) Between those power outages I had uptimes of ~150 and 122 days.

[LexiMax]

Little Faith said:

Alexmax, someone of us actually CARE about those old DOS games.

CLICK HERE!!!

Some guy I have never heard of comes out of the closet and says:

AlexMax, I'm prescribing 1 chill pill every 8 hours. This will make you feel better, and will avoid the more drastic secondary effects of the stupidity amplification posting syndrome; like permanent Submit Reply button malfunctions, sudden bizarre titles your mother wouldn't be proud of, bright colored threads in your wake, and whatnot.

Where in that entire post did you actually have a rebuttle to anything I said. Or would you rather point fingers and baselessly call people stupid. I admit, pointing fingers and calling people stupid is fun. Just not without a single sembience of a rebuttle.

EDIT:

Dr. Phil said:

dude, refill that prescription.
He didn't say you were stupid; he was saying that you were over-reacting.
We're all on the same team here with the same goal; let's work together.

Separated at birth?

[Opulent]

AlexMax said:

The sheer amount of stupidity in this thread is going to kill me.

So yeah, all of you are being really friggin stupid. Any of you who are concerned about any Micro$oft LOL conspiracy are going to have to try a little harder. Until then, put away your tin foil hats and shut up.

dude, refill that prescription.
He didn't say you were stupid; he was saying that you were over-reacting.
We're all on the same team here with the same goal; let's work together.

[myk]

AlexMax said:
Where in that entire post did you actually have a rebuttle to anything I said.

Did I have a what?

Or would you rather point fingers and baselessly call people stupid. I admit, pointing fingers and calling people stupid is fun.

You call everyone that posted in this thread stupid, fail to quote whoever could remotely have said anything you might be answering to, mock and flame to and fro, and then dare say that?

Just not without a single sembience of a rebuttle.

And sembience? You can note that what you said on your post added nothing to what has been said earlier by other people, who wrote like civilized beings to boot... plus to answer to whatever moves you I'd have to visit some unnamed and unlinked "reputable" forum somewhere. Great substance there.

[Murdoch]

Alex, you're not an SA goon by any chance? ;)

[Bastet Furry]

Just to clarify a thing...
The only dos based doom engine binary i have is strife, and it runs without any problems on my Windows XP SP1.
If i have a game that cant cope with WinXP own sound emulation i have VDMS, and if all fails i still can revert to DosBOX.
According to their compatibility list Doom runs flawless inside DosBOX.
No, i dont have a doom2.exe in here ;)
I just kept the 1.9 wad files, for what should i hurt my eyes with 320x240 when i can run Doom in 1024x860?
And now i try if my K7-3000+ can cope with 1600x1200 in zDooM ^.^

[DoomRater]

Great, thanks to my stupidity and idiocy we've got people flaming each other in here. (slaps forehead, ever regretting getting cocky in here)

Yup, I do talk about Home and Pro like two differnt codebases. Because I've not only heard from experienced people telling me nothing but bad things about Home (all of these people have been certified within the past year, or have been working on a degree in computer science, so their knowledge is current), but I've seen Home not be able to handle games as well as Pro can. So, if I'm wrong I'm wrong, but personally, I like having extra RAM lying around to use and a memory manager takes care of the memory issues of 98 (I use RAMpage myself on my laptop), so I use either 98 or 2000 depending on the situation.

What was said about Certs is true, and on top of it the A+ is for life, which means if you took it 9 years ago you had 95 as your highest OS knowledgebase. o_O That just says if you don't stay current on the tech you can't stay in the business.

I think I'll end this by apologizing to boris for freakin out over all this... I knew I was pissed by the mere mentioning of Home and should never have spoke up, because all I did was get cocky about how I'm certified and all that shit. Yeesh, even I should know that doesn't mean squat! EXP is what counts.

[Bastet Furry]

Hmm, i see no direct diffs from xp pro versus xp home what games matters.
I have Pro on my main machine and home on my main laptop.
At the time of test both machines where rouglhy equal.
Laptop was a bit slower (2 ghz intel versus K7 2000+)
And the 3D-GFX Card (SiS somenumber) is somewhat outdated but sufficient for a notebook.
(For the curious its a gericom per4mance 2ghz edition)

All Games that i play worked without any crashes, even etepetete CnC Generals.
What i have found out, it all lies how you configure your machine and what stuff you install.
My List of must have softs:
Servant Salamander (Freeware NC-Clone)
D-Tools
*VideoLAN
*OO.org
WinAMP 2 or bigger
*Dev-Cpp with underlying MSYS
*Satellite (for TV)
*FireFox
*Thunderbird

Everything with a star* is OpenSource.
Just 3 Apps that are closed source.
And maybee not so well programmed with errors that arnt resolved very fast.
Everything that you realy realy realy dont need, dont put it in.

[Opulent]

just to confirm, it does not run on a non-NT kernel.
I bet you a million dollars, it is Activision's GUI interface that is the problem. bastards.

[Bastet Furry]

Opulent said:

just to confirm, it does not run on a non-NT kernel.
I bet you a million dollars, it is Activision's GUI interface that is the problem. bastards.

Then i have to get hands on this game... wait another 10 days till the german release and ill tell you how to run that game inside non NT ;)