In Praise of Older Operating Systems
 

I was about to trash a Sony Vaio desktop (Pentium III, 733Mhz, 512MB, 40GB) for being balky, slow and starting a series of system crashes. Over the years it was upgraded here and there and was running Win2K. Since I had the original system restore disks (WindowsME), I thought I'd see what it was like to go back to when it was new. That meant

What a surprise, it boots up faster than any current PC and seems like a brand new PC. Probably helped to have its drive wiped and all the digital "crud" shook loose. All the old Sony apps, like Imagestation are there, along with all the intial sign up offers from MSN, AOL, Earthlink, Prodigy.

Going to see if XP Home, on an update install slows it down much. :cool:

Windows ME is a good DOS based OS.It is basically single tasking so the application you are running in the foreground will be fast.

If you want to be amazed at how fast your laptop really is, load up RedHat It will run like a beast on that system...

FWIW I would never dream of running W2K or XP on a system with 512MB RAM, You need at least 2GB to keep the thing from swapping to disk all the time and REALLY slowing down...

Windows 2K does fine with 512 mb of RAM, i gamed on such a system for years. Now with XP and todays software I need 2gb though.

It seems like you can never have enough ram these days.



I am running 8GB in my xp x64 box. Still doesnt seem like enough. :mad:



It does run vista like a beast though. 7 too.

Damn it Iwrock, now I need to go buy more RAM!!!

I still have my first toughbook, running windows 98se
It's kind of like an old Mercedes, has some quirks, but works great, especially if your not in a big hurry.
It's the kid's 'other' laptop. We have 4 of the damn things, they're like bunnies or cassette tapes, leave 'em in a room together, next thing you know....
Still, I can't bring myself to part with it. Maybe I'll start carrying it around in the SD