WINDOWS 95!!

[Lüt]

Not exactly relevant to Doom, more relevant to computer operation, but anyways:

I finally took Windows98 off my computer (Celeron 500/256 RAM) and loaded Windows95. Sweet holy mother of God, I never knew I had so much performance hidden in this machine! My boot times (with all software loaded) cut from 1 minute and 19 seconds (Win98) to 16 seconds (Win95). Finally free of that bloated mess of programming shite they call Windows98, my computer is now raw horsepower. I liked having a cheap little 500MHz thing I spent $1000 on which boots and loads programs faster than my friend's new 1.0 and 1.1 GHz machines they spent over $3000 for.

On a side note, my workplace had some extra hard drives and WindowsME lying around, so I decided to test that out too: well, I REALLY thought (as did my entire tech department) that NOTHING could possibly be worse than Windows98 (except Netscape and AOL). Well, man did we get proven wrong. I figured after 2 years of people bitching about 98, at least one thing would have been fixed in this new release. Don't get me wrong; WindowsME is fine if you are never planning to install new software or update any system drivers (don't even think about swapping hardware around). Any program install that required a reboot would cause windows to freeze at the point of loading the wallpaper during the reboot: a power-off was required, thus kicking in scandisk on the 3rd reboot. Now if you try to cancel scandisk, ME freezes again. Let it run, and if you're lucky, it'll finish without freezing. It's a dangerous loop to fall into. DOS support is gone now too. No command prompt you can boot into. Wanna make a boot disk? "You can only perform this operation on Drive C:" I could go on, but I won't. WinME is the Danzig 5 of operating systems. It is one step below the lowest possible level. It's the "Latest and Greatest" from Microsoft; need I say more? My boss threw the WinME CDs in the garbage after they ruined numerous computers and programs here. I've noticed a lot of people having problems getting Doom stuff to work under WindowsME and Windows2000 also. If that's not a big enough hint: UPGRADE TO WINDOWS95!! At least get 90% of the performance your hardware can give.

Uh, that's all. Just a fair warning.

[NiGHTMARE]

Where you by any chance using Win '98 release 1? Release 2 runs much faster than, and is a LOT more stable than, Win '95, at least on my machine.

[Sephiroth]

dude u should try linux it is far better, i use both 98 and linux but i am still haveing trouble with getting into both of them, like 98 to linux and linux to 98

[Lüt]

I'd love to use Linux, except that only about 15% of the stuff I use is compatible with it (I haven't tried first-hand, but that's what the people I've checked with say). Unfortunately I really don't have a choice here. 95 is doing great for now.

[Lüt]

NiGHTMARE said:

Where you by any chance using Win '98 release 1? Release 2 runs much faster than, and is a LOT more stable than, Win '95, at least on my machine.

I had OSR1 the first 9 times I tried to get my computer running for more than a week. I got two, and noticed that it didn't take 10 seconds to load a menu with 3 selections, and didn't have to refresh the desktop 3 times to clear out your documents folder, but that's about it. Cut something like 6-7 seconds off the boot time, as if that was a big improvement.

[deadnail]

I'll agree that 95 was more customizable, but on my systems I get better performance out of 98SE.

What kind of hard drives do your friends have? I've seen some Gigahertz systems with ATA66 motherboards and 5400 RPM harddrives... Jesus Christ, why even bother? ;)

Another bad thing about ME I've heard: It won't recognize more than 128 megs of ram. Wow, what the fuck were you thinking Microsoft?

Personally I'm into 98SE and BeOS, they both do everything I need them to.

[Lüt]

<<What kind of hard drives do your friends have? I've seen some Gigahertz systems with ATA66 motherboards and 5400 RPM harddrives... Jesus Christ, why even bother? ;)>>

They are 7200RPM, I know that much. Not sure about the ATA business. Mine is an ATA66/7200RPM but it's also 34.2 GB (remember I got this about a year ago).

