Amiga.org
Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: Sethy on July 30, 2004, 07:15:47 PM
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Back in the days where my pops would have to explain computers to me, ( instead of the other way around like nowadays... ) the most effective way to fix our old A500 was to smack it a bit! I was lil back then, so I couldn't hit it hard, really. But it worked most of the time, solving weird freezes and several odd glitches.
A few months ago I got that same old A500 back from a friend my pop gave it to years ago. Decided to clean it up a bit an opened it for the first time. The smacking helped because of some funky dual-kickstart solution involving some ribbon cabling, some soldering and cramming 5 or so sockets on top of one another... I think...
I loved those things back then. No matter how hard I hit my computers nowadays, they all still suck compared to Amigas. As for the stupidest thing that happened to the A500? My dad gave it away and bought a 486 instead. I think I redefined the word "angry" that day...
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I understand what you are talking about. I rather use an Amiga then a PC, because PC has very much problems with MS Windows. Even XP Professional doesn't work very well.
Sometimes I have the very odd problems with IIS or share Internet with other PC's. But I like those 3d games like Far Cry and Max Payne 2.
I love to play with my old Amiga, but my Commodore 1084s monitor has some powering up problems, but the monitor gives sharp and good display when I bought it 10 years ago.
Amiga's are sturdiest computers of the world.
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Double post
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I understand what you are talking about. I rather use an Amiga then a PC, because PC has very much problems with MS Windows. Even XP Professional doesn't work very well.
I want to know what you folks are doing to get such horrible results with newer machines. As much as I hate to admit it, my current x86 workstation (which is usually booted into WinXP Pro) is a TON more stable than ANY Amiga I've ever owned.
That list includes my tank of an A500, the "Flagship A2000 Professional," my little speed-demon 1200, AND my A4000/CSMK2-060/CV64-3D.
Right now, my XP box has 2 weeks uptime going. That's not two weeks of idling, but two weeks of running BitTorrents of MST3k DAP episodes, running Papyrus NASCAR 2003, netKar, the odd game of UT2004, web-browsing, e-mail, video encoding, and sound editing.
The only reason my uptime is "only" two weeks is I installed some new video codecs and had to reboot for the changes to take effect. Usually uptime is over a month, with no noticable drop in framerates in games. Heck, I don't even pause/stop my BitTorrents before playing games, anymore. With the HyperThreading on a P4, it's the smoothest, fastest modern workstation I've ever used. In fact, it's the first PC running Windows that I can honestly say multi-tasks better than my A4000.
The most stable of my bunch of Amigas was the A2000, which could run a BBS for about a month before memory fragmented enough you needed to reboot it. And even then, it was only about half the time it made it that far. Sometimes it would just guru on it's own. And if I was doing any amount of multi-tasking on it, forget it. Reboot weekly or sooner.
When I was heavily using my A4000, I could get a full day's work before a reboot, which was quite good compared to a 486 running Windows 3.1 (which was "state of the art" at that time.) But no match for a modern workstation. Like I said, I'm on two weeks on this PC, right now.
Don't get me wrong, Amigas are typically quite stable, but they just don't hold a candle to a well built current system.
99% of the instability people encounter can be blamed on one of four things:
1) Poor quality PC components.
A PC is only as good as it's worst component. You know that $15 power supply? It's a problem. You know that el-cheapo no-name RAM? That's a problem, too. The SiS chipset motherboard? You guessed it -- problem.
2) Virus/spyware/software problems.
It goes without saying that viruses, spyware, and improper sotware versions will hurt system stability. Keeping a clean system with the proper versions of programs for your OS helps a TON!
3) Improper Windows configuration.
Windows installs lots of services and junk. Some of it you need, some of it you don't. If you just blindly enable everything, your system will run really slow and be a magnet for viruses. If you blindly DISABLE everything, your system will ALSO run really poorly, and crap will crash at odd times for no apparent reason. You need to sort out exactly what each service does and determine if you need it or not. Over time, I've best learned that you want to tweak much more than "mass disable."
