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Re: Do we actually need XP support?

For our purposes, and from my point of view, and based on my very
superficial understanding, W7 has absurd amounts of overhead which we
don't need to process or waste memory on; and it also requires
draconian activation. W2K is much smaller and much sleeker. But for
details, you'd have to ask Kari.

What I can tell you from experience is that avoiding overhead-heavy
systems like XP and Win 7 really does make sense in the
virtualization context. When I ran Xy4 under XP and VirtualBox, it
was perceptibly slower than Xy4 under Win2K and VMware. I believe
that is due in large measure to the extra overhead in XP; and there
is yet more in Win 7.


At 24/03/2014 23:59, you wrote:
Why is W2K superior to Win7 32-bit (which runs Xy with NTVDM just as XP does).

Regards,
Harry
I'm very much looking forward to your step-by-step instructions for VMWare.
I hope to get that done in the next few days, but there isn't any
rocket science. It's all very easy and quick.

If I decide to go that route, using Win 7 or Win 8.1 as my main
OS, what's the advantage of using W2K as the virtual OS rather
than XP, which has the benefit of long familiarity?

Lynn, I too would have been more comfortable selecting XP, but I
blindly took Kari's advice on this, and haven't regretted it. Some
of his reasons are that it is lighter, faster, less of a memory
hog. An enormous thing I love about W2K is that it doesn't require
activation, so can never get egregiously unactivated. To be free of
that detestable XP and post-XP activation mechanism is a great
blessing for me. I hate activation.

One of the major problems with running older operating systems
natively is lack of modern video driver support. VMs counter this
by providing their own up-to-the-minute video drivers. So, for
example, with VMware, W2K operates perfectly with my 3200x1800
screen, even though that resolution was scarcely available on even
the most high end systems when W2K came out. That is one of the
reasons I prefer VMware to VirtualBox. With VirtualBox, setting up
screen resolution, especially for high-resolution screens, is much more fiddly.

I was looking for a solution that would get me to stable XyWrite
with the minimum of fuss. That's what I found with VMware and W2K.
Please note that the way I set it up, W2K does not communicate with
the internet. That's what I wanted: it saves me having to worry
about attacks, viruses, etc.

The host operating system (Win 7 or 8.1) provides all the internet
access I need, and as I pointed out to Henry, all you have to do to
cut and paste is press Ctrl-C in your Win7/8 program, then alt-tab
to XyWrite, and right-click to paste. It's as simple as that, with
the proviso that, as we all painfully know, pasting an upper ascii
character (like a true apostrophe or an em-dash) from Windows to
the DOS program drives XyWrite mad with grief. Manuel on this list
has documented his system for dealing with that (getting XyWrite
onto a Windows codepage) but I have yet to implement this, though
it's on my to-do list.

I am sure Kari has a lot of other reasons for boosting W2K in this
context - - I felt there was no point in not taking advantage of
his considerable experience, and I really didn't have to know the
details. Lack of activation and
semi-official-retired-and-therefore-free status is enough for me.
Add to that, convenient ISOs are available (I will be providing
links) so no worries about messy CD media.

Above all, it's known that it works, period, with XyWrite, and that
counts for a lot.