<<Another bad thing about ME I've heard: It won't recognize more than 128 megs of ram. Wow, what the fuck were you thinking Microsoft?>>

I am not so sure about that one - my setup has 256 and it recognised the full 256 under System Properties. Whether or not it used it all? I couldn't really tell you. I was to scared to install diagnostic software :)

[Guest DJ UAC]

Lüt said:

I had OSR1 the first 9 times I tried to get my computer running for more than a week. I got two, and noticed that it didn't take 10 seconds to load a menu with 3 selections, and didn't have to refresh the desktop 3 times to clear out your documents folder, but that's about it. Cut something like 6-7 seconds off the boot time, as if that was a big improvement.

i have a p100 with a 580 meg hd, 32 megs of ram, and it loads faster then my p2 333 64meg's of ram!!
i just wish that beos would run on more video cards.
another grat thing about beos is, u dont need to install drivers!
everything is already done and installation is a breeze.
And i dont think it ever had an error(accept one time when i tried to load a web page while not on the internet but i still pressed enter to see what the errors would say cus ther would be soo cool.)
I love u Beos!

[Guest DJ UAC]

Lüt said:

I had OSR1 the first 9 times I tried to get my computer running for more than a week. I got two, and noticed that it didn't take 10 seconds to load a menu with 3 selections, and didn't have to refresh the desktop 3 times to clear out your documents folder, but that's about it. Cut something like 6-7 seconds off the boot time, as if that was a big improvement.

i have a p100 with a 580 meg hd, 32 megs of ram, and it loads faster then my p2 333 64meg's of ram!!
i just wish that beos would run on more video cards.
another great thing about beos is, u dont need to install drivers!
everything is already done and installation is a breeze.
And i dont think it ever had an error(accept one time when i tried to load a web page while not on the internet but i still pressed enter to see what the errors would say cus they would be soo cool.)
I love u Beos!

[Guest DJ UAC]

DJ UAC said:

i have a p100 with a 580 meg hd, 32 megs of ram, and it loads faster then my p2 333 64meg's of ram!!
i just wish that beos would run on more video cards.
another grat thing about beos is, u dont need to install drivers!
everything is already done and installation is a breeze.
And i dont think it ever had an error(accept one time when i tried to load a web page while not on the internet but i still pressed enter to see what the errors would say cus ther would be soo cool.)
I love u Beos!

o shit, so thats why there was an error.

[masterhassan]

i used to have win98. when i installed windows 98 se i got a huge performance boost. i had a pentium 133 with 32 megs of ram and a matrox mga millenium. i was running half-life on 320-240. anything higher and it ran like crap. after installing win98 se it ran really smooth on 512-320. actually all quake engine games did. then i installed new bios for my video card and everything ran fast on 1024x768. now i have a celeron 466 with winme. i only have 32 megs of ram but im getting more this month. my video card isnt that good an ati rage pro turbo with 4 megs of ram...and its built in. so it uses system ram. so i have only 28 megs really. i suck. wait what was the question again¿

[Jon]

heh good on ya, relapse and I run win95osr2 alongside everyone's fave free unix clone and wish more people would see the light.

[Afterglow]

Right now on my p100, 48mb ram, 1.6gb; I have WIN95 4.00.950B installed and it has become _unbelievably_ unstable. I rarely go 30min without a bluescreen to halt any work I'm doing. What I'm doing soon is formating my hard drive and sticking win98se on instead. Why? At home I had a Celeron 433, 64mb ram, 8gb and it was _unbelievably_ stable... nothing ever crashed (except the odd Q3A freeze because of the low ram :). If you system ever becomes unstable, it's probably best to format the hard drive and just reinstall everything.

I imagine I'll also setup Linux partition with Red Hat distrib. 6.2 installed since that's what my uni uses for development in the programming classes.

A good idea is setup a Windows partition and another Linux one... that way if you're doing simple tasks such as browsing the web and sending email, you have the stability of Linux and if you have specific programs to use or games to play, fire up Windows.

[mewse]

I ran win95 osr2 for the longest time on my p233mmx, and it was great.. but it wasn't very stable..

Now I have a duron 750 so I run win98se, and it gives me great performance, and its got proper USB support (my win95 osr2 had usb support but i never saw if it actually worked or how buggy it was)

Anyways, I agree that WinME is a piece of shit. I was at a LAN party and one of the guys was running WinME, we couldnt get him doing anything, or doing windows networking. My friend even works in tech support and he was completely befuddled by the changes they made to the interface. Why do they fuck up things that already work? Makes no sense to me..