And, usually, running one of those "XP Lite" or other programs designed to rip out chunks of Windows is a horrible idea, stability wise. Sure, it's fun to feel like you're flipping off Bill Gates, but in the end, you're the sucker. Stuff expects to find certain files and versions in certain places. If they're missing, modified, or an earlier version, problems ensue.
4) Driver issues.
You need to have proper drivers for everything. Just because something "works" doesn't mean it's working right. Personally, I prefer reference drivers for video over the OEM versions. They are usually newer, faster and more stable.
Following these simple rules can give you uptimes of months on end, as well. It's really not difficult.
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I myself use Windows XP, and it has never ever crashed on my ever since, and I dont even have the service pack installed yet. I am waiting for service pack 2 to be released. But I have been happy ever since, but if you are comparing the fun out of games........DEFINATELY Amiga has some awsome games. Sure the gfx are not the top-notch, but in gameplay, it has plenty. :-D
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Hi Sethy,
I like your short story. Ever thought about becoming a writer? :-)
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I have to admit that my xp pc does a great job, though i do have to run anti spyware daily, and watch out for those damn trojans/viruses, though i can't blame the pc, it's just the way the internet is going. but i still find it hard to find a pc game that beats the gameplaying of the old amiga games, dungeon master, eye if the beholder etc
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I understand what you are talking about. I rather use an Amiga then a PC, because PC has very much problems with MS Windows. Even XP Professional doesn't work very well.
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This is a really odd comparison. The Amiga is was mostly a closed system (same BIOS, similar chipsets, etc) Windows must run on near-infinite variations of hardware, much of it comodity-grade. A better comparison would be to compare the Amiga to Pocket PCs or smartphones.
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I love to play with my old Amiga, but my Commodore 1084s monitor has some powering up problems, but the monitor gives sharp and good display when I bought it 10 years ago.
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Most 1084S monitors were made by Philips/Magnavox or Daewoo. Basicly, you are saying that older eqipment seems to last longer than today's brandX commodity-grade eqipment.
The moral isn't that WinXP is bad and Amiga OS is good. The moral is: you get what you pay for.
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BoingBoss wrote:
Hi Sethy,
I like your short story. Ever thought about becoming a writer? :-)
Well, considering this was meant to be a reply to another post, not a seperate thread, I highly doubt I'd make a good writer. Talked to a publisher about it but he mentioned something about me releasing individual chapters as books instead and not checking what the heck I am doing in the first place... Ahem...
Sooo, excusez-moi! Doesn't change the point that Amigas were awesome though and could defininitely spank any PC back then. Nowadays things will get tougher alright. But then again, we're comparing modern PCs to 1980/early 90s hardware.
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I agree with what most of you are saying about WinXP... by far the most stable OS I have used on the PC. If I do experience a problem it's because I did something stupid or went to a crap filled website. I really think people that criticize it just have a hatred for Microsoft in general.
Side note and off topic: those of you having spyware problems on the PC should really switch to Mozilla Firefox for a web browser. I haven't had a pop-up or new spyware since I made the move. Get it at www.mozilla.org
Back on topic: There is no way I'd ever try to take anything away from the Amiga either. My A1200 is amazing. I still get misty just thinking about the days when I first started on the Amiga. My PCs tend to last about 3 years before I off them on some nephew or such... but I'll never dump the Amiga. If anything I'm going to be investing more in it! :-D
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There is no way I'd ever try to take anything away from the Amiga either. My A1200 is amazing. I still get misty just thinking about the days when I first started on the Amiga. My PCs tend to last about 3 years before I off them on some nephew or such... but I'll never dump the Amiga. If anything I'm going to be investing more in it!
Oh, exactly. It's important to keep it all in perspective. The Amiga was incredible for it's time, and it still has a great feel and "soul" to it. I'll never sell my A4000.
However, your modern computer should be quite a bit more stable and reliable than the old Amigas. If not, you've surely done something very wrong.
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It's like people who use 303s or Moogs... It's not the most advanced or featureful, it just has a feel, and soul.
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ent0mbed wrote:
I agree with what most of you are saying about WinXP... by far the most stable OS I have used on the PC. If I do experience a problem it's because I did something stupid or went to a crap filled website. I really think people that criticize it just have a hatred for Microsoft in general.
That's really strange. I've heard everyone say this about XP, yet, I've just had a new PC at work with XP installed and it's crashed more times in the past 2 weeks than my w2k box has in the past year. It's awful, I hate it. I'm considering installing 2k on there.
Martyn.
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That's really strange. I've heard everyone say this about XP, yet, I've just had a new PC at work with XP installed and it's crashed more times in the past 2 weeks than my w2k box has in the past year. It's awful, I hate it. I'm considering installing 2k on there.
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I heard the same story from a friend of my Wife about 3 days ago. He said: "Why did I try and install XP? I was so happy with Win 2000! XP crashes all the time!"
He took it to a friend who replaced components on his system part by part. It was the power supply. Now that he has a non-defective PS, Windows XP runs with no crashes.
The moral: Everybody expects Windows XP to work in all situations, and it's the first thing to get blamed for crashes.
The other moral: commodity-grade components will bite you someday.
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Martyn wrote:
That's really strange. I've heard everyone say this about XP, yet, I've just had a new PC at work with XP installed and it's crashed more times in the past 2 weeks than my w2k box has in the past year. It's awful, I hate it. I'm considering installing 2k on there.
Martyn.
One thing you should really make sure you've done is get all of the critical updates from Microsoft using Windows Update. Sorry that this is getting a bit off topic, but I hope this might help in your situation. I support 150 computers at work all running either Win2K or WinXP and I think that both operating systems are really very nice. I despised the PC at one point in time (early 90s), but they have really become great machines in the 2000s.
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@ALL:
It seems very funny. On the most pure amiga site, on its forum, people begin to teach each other, how to use windows on PC, how to get it working stable, how to set up patches etc. Moreover, they say they like windows, which, as they say, is the best and nicest.
Just nothing to say more...
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Moreover, they say they like windows, which, as they say, is the best and nicest.
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Looks like a burning, unreasoning hatred of Windows is not required in order to be an Amiga enthusiast!
Could Amiga users be more than just mindless fanboys? Shocking! :-o
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Ive been a 68k user since the dawn of amigas.
I got a hd in 95 or so,
and I still have the data
(and selfcreated data)
that I had on that hd.
Except what I deleted ofcourse.
My experience is that pc users
generally lose their data
several times a year.
:Arrogant mode on:
Do you know any pc user that has the data
they had a decade ago?
(that they want(ed) to keep)
I guess it depends on the person tho.
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heh, I Still dont like PC's.
Nothing to do with reliability or usability, but I think Windows isnt a very good OS. It runs {bleep}loads of programs yes, but it looks ugly as hell without a load of customisation and you have to mess about with loads of things to get it workiing properly - something the average home user shouldn't be forced to do.
OSX all the way!
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@FastRobPlus:
For those who haven't understood:
Mindless fanboys of windows are trying to speak about it everywhere. Normal amiga enthusiasts just want not to see windows discussion on amiga forums.
BTW, nobody says about linux, eh? So bill gates can have all the profit from you now :):):)
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Do you know any pc user that has the data
they had a decade ago?
Yeah, me, for one. I don't really consider myself an Amiga "user" anymore. I've got quite a collection of them, but honestly, there's little that I actually DO on them besides tinker around and play old games. (All web, video, sound, and productivity software has been far surpased.) The PCs are the workhorses, now.
But, I know of others, as well. In fact, I'd be hard put to name more than one or two people who have had failures of either hardware or brain severe enough to cause them to lose data. Installed programs, perhaps. I usually format and re-install Windows if I've had a meltdown or hardware change of some kind severe enough to cause lingering problems with the old build.
(Of course, the risk of losing data increases as more DRM BS gains a foothold, and you aren't ALLOWED to make backup copies, or move data to a new computer, but that's a subject for one of my own anti-Microsoft rants.)
I guess it depends on the person tho.
Exactly. It has little, if anything, to do with the OS. In fact, a MS system is EASIER for a clueless person to back up data on, because most new programs save everything to "My Documents" thus giving an easy target to backup/restore.
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PC's sucks!
Besides my Amiga's, i've got a P4 PC
with Windows-XP on it.
The damn thing takes a long time to boot up,
and takes even a longer time to shut the piece
of crap down!
(I don't know why it's waiting that long,
no work to save or something like that.)
One of these days I'll smash the stupid thing
with an axe or something!
:pissed: :hammer:
Just joking!
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While it is true that Amiga enthusiasts aren't coming here to talk about the windows OS I think it became a topic through a comparison made about how sturdy the Amiga is compared to the standard PC. It's a valid discussion. I think just about everyone agrees that the Amiga has amazing durability and on the other side of the coin some were just pointing out that the PC has definitely grown in the last decade into a very usable system. As with anything (Amiga included) there will be exceptions and some people will get a lemon.
Why WinXP takes a long time to shut down? One of the biggest reasons is it is saving restore points so that if something is wrong next time you use it you can return to a previous point in time when things functioned. You can turn that feature off if you want.
Anyway, I'd like to say: sorry that my own posts have strayed away from the Amiga being sturdy. It wasn't an attempt to toot the windows horn... I was just trying to lend some helpful hints to another forum member. I wouldn't be here at all if I wasn't an Amiga enthusiast.
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Back on the topic of sturdy Amigas...
If you ever open up an Amiga and look at the components, it reads like a who's who of good component fabrication companies. I even saw a Micron expansion bus on ebay recently.
I don't know if you guys remember, but the Coleco ADAM and the Commodore 64 (in 1983) had the #1 and #2 highest failure rates among home computers. They were manufactured very cheaply. The Amiga was light-years better in terms of reliability - even the A500. The real problem point for the low end Amigas was its power supply.
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ent0mbed wrote:
Why WinXP takes a long time to shut down? One of the biggest reasons is it is saving restore points so that if something is wrong next time you use it you can return to a previous point in time when things functioned. You can turn that feature off if you want.
The first thing I did when I installed WinXP,
was to turn that feature OFF. (the saving restore
points, that is.)
It still takes a long time to shut down.
When i'm in a hurry, and want to turn the PC off,
I just pull the power-plug out!
I think PC's are vééééééry slóóóóów when it comes
to turning it on or off.
My Amiga's are booting up within 7 seconds.
Amiga RULEZ!!!!!
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:Arrogant mode on:
Do you know any pc user that has the data
they had a decade ago?
(that they want(ed) to keep)
I would have done, except the hard disk died. Do Amigas stop that from happening then? :-)
- Moderator hat on - Guys, lets finish the "Amiga rulez! PCs suck!" comments here. It is a little tedious to say the least -
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Am I on the wrong site here?
I thought amiga.org is a site where people
who love the Amiga-computer, come together
for help, tips and to pick on PC's.
Guess there are a few Amiga-haters/traitors
on this site who are defending the PC with
heart and soul. It's better they move to another
site like 386dx.org or something like that!
There they can adore and worship the PC as much
as they want!
:quickdraw:
Greetings to all REAL AMIGA lovers! :pint:
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mikeymike wrote:
I would have done, except the hard disk died. Do Amigas stop that from happening then? :-)
Yes!
Everyone knows 68k processors create structural integrity fields around HDs and have trilithium-based paraxial graviton stabilizers absorbing any shocks or vibration. They also got some advanced temporal caching where it retrieves data before you ask for it and (self-)repairing intelligent read/write heads on the HDs!
:-D
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k-disk wrote:
Am I on the wrong site here?
I thought amiga.org is a site where people
who love the Amiga-computer, come together
for help, tips and to pick on PC's.
Guess there are a few Amiga-haters/traitors
on this site who are defending the PC with
heart and soul. It's better they move to another
site like 386dx.org or something like that!
There they can adore and worship the PC as much
as they want!
:roll:
We do not encourage mindless advocacy of any sort. What we do encourage is intelligent discussion, particularly with regard to Amiga/compatible platforms.
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Sethy wrote:
mikeymike wrote:
I would have done, except the hard disk died. Do Amigas stop that from happening then? :-)
Yes!
Everyone knows 68k processors create structural integrity fields around HDs and have trilithium-based paraxial graviton stabilizers absorbing any shocks or vibration. They also got some advanced temporal caching where it retrieves data before you ask for it and (self-)repairing intelligent read/write heads on the HDs!:-D
Too much Star Trek for you :-)
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mikeymike wrote:
We do not encourage mindless advocacy of any sort. What we do encourage is intelligent discussion, particularly with regard to Amiga/compatible platforms.
Speak for yourself...
Looks like an empty headed Amiga traitor to me.
Dear Amiga friends,
please keep the Amiga-Spirit here alive!
(You're NOT doing it by blabber about the
PC is so good and stuff like that)
:rtfm: :inquisitive:
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k-disk wrote:
mikeymike wrote:
We do not encourage mindless advocacy of any sort. What we do encourage is intelligent discussion, particularly with regard to Amiga/compatible platforms.
Speak for yourself...
Looks like an empty headed Amiga traitor to me.
Actually no, I speak for Amiga.org. Notice the 'moderator' tag?
Dear Amiga friends,
please keep the Amiga-Spirit here alive!
(You're NOT doing it by blabber about the
PC is so good and stuff like that)
Mature, intelligent people realise that every platform has its strong and weak points, and that no platform is anywhere near perfect.
It is up to you, do you wish to be treated like an intelligent and mature person, or do you want to find another site to frequent. Because I'm sure that I speak for all Amiga.org staff as well as the majority of AO regulars, when I say that we don't need another zealot of any inclination.
Zealots give a bad name to the platform they advocate.
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k-disk wrote:
Am I on the wrong site here?
I thought amiga.org is a site where people
who love the Amiga-computer, come together
for help, tips and to pick on PC's.
Guess there are a few Amiga-haters/traitors
on this site who are defending the PC with
heart and soul. It's better they move to another
site like 386dx.org or something like that!
There they can adore and worship the PC as much
as they want!
:quickdraw:
Greetings to all REAL AMIGA lovers! :pint:
I'm not sure if I should even be taking your comments seriously. If you really think that enjoying another computer platform makes you a traitor to the Amiga then I know this discussion is a worthless waste of my time. You are obviously entitled to your opinions and I wouldn't even begin to try and change them, however, I also won't defend whether or not I or others on here are Amiga lovers.
One final note... you are correct... this is amiga.org, however it isn't pchaters.org or destroymicrosoft.com either so before you start telling people they should be leaving the forum perhaps you should re-evaluate your attitude. It seems to me that you are only trying to light a fire anyway.
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k-disk wrote:
Guess there are a few Amiga-haters/traitors
on this site who are defending the PC with
heart and soul.
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Like I said, there are those who must hate everyhting else in order to promote what they are enthusiastic about.
Of course, k-disk might just be joking, it's hard to read that poker face...
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FastRobPlus wrote:
Of course, k-disk might just be joking, it's hard to read that poker face...
I agree. I think he's just messing with us and we're all falling for it.
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FastRobPlus wrote:
Of course, k-disk might just be joking, it's hard to read that poker face...
You're right! It's just my sence of humor.
(That, plus a few icecold-Heinekens, or was it
more than a few? Can't remember it!):pint:
I'm not gonna reply on all the other quotes
(not with my poor english).
But I tell you what:
If you all learn to speak Dutch, then we can have
a nice, intelligent, conversation about crappy MAC-computers!
(Just joking! ha-ha) :laugh:
So loosen up folks! Don't take the things I wrote
yesterday all to seriously.
:python:
I just love Monty-Python!
Greetings to all Amiga-fans
Keep up the good work!
K-disK :lol:
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:whack:
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Yes, I'm sorry I called you an Amiga traitor.
(Me and my big mouth!) :sealed:
I will think about it in the future.
Greets,
K-disK :-)