Just wondered if anyone here is just as out of date as I am with Windows. I am using Windows NT 3.51, the version that looks like Windows 3x with the Program Manager, File Manager, etc.......could I indeed be the only dinosaur on this forum re Microsoft Windows?

My other machines are extreme ends of the spectrum....upstairs an old 486 PC is still chugging away with Windows 95, and an even earlier machine is somehow managing to cope with the internet on a LAN broadband connection running DOS 6.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11....still working, I am amazed....

Just proves there is a bit of life left in these ancient operating systems.....personally I love the old style windows.

Originally posted by goldenfleece
Just wondered if anyone here is just as out of date as I am with Windows. I am using Windows NT 3.51, the version that looks like Windows 3x with the Program Manager, File Manager, etc.......could I indeed be the only dinosaur on this forum re Microsoft Windows?

My other machines are extreme ends of the spectrum....upstairs an old 486 PC is still chugging away with Windows 95, and an even earlier machine is somehow managing to cope with the internet on a LAN broadband connection running DOS 6.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11....still working, I am amazed....

Just proves there is a bit of life left in these ancient operating systems.....personally I love the old style windows.

Not sure about your preference in Windows but each to their own. I used to have to look after a fleet of 6/7 PC's all running Windows for Workgroups 3.11 Some fiddling little kid deleted the line "win" from the system.ini file so they just booted into DOS..grrrr....:rant:

But i am currently using Win XP Pro with no service packs....works fine..if a little slow....but then thats the PC not the OS :|

I posess a very old Toshiba laptop pc with windows 3.XX on it.

the RAm is about 16 mb, and it has a hard drive with a massive 250 mb of memory!

(my god, the laptop I use at work has 256 meg of memory in the stick, for crying out loud!)

PT

256 Mb is quite decent though by even today's standards as most stuff will work as long as you've got at least 128.

Going slightly off topic,

About 6 months ago I bought an 120gig harddrive for £52.

The first harddrive I bought was a 85meg for the Commodore Amiga, this cost me £300.

If the 120gig had cost as much per meg as the 85meg drive i would have been looking to pay over £433,694.

Yes nearly half a million pounds worth of harddrive space is sat in my XBox..


I found it quite scary when i first worked it out.

Originally posted by Avalon
But i am currently using Win XP Pro with no service packs....works fine..if a little slow....but then thats the PC not the OS

I hope its not connected to the internet.

up until a year ago I was using a Packard Bell with Windows 95, 16mb of memory and 1.2gb hard drive :) i'm so happy with my new computer, haha

Until really quite recently I had a Texas Instrument TI3000 laptop, blessed with a 386 that ran at 2MHz, 6MHz or 8MHz (for low battery, high battery and mains respectively), 2Mb of RAM and a 130Mb hard disk (upgraded from 20Mb). That ran Win 3.1 on it's 7" black and white display just fine. I had ClarisWorks 3 on it for any actual work that needed doing. Just for good measure I also had Minix 2.0 on the 20Mb drive and swapped it out occassionally. All good fun.

When I got it, it was an ex-factory floor machine. I say ex-, because someone had tripped on it's power cable and it had smashed to bits on the concrete floor. I actually managed to repair everything but the lid closed detector switch and got the whole thing working again. It felt a bit like looking after an abandoned kitten. I miss that machine *sob*

Originally posted by SlimboyFat
Going slightly off topic,

About 6 months ago I bought an 120gig harddrive for £52.

The first harddrive I bought was a 85meg for the Commodore Amiga, this cost me £300.

If the 120gig had cost as much per meg as the 85meg drive i would have been looking to pay over £433,694.

Yes nearly half a million pounds worth of harddrive space is sat in my XBox..


I found it quite scary when i first worked it out.

When I started my first job we used 8" floppy disks to distribute the software, in 100K chunks. I remember how excited everyone was when we got an IBM PC that could do 8 text colours, at the same time, and as for the graphics, it was like TRON was for real !!!

Despite the declaration I prefer "old" Windows, yesterday was the final straw.......the legendary blue screen of death started arrived with no let up, after I installed replacement graphics card and drivers.I was forced to do a complete reformat and DOs/Windows installation as you know how difficult Win 3.1 can be on a bad day.....

Unfortunately the replacement graphic card does not support any pre Windows 95 system properly, despite the fact the card claimed it was Win 3.1 friendly. Win 3.1 rejected the drivers and went ballistic, and would not do anything but 16 colours and that horrible old fashioned clunky screen resolution which fits about 3 icons on the entire screen and is PAINFUL to look at!

Its goodbye Dos 6 and Win 3x.........at least for the time being. Oh, my wonderful MS-DOS version of Word is no more......

I guess the delights of WIn XP are just around the corner......I wait with bated breath the jewel in the crown of Microsoft Windows......

Originally posted by goldenfleece
was forced to do a complete reformat and DOs/Windows installation as you know how difficult Win 3.1 can be on a bad day.....

When I worked as an apprentice at a firm up City Road, I must have installed DOS 6.22/Win3.11 hundreds of times over the course of two years. I got it down to 20 minutes from first inserting the DOS boot floppy to running a macro I had recorded to automagically set up all the program groups. Of course, the hard disks being < 512Mb helped with the format time :)


Its goodbye Dos 6 and Win 3x.........at least for the time being. Oh, my wonderful MS-DOS version of Word is no more......

