OpSys Options

[Patricia M Godfrey pmgodfrey@xxxxxxxx]

We've heard a lot about possible incompatibilities between XyW and Win XP
(I personally suspect a large hardware-firmware-BIOS-chipset-CPU
component, but cannot get enough evidence one way or the other). Well, it
apparently is possible to buy reasonably new hardware that will run Win
98. We just got a new machine at the office, and while setting it up, I
noticed that the driver CD had 98 (and ME, but you _don't_ want to go
that route) drivers for everything, even the SATA controller. This is not
bleeding edge, but neither is it end of life: it has AGP8X, USB 2 (and
Firewire), Gbit LAN, SATA (and IDE too, for a total of 8 possible drives,
with RAID 0 & 1 possibilities), and though we got only a Sempron CPU, the
mobo can take an Athlon 64 one. Of course, this is not a name-brand
system; all the components are name-brand, industry-standard (which you
don't always get with a Dell system at least; I cannot speak about other
name brands), but it was put together by "Three Geeks and a Goat." I
don't know whether they would have installed 98 if we'd given them the CD
and install key and asked them to (because we asked them not to install
XP, but leave that to us), but a Win9x installation is _not_ rocket
science.

Once this is up and running, I should be able to test some of the XP
problems people have. It will be a couple of weeks more, though, since
the tech guy is away, and they don't trust me to get the network right
(though HE bound TCP/IP to our internal LAN, which someone here told me
is a no-no).

Patricia M. Godfrey
PMGodfrey@xxxxxxxx