Re: I want to go geek .. and VPC?

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

mhchoate wrote:
Ben Armstrong's blog, Virtual PC Guy's Weblog, found via Google on

One of the less noticed changes to Windows Vista is that it no longer
supports displaying in 'full screen text mode'. This means that if you
open a command prompt - you cannot put it into full screen mode.
Yikes. Marge, a lot of blogs are nothing but hot air. This appears to
be one. Even in XP, maybe even W2k, if you opened a command prompt, it
came up windowed, and there was no place on the pseudo-properties tab
to specify "full screen". BUT if you right-click on the ribbon at the
top (what the hades is that thing called?) to get at the REAL
property-setting functionality, you can tell it "full screen." (I
confess I just discovered this myself, rummaging around trying to help
Avrom. But this guy apparently hasn't discovered it at all.)
Robert commented:
I suppose there is some legitimate argument for sticking with
Win9x (not that I can remember what it is, except for the
obvious one:
For some of us, it's just unwillingness to continue supporting an
arrogant [epithet deleted] like Gates, who is so sure he knows what we
want better than we do. I use XP and W2K at the office. I just don't
want to pay my own $$ for them. (I keep hoping REACTOS will fly.)
I assumed that would be true. But I've used my XyWrite on, hmm,let's
see, four computers now. All have been slightly different. But not until
this last experience with XP on this Gateway laptop did I have a
PROBLEM. And believe me, if I lost fullscreen on this laptop XP again,
and couldn't get it back, I'd probably retire! Unless I could quickly
get up and running on something else. (Oh, my use of XyWrite is not
typical. See below.)
Isn't it sometimes the case that laptop screens are different in ways
that boggle the imagination? There have been discussions of this on
the list, with some apparently well-informed posts attributing
problems to hard-wired conditions in laptop BIOSes and LCDs.
I just tried out all the demos. All said "full screen mode not
supported on this system" ...
This is what I mean about the arrogance of Gates--and of the major
dealers too. They will lie in their teeth. You just cannot trust
anything they tell you.
Marge's reply, still laughing. SEE MY SUBJECT LINE! You are preaching
to the choir. But I haven't been ASLEEP! I've been busy on other things!
My to-do lists start at the top with "have to" and then "very important"
.... learning guts of PCs and OSs has never been anywhere but at the
bottom of the list until now.
Unfortunately--or maybe not--we simply have to put it nearer the top.
I've said before, the PC is a kind of tool man hasn't dealt with since
Og or whoever discovered fire. It's a multipurpose tool, and using it
properly absolutely requires that one know what one is doing. It's
not, pace Flash, like sharpening a chisel before carving a statue.
It's more like--what? Learning geometry and celestial navigation and
geomorphology before drawing a map.
weaning myself from XyWrite by looking into doing what I do in Word,
plus Visual Basic. Didn't take me long to trash that idea. But
> parts of that system, compared to what I
have developed for myself in XyWrite, is like reverting to sawing 2x4s
with a handsaw when you're used to an electric table saw.
Yes, one comes back and back to that. Xy can run rings around any
Windows app and can be used for all sorts of things one might never
expect.

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
PriscaMG@xxxxxxxx