X-Authentication-Warning: delorie.com: mailnull set sender to djgpp-bounces using -f From: "Thomas Mueller" Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Re: WinXP and DJGPP.... Date: 17 Feb 2002 10:50:09 GMT Lines: 61 Message-ID: References: <3C5AE532 DOT 1AC99444 AT qwest DOT net> NNTP-Posting-Host: dial3-130.bluegrass.net (208.147.34.130) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: fu-berlin.de 1013943009 1715705 208.147.34.130 (16 [49635]) X-Mailer: NOS-BOX 2.05 To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com from "Rob McCrea" : > sorry this ended up long. > XP sucks, imho. I gave it a serious try for about 1 month. 3 games -- 1 dos and 2 win9x -- wouldn't run properly on it (all close, but no cigar). That's 100% of the commercial games I tried -- and it's a bitch to thoroughly search for and try out potential fixes. .Since I only have 35 gigs of disks space, I decided I couldn't waste half a gig on XP anymore. (And just because I'm here, I'll give you my initally evaultion of XP: Good: on the fly user switching Bad: That worthless for power users; I don't have enough "power" for myself let alone another instance. Good: was very stable for me (in other words, apps crashed, not windows). Bad: Couldn't find anyone that knew how to set an app's priority BEFORE launching, for realtime games to run at high level which was needed (err, I guess I could have tried lowering most other services in my attempt to get programs to run as fast on XP). Suprising: I have some funky hardware, and had zero compability problems contrary to popular rumor. Bad: DOS is (once more) all but dead. Complaint: they advertise that "compatibility mode", and my pre-XP programs seemed to run worse under compatibilty mode. Complaint: Some pertty nifty extra feautres, but there's absolutely many could not be released for win9x. Complaint: MS actively reports they designed XP to startup in less than 30 seconds -- the day of my installs, it took nearly 2 minutes (and got worse as I added programs, of course). This Win98 usually shuts down in less than 2 seconds. XP took a long time to shut down. > I'd professionally recommend that as a home user with DOS interest, you should put win98 on your new computer. You (and me, and everyone?) may think "well, this OS I'm using is 5 years old -- I have to catch up to the times eventually". All indications are that the times are going away from Microsoft (operating systems). (snip) Actually, Win98 SE is still shy of three years old. I downloaded DR-DOS 7.03 in late 1999, think you can still download this from http://www.drdos.org/ or http://www.drdos.net/ How much RAM do you have? From what I read, WinXP really needs 256 MB to perform at reasonable speed, and you need much more than 1/2 GB disk space (for XP itself) for a proper install. There is FreeDOS (http://www.freedos.org), though I don't really know if it's up to strength. Either of these DOSes, and likely others too, can be run in Linux with dosemu from what I read, and DJGPP and DJGPP-compiled programs run there too, though I have so far never set up Linux dosemu. I don't like what little I've seen close up of MS-Windows, even 98, find the command prompt more user-friendly than the Windows GUI. I had OS/2 prior to the hard drive crash last April 6, where it was easy to get to full-screen or windowed OS/2 or DOS command prompts, which I used, though I also used the GUI. I think OS/2 Warp might have had the best DOS emulator, though I can't recall running DJGPP there. I get the feeling that MS-Windows and its applications pull the wool over the user's eyes. I'd rather see what is really happening. DOS is losing ground with newer computer hardware and Internet protocols. I see more future in GNU/Linux or possibly other Unix-like OS.