Re: Off topic new pc

[J R FOX jr_fox@xxxxxxxxxx]

--- Avrom Fischer  wrote:

> Any suggestions on whther I should stay with Xp >
or go back to windows 2000 or dual boot using xp >
and another operating system.

Avrom,

I'm not much of a Windows person, but my observations
suggest that a lot of the difference between XP and
W2K is cosmetic. Simplified (?) ease of use features
and the like. For example, XP lets you set Restore
Points for the Registry -- to "turn the clock back" in
case it gets messed up by various mishaps -- whereas
in 2K you'd need an outboard utility program like
CONFIGSAFE to accomplish this.

Supposedly, XP has some enhanced features for heavy
multimedia users. If you like XP, then you might as
well stick with it, as MS support for W2K may not
continue as long. The new Win OS debut is not far
off. (They earlier announced withdrawal of support
for W98, but postponed this at least once. W2K has a
lot of entrenched business users, though, so who knows
?) The willingness of a Windows OS to tolerate the
existence of an alternate OS on the same hard drive --
absent some special interventions -- has never been
that good, and steadily continued to deteriorate.
>From what I've heard, the Rubicon seems to be SP2 of
XP. I suggest you don't go there, if you're seriously
interested in having more than one OS. This is
particularly true in the case of a laptop, most of
which come these days with a hidden "Recovery"
partition that is supposed to reflect what was on the
C:, as delivered. You have to monkey around with this
whole setup (knowing what you are doing), in order to
effectuate installing another OS, and post SP2 I'm
told this can get you into a world of hurt.

I plan to stick with W2K for my Win environment, which
I only need to run certain programs. I've never
managed to finesse the display and other issues for
running Xy4 under Win. When I run it under OS/2, it
needs no special tweaking, doing everything much the
way it was under DOS.

What would be your other OS ? Real DOS ? Linux ?


Jordan