[65396] in North American Network Operators' Group
RE: Anit-Virus help for all of us??????
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vivien M.)
Tue Nov 25 09:40:16 2003
From: "Vivien M." <vivienm@dyndns.org>
To: "'Daniel Karrenberg'" <daniel.karrenberg@ripe.net>
Cc: <nanog@merit.edu>
Date: Tue, 25 Nov 2003 09:39:34 -0500
In-Reply-To: <20031125084222.GU3190@reifa.local>
Errors-To: owner-nanog-outgoing@merit.edu
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-nanog@merit.edu [mailto:owner-nanog@merit.edu] On=20
> Behalf Of Daniel Karrenberg
> Sent: November 25, 2003 3:42 AM
> To: William Allen Simpson
> Cc: nanog@merit.edu
> Subject: Re: Anit-Virus help for all of us??????
>=20
>=20
>=20
> On 24.11 18:20, William Allen Simpson wrote:
> >=20
> > Brian Bruns wrote:
> > >=20
> > > One thing that many people don't realize (from my personal=20
> > > experience) is that contrary to popular belief, Win98SE is a good=20
> > > all around desktop OS to use. It can run most things like=20
> > > productivity apps and games, and with 128-256MB of RAM, its quite=20
> > > fast even on an old laptop like mine. Unlike XP, it=20
> doesn't have a=20
> > > million services running, nor does it have the nasty UPnP=20
> stuff from WinME.
>=20
> I agree wholeheartedly.
>=20
> if haveto(M$)=20
> use(W98SE);
Have either of you actually followed this advice?
Win98SE is totally useless as a desktop OS due to the archaic GDI/USER
resource limits. When one average consumerish app (eg: a media player) =
eats
up 10% of those resources, one window in an IM program eats up 2%, =
etc... it
does not take much to bring down an entire system. Last time I was =
running
Win98SE (which is about 3 years ago), it took about 20 minutes after =
booting
while running boring normal apps to get to a dangerously low resource =
level
(30%ish free). That machine got totally unstable needing a reboot after
about 3 days. On the same hardware (with additional RAM), Win2K could =
easily
run 3-4 weeks and run any app I wanted just fine.=20
So, some people might say I'm a power user, but the average users I know
these days tend to multitask at least a web browser, an IM client with a
couple open windows, some bloated media player, perhaps a P2P app, and =
some
office app. This is already stretching Win9X to its limits, and I would
expect it to be worse (code just gets sloppier...) than it was three =
years
ago...
No wonder people think Windows is unreliable. 98SE may be preferable =
from a
security-from-external-threats POV, yes, but for any type of real use, =
it's
useless. Not to mention the other quirks, like needing to reboot to =
change
network settings, the lack of any local security (or even attempt at =
local
security), etc. I'll take rebooting every week or two for the latest XP
security patch any day over rebooting every day or two because Win98SE =
is an
unreliable piece of poorly designed legacy junk.
The way I see it, there are two uses for 98SE (or 95, 98, Me, etc) in =
the
modern world:
1) People who use their computers as game-only machines (or who dual =
boot a
real OS for non-game purposes)
2) Advertising for $OTHER_OS, where $OTHER_OS can be Win2K, XP, or your
favourite Linux distro with KDE, GNOME, etc. Anything that actually =
WORKS
reliably.
Vivien
--=20
Vivien M.
vivienm@dyndns.org
Assistant System Administrator
Dynamic DNS Network Services
http://www.dyndns.org/=20