I guess the delights of WIn XP are just around the corner......I wait with bated breath the jewel in the crown of Microsoft Windows......

Don't do it! Get a Win95 OSR1 OEM disk (I think I still have one) and install that! You can even still use program manager and it'll let you set up PIFs for Word no problem.

*goes all misty eyed at the word PIF*

First PC I used at work (early 80's), had a massive 128k (yes, kilobytes, not megabyte) memory and twin 360k floppy disks. Ran MS/DOS v 1.0.

Have used all versions of DOS and Windows, still quite nostalgic for Windows 3.11 - that was a big leap forward at the time - still probably got the disks knocking about somewhere.

Still got my old Sinclair ZX-80
1K of memory - integer basic: 4/3 = 1
When you switched if off, it forgot everything...
Still managed to programme it to play cricket etc.
Ah, the good old days...

(Not Windows I know, so off topic - sorry)

Originally posted by wicko_boy
Still got my old Sinclair ZX-80
1K of memory - integer basic: 4/3 = 1
When you switched if off, it forgot everything...
Still managed to programme it to play cricket etc.
Ah, the good old days...

(Not Windows I know, so off topic - sorry)

...and now it's worth a fortune! I dug out my old Sinclair Spectrum microdrive cartridges out at the weekend, showing them to the kids in an IT lesson at school - they can't believe they only held 80Kb of data!

And with that it's time to bring up this link again:

http://custurd.b3ta.com/heyhey16k/

Ahh, WinNT 3.51, my first "proper" non-crashing operating system.

After falling in love with NT, I could never understand how people could stick it out with Windows 95, 98, ME. Windows XP has finally brought a more "mainstream" version of Windows up to almost the reliability standard of NT3.51 and 4, but I still miss 'em.

I have to use vintage Microsoft Windows, currently XP Pro, to run a legacy application at work, so I dual boot into Windows every few days when I need to use it.

Other than that I've been using Linux full time for a couple of years, SuSE (now by Novell) at work and Xandros Desktop OS at home. If you put two blank PCs next to each other and installed Xandros on one and XP on the other, I can almost guarantee Xandros 'just works' and is as simple use as XP. Linux has come a real long way. Last time I reinstalled XP, I had to then download wifi, video and printer drivers off the net on another machine, yet Xandros picked everything up no problems.

The biggest benefit of running a Linux OS is that it is practically immune to virii. Sophos lists 60,000+ for Windows, and of the 400 and something Linux 'prototype' viruses, none have been found in the wild because there is no automatic spreading mechanism. Although there are bugs and holes (as with every piece of software) the fact that Linux is Open Source means that thousands of eyes see the code and can fix things as soon as they're discovered. Oh, and it's free of course.

It's a brave GNU world...!

Originally posted by tombeharrell
I can almost guarantee Xandros 'just works' and is as simple use as XP
I haven't used Xandros, but that's certainly not my experience of Linux.

I tried to set up a machine using Linux a couple of months ago: tried SuSE and Fedora, spent six days in total trying to get the wireless network card running, including all sorts of mucking around compiling drivers, but to no avail. So I gave up and installed XP instead.

I'm not exactly a Linux newbie - I've been running various distros on & off since 1994 - and if I have this kind of trouble then it doesn't bear thinking about how a newbie would cope. I agree that the basic install of Linux is a hell of a lot easier than it used to be, and most hardware does now work out of the box, but unless you get manufacturer buy-in and hence drivers available for every bit of hardware then it's still going to be a pain at times, and because Linux has no commercial clout to get the manufacturers on board then I'm not sure whether it will get much better.

Originally posted by DanSumption
...tried SuSE and Fedora, spent six days in total trying to get the wireless network card running, including all sorts of mucking around compiling drivers, but to no avail...


Indeed, wireless drivers are much better supported now than even quite recently, and getting better all the time, however as with winmodems (lots of which do work these days) certain chipsets still aren't supported.

I suppose you just need to check up on the compatibility of hardware, and not take for granted as with Windows that drivers are available at the moment for a given piece of kit. Though most are.

...unless you get manufacturer buy-in and hence drivers available for every bit of hardware then it's still going to be a pain at times, and because Linux has no commercial clout to get the manufacturers on board then I'm not sure whether it will get much better.

I disagree slightly because I think there is a lot of commercial clout behind Linux, and it's growing all the time. Especially from IBM, Novell, Sun, companies such as AMD working with the community to give support. Even Intel Centrino is now supported.

I think that if people want to move away from Microsoft, there are steps they can take to really make it work.

Tom.

I still run Windows 3.11 on a laptop (486SX) which gets wheeled out every now and again when I need to test or modify some vintage shareware I wrote many moons ago... :)

As for Linux, I've played with it on and off for about 7 years and still find that it has a long way to go before I'd let a 'normal' user loose on it. A while ago I decided to try setting up Star Office on a PC running Linux and gave up after the install routine kept suggesting I go off and find various other packages to install..... :)

I still use Linux for running Apache, mySQL and some A-Life applications that I haven't yet ported to Windows, but I have to say that I'll probably stay with Windows for the forseeable future.

Joe

I run a business on 3.1......