[RTC_Marine]

DJ UAC said:

o shit, so thats why there was an error.

I Ran win 95 on my 266mhz with 64mb ram & i got about 40% more speed outta it, win98 is a piece of shit, so is ME and 2000
i like win95 better :P

[Guest fraggle`]

if you can afford it and run it, try windows 2000. Its stabler than a very very big rock. The main disadvantage is that it doesnt run DOS things, but with so many windows doom ports around, that isnt much of a problem :)

Oh yeah and if you have any kind of obscure hardware, make sure you check that its compatible first.

[Afterglow]

I've heard Windows 2000 runs slow as molasses on anything less than a 300.

[Lüt]

fraggle` said:

if you can afford it and run it, try windows 2000. Its stabler than a very very big rock. The main disadvantage is that it doesnt run DOS things, but with so many windows doom ports around, that isnt much of a problem :)

Oh yeah and if you have any kind of obscure hardware, make sure you check that its compatible first.

I have been considering making a partition with Windows2000 (or maybe just a different hard drive) as long it's available to me for free through the university's MSDN license.

The hardware I *should* be up to date, the only thing I'm not certain about is these network cards I have - the machine I'm on now has a cable modem, so I have it set up with two network cards, one for the cable connection and one for the rest of my home network (the other 5 computers I have get on the internet from it). The network cards were given to me by the cable company, they're definately not top-quality cards, and they caused a lot of problems with WinME (as if that says anything). I have an old SBAWE64 but I like it's performance much better than the later PCI versions, especially when it comes to recording my music, the system drain is much less.

The other reason I'm hold off Win2K for now is because the primary Doom port that I use 95% of the time (Millennium) is MBF-based, so it only runs in DOS, as does my main level editor (WadEd).

I suppose I could just use one of my other computers, but this one is the only one where I can run 640x400 without any hiccups or drop in performance from 320x200 mode. (The rest are 233 MMX's and below.)

[Lüt]

mewse said:

I ran win95 osr2 for the longest time on my p233mmx, and it was great.. but it wasn't very stable..

Now I have a duron 750 so I run win98se, and it gives me great performance, and its got proper USB support (my win95 osr2 had usb support but i never saw if it actually worked or how buggy it was)

Anyways, I agree that WinME is a piece of shit. I was at a LAN party and one of the guys was running WinME, we couldnt get him doing anything, or doing windows networking. My friend even works in tech support and he was completely befuddled by the changes they made to the interface. Why do they fuck up things that already work? Makes no sense to me..

I used the Windows95 upgrade for the first 16 months that I had Windows95. My brother loaded 95 on his computer first (P120/16 RAM), and I must have sent Microsoft 15 letters telling them what complete morons they were for making such buggy shite. I finally gave in one day, about 6 months later, and ran the upgrade on my machine (P90/16 RAM) and it ran near perfect. I only had to reload it once, but that was entirely my fault.

Windows98 came along, and I picked up the full version for $89 in a price mix-up at Best Buy which lasted an hour. I had to reload it 9 times in 7 months; it kept screwing everything up like nobody's business. Not a single time did I do anything I shouldn't have. Various components just decided to stop working every once in a while.

When I built my new computer about a year ago (Celeron 500/256 RAM) I made the silly choice of loading it with Windows98. As usual, it worked for about a month and then everything went haywire. I've been suffering with it since until a few days ago.

I am not a big fan of USB, unless you're plugging keyboards and mice into it. I've had the opportunity to use a few USB devices at my latest job and most of them had performance that would lead you to wonder where the "Microsoft" name had been stamped on the product. Sound cards and network cards are the two where performance was notably worse than ISA or PCI devices of the same make, so I assume that that USB to ISA/PCI performance ratio stands true for the majority of other USB devices.

I didn't notice very many things changed in the Network Neighborhood configuration under ME. The setup appeared to be the same as Win98 and I got these computers configured to the university network the same way as with 98. They might have changed the underlying code though; I noticed that every once in a while, ME would just decide to not log on or detect the network.

I really wish Microsoft would just fix what is wrong with their latest Windows version for their next release and not try to add new features. They fix 2 or 3 bugs and create 15 more... it's been that was since Win3.11 and I'm sure it will stay that way until they can stop making useless changes just for the sake of making changes.

[Lüt]

Afterglow said:

Right now on my p100, 48mb ram, 1.6gb; I have WIN95 4.00.950B installed and it has become _unbelievably_ unstable. I rarely go 30min without a bluescreen to halt any work I'm doing. What I'm doing soon is formating my hard drive and sticking win98se on instead. Why? At home I had a Celeron 433, 64mb ram, 8gb and it was _unbelievably_ stable... nothing ever crashed (except the odd Q3A freeze because of the low ram :). If you system ever becomes unstable, it's probably best to format the hard drive and just reinstall everything.

I imagine I'll also setup Linux partition with Red Hat distrib. 6.2 installed since that's what my uni uses for development in the programming classes.

A good idea is setup a Windows partition and another Linux one... that way if you're doing simple tasks such as browsing the web and sending email, you have the stability of Linux and if you have specific programs to use or games to play, fire up Windows.

One thing might be that you are getting the latestproduct updates: there's not a chance in hell I am using IE5.5 or Windows Media Player 7 on Win95. A lot of the stuff under Windows Update and, in fact, most anything after 1998 was designed for Windows98 and later. They will say it should work in Windows95, but I don't trust that. Plus, why the hell do I need to load up an entire webpage, GUI and 15 codecs just to play a damn WAV or MIDI file? I remember when you just had a timer bar and WAV/MIDI length indicator. THAT'S what I'm into; pure performance. I've taken some risks by getting recent drivers for my hardware, but fortunately they haven't caused any problems yet. I prefer what comes with the stuff when you buy it.

[Guest Nuno Correia]

Lüt said:

Is your cable modem NIC by any chance an AOpen one? If so, you'll have no trouble configuring it with 2K (hell, it's my own configuration). And AWE's work sweet (heh, I've got one too! Geez!).

[stphrz]

Lüt said:

Hmm, why do you have TWO network cards in your computer? I have cable too and each of my pcs (all two of 'em :) use the same card for lan and cable access. I assume you have a hub set up right? On mine, the modem and each of the pcs are connected to the hub. Both pcs have internet access. Although I got a free extra ip address as a bonus for signing up for the service, I know people who are using a "router" (is that what it's called?)
to provide access to all the pcs on their network. That way they only have to pay for one ip. I'm not really clear on how all this works exactly (sounds kinda illegal to me). It seems like it would be difficult to configure a computer to use two separate newtwork cards without conflicts.

[Lüt]

I have two cards: one to connect to the rest of my home PCs and one to go to the rest of the world. The rest of the PCs pull internet access of my main computer over the network, which basically comes down to them pulling the info through one network card into themselves. Since that one network card is going to the other computers, I need the second one to connect to the cable line. I COULD have them set up the other computers properly through a hub, but it's an extra $5 per month per computer, so screw that. I'm already spending $10/month for AOL mail since all other mail services suck the big one. It's illegal according to @home, but their service and support sucks so I really don't care. Internet Connection Sharing is what the feature which lets all computers on a network use one main gateway to the internet is called. What it does is take the IP configuration of the network card (or modem) you use to connect to the 'net and sets up an ICS protocol with that data, which the other computers use over the network as a gateway to access the web. Your adapter no longer has the IP information; it gets stored in the ICS protocol, so anything on the network, even your main computer, goes through that protocol, which sends the requests to the active 'net connection. I don't see the cable company's reason for not supporting that: I mean, I'm either gonna download stuff over the internet onto my other computers, or download it on my main one and send it over the network. Either way, my other computers get their files/updates. Kinda pointless to charge extra for extra computers with ICS available.

[stphrz]

Ah, ok. I understand better now. I don't see the problem either. I mean, you're still limited by the modem, so it's not like you can suck up more than your fair share of the bandwidth.
Besides, what can they really do about it anyway? Short of comming into your house and looking at your setup there's no way they could know anyway.

[Guest fraggle`]

Afterglow said:

I've heard Windows 2000 runs slow as molasses on anything less than a 300.

I run it on my k6/233 and its as fast as win95 was, as far as i can tell. Of course I cant say that everyone else will have the same experience...