Re: XY, Vista, choices

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Michael Norman wrote:
> *To be sure, your license to use XP does allow you to remove the OS from
> an old machine and install it on a new one.
Not necessarily. If you bought a shrink-wrapped copy of XP, yes.
But if you bought (for much less) an OEM copy, or if it came
installed on your system, NO. Such licenses cannot legally (at
least as Microsludge makes the law) be transfered from one
machine to another. And with Product Activation, they can enforce
it. (This was new with XP; all previous versions of DOS and
Windows were transferrable, whether shrink-wrapped or OEM, though
occasionally a manufacturer would so tweak an OEM copy that it
wouldn't run on any hardware but theirs.)
> it may be harder
> to find drivers for video, audio, and other computer components that
> support the older OS.*
Again, depends. When pricing a system last summer for the office,
I was almost tempted to recommend a name-brand one, until I
looked on the manufacturer's Web site and found NO XP drivers for
the box. On the other hand, I checked before I bought my laptop
(in Oct. 07), and there are XP drivers, though if I install XP I
void the warranty.)
As for Xy, on this laptop, Xy runs much _better_ under Vista than
under XP or W2K on the three office desktops or under XP on my
own dual-boot (XP & 98SE) desktop. No jerky cursor at all. An
infinitisimal difference of response times between the built-in
LCD and the second CRT monitor, with the former being just a
nanojiffy slower.
I did have to do some tweaking (se previous posts esp. on icons),
but as now set up (to run under cmd.exe), I have--knock wood--had
fewer problems than even under 98SE (where long sweep searches
would sometimes cause the system to go out to lunch).
XyWin, on the other hand, will not run at all under Vista. But
dBase5 for DOS does perfectly well, once I cleaned up the color
scheme for windowed display.
Again, note that I have always maintained and still do that
hardware and BIOS are factors in both jerky cursor and XyWin's
ability to run.
Note, however, that I have always run Xy in windowed mode. Those
who want to run full screen will probably have to settle for
pseudo full screen (see Robert's and my posts in June 2007 about
this, when I got a demo at a computer store, but then Robert
showed that I hadn't seen what I thought I had).
A further wrinkle is that so far I haven't been able to print
using net use under Vista. It's irrelevant to me, because I
always print using TYP. And part of the problem is, I think, that
I don't have broadband. Vista cannot believe that you could have
a network and not use it to connect to the Internet. So a network
with only hubs and switches isn't recognized. But one with a
router is immediately recognized, and assumed to be connected to
a cable or DSL modem--to the extent that Vista disabled my dialup
modem! And you need some rudimentary degree of networking enabled
to use net use. I'm still working on this. (Does anybody know of
a knowledgeable tech site where the posts are reasonably
literate? I can live with typos--heaven knows I perpetrate enough
myself, esp. on this crummy laptop keyboard--but misspellings,
malapropisms, sentences that don't track and are wildly
mispunctuated or not punctuated at all, and all lowercase,
distract me too much for me to give much credence to the matter
being stated.)
Apropos of that, IPCONFIG apparently no longer returns your IP
address. You can get it through the GUI, but just typing IPconfig
does not produce it.
There are some good things in Vista. In some instances, you can
tell it to let you see what you're typing when you create a
password. That's a great blessing. When you drag and drop a file,
if a file exists in the destination with the same name, it asks
you if you want to not copy, overwrite, or keep both files,
renaming one. You could always do that with copy or xcopy, but
that might involve typing long fully qualified path names. Why it
took Gates & Co. 13 years (counting from Win 95) to get a GUI
equivalent, echo alone replies, but better late than never.
Vista out of the box is bloated beyond belief with eye candy, but
one can turn that off (I run Home Premium on 1 G of RAM, with no
discrete VGA card here, and once it's up, it is not noticeably
slow. But, of course, I don't do demanding things like video
editing). And there is UAC--User Access (or is it Account?)
Control, a piece of insufferable nannyware that, even if you're
running as administrator, pops up a "Did _you_ do that? Do you
_really_ want to do it?" message any time you try to change a
setting, install software, or do anything beyond the most basic.
Goshawful. Turning that off is the first thing I did. But if
you're using your system in a public access WiFi hotspot, you
might think of turning it on. And not running as admin. I have a
plain user account for that circumstance.
I have heard (no experience) that the Business versions have a
way of backing up your system. Home doesn't, but my laptop is an
Acer, and they supplied a great util that lets you make an image
file of your c: drive, then burn it to CDs or DVDs. Like Ghost or
Acronis True Image, except that the one time I had to use it, it
worked flawlessly.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx