A common attitude with Windows users here

[Glaucus]

Hey Mikey,

I know this isn't the right place for this, but since we're all here I might as well ask it now... Do you know of any way to have WinXP run some kind of script or batch file at bootup? Is there a startup file of some kind? If I want to have certain commands run at startup (like "delete c:\temp\*.*" at every logon), could I just create a batch file and stuff it into the registry under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\ Just curious.

  - Mike

[adz]

@Glaucus

Easiest way I can think of doing it is by writing a batch file and putting it in the Startup folder. However, you can also assign logon scripts to users in both 2K and XP.

[Belial6]

You could also put the batch file in the Autoexec.bat.

Yes XP has an Autoexec.bat.  You just have to unhide the system files to see it.

[smerf]

Hi,

Just took a course in college on Windows 2000 professional and server. It is funny that the more I know the more windows 2000 crashes.

Has anyone noticed that as the PC clones claim that they are running faster they actually are running slower at least in real time by my stop watch, or is it that the PC clone mfg's are lying to us, stay tuned I will investigate this matter more. My stop watch tells me that my old 500 mhz Compaq Presario takes 2 minutes and 39 seconds to start up. My Amiga 3000 at 25 mhz takes 32.5 seconds to start up, and my new 2.2 ghz e-machine takes 3 minutes and 2 seconds to start up, but now my old Packard Bell at 200 mhz only takes 1 minute and 45 seconds to start up. HMMMM very interesting. Now my Amiga takes approx. 1 sec to shut off, my Packard Bell takes 10 seconds to shut off, my Compaq takes 1 minute and 52 seconds to shut off and my e-machine at 2.2 ghz takes 2 minutes and 56 seconds to shut off. So this tells me that the fastest machine I own is really the slowest, and the slowest machine I own (Amiga) is really the fastest, at least in real time.

Very Interesting!

My Amiga 3000 running OS 2.0 hasn't crashed in 10 years, my Packard Bell running Windows 95 crashes about once every 6 months, my Compaq Presario running Windows 98 crashes about once a year, and my e-machine running Windows XP hasn't crashed yet, (only had it 2 months) :-)

HMMM My oldest machine the Amiga seems to be the most dependable.

HMMM now what am I using Windows 2000 on, how about an 800 mhz Microtel machine, like I said the more I know about a OS the more it crashes, I crash this out at least twice a month.

Smerf

[logicalheart]

I hope you are joking.

Or maybe we are wrong to expect a multi-billion dollar operating system with over 90% of the market share, development, engineering, and everything else to outperform an outdated, underfunded, niche system?  Gee whiz, what was I thinking?

Do you think we are on here because we are forced to use Amigas?  Most of us were smart enough to evaluate multiple systems and run away from the crappy ones.

Unfortunately we still have to fight with Wind*ws every day in order to find some sort of mediocre compliance with the rest of the planet.

Many of us are more adept than the mentioned lemming crowd, and are the ones fixing their "wonderful" systems as a friend, or for our employment.

[B00tDisk]

Ah...it was too good to stay away from.

Besides, that prat "DoomMaster" is gone (for pete's sake, guys, didn't you realize from post #1 he was a troll?) it's a bit more fun.

But on to the topic at hand!

I tend to agree with the general attitude given regarding Windows 'round here.  

Let me see if I can encapsulate my thoughts without doing a line-item on every post...

Firstly, there's so many cries of "Well, I've got windows running on xyz processor.  It crashes.  It's junk."  or "Well, windows was running until I installed 'xyz', then it totally crashed and I had to reformat and reinstall."

Having done PC support and network administration for a few years, I can't take statements like that at face value.  That's like saying "I was driving down the road and suddenly my car was sitting in the junkyard, wrecked.  Man, those 'xyz' manufactured cars suck!"

Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE!  When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ;-) ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.

My advice?  Guys, you might hate PCs and want to spend as little time on them as humanly possible but - and I can't emphasize this enough - spend a little extra if you want the damn thing to work right.  

That doesn't mean buying Crucial RAM (although it helps), but know what kind of gear you're putting together.  If you can spend $120 on an AMD CPU, then save your pennies and spend the money on a decent motherboard (Asus and Abit are particularly well-regarded).  Don't buy no-name junk with unsigned drivers.  Buying a NIC? Skip over that $5 card and spend the extra money on, say, a Netgear or Linksys.  One of the worst problems with XP I had was due to a bad NIC driver - buffer overflows would cause the damned system to reboot!  Swapped it out, put a $15 Netgear in place of that SunshineRainbowFarEastRicePaper piece of crap card and presto!  No more issues.

Secondly...the issue of RAM and HD footprint?  I think we can all agree here that despite the "bloat", WindowsXP or 2000 can easily fit on a 5gb HD, right?  And run well enough with 128mb of physical RAM, correct?

Now how cheap are those things - even quality components?  $15-$20 for the drive (most manufacturers quit making 'em that small so vendors tend to charge a "rarity premium" if you can find 'em - check out www.pricewatch.com to see what I mean; a 5gb HD costs about $10 less than a 30gb!)  $10-$20 for the RAM?

I gave away a 433mhz celeron with that HD and RAM combo - and bought XP and installed it for my folks.  

Guys, the "issue" of OS size and RAM requirements is nonexistent.  RAM and HD space are commodity items.  This isn't the days of 5MB fullheight MFM drives anymore.  Incidentally, you can install a stripped down XP or 2000 on a 1gb HD...

Which brings us to the ridiculous subject of "boot times" or "response times".

I love the Amiga as much as the next person...but the fact of the matter is that it's not 100% code efficiency that gets you the whole OS* on five floppy disks and installs in 10 minutes, and boots in ten seconds.

Firstly, you're looking at a custom "BIOS" and "CMOS" (if we can call Kickstart that) which are tied very closely in with the OS and the native hardware - upon who's initialization add-on non native HW depends.

Secondly...it just doesn't do as much.

(Waits for the din to settle.)

Not "you don't do as much with it", but it in and of itself doesn't do as much.  Take 3.1*, out of the box, and tell me how you network it with other systems.  Tell me how you set it up to have a static IP or use DHCP.  Tell me how USB classes work under it.  Or how much support OpenGL has.  Or how I can connect an HP2200l printer to it.  Or how I lock the workstation when I'm away from the keys.  Or what email, web-browsing and media playback tools come with it.  Or what NVidia video cards are supported.  Or what sound cards.  Etc.

Is there a lot going on in Windows?  You betcha.  And I wouldn't do without it for the world.

Don't get me wrong, guys.  There's a lot about Win I don't like.  Like the OS trying to "phone home" with trouble reports when something goes awry.  Or the "MSN Messenger" client that tries to run on startup.  Or the GUI layout.  Or the font dithering.

But y'know what?  I can take two minutes and turn that stuff off, or show someone else how to do it.

/rant

*Taking this as a baseline for the OS, that is.

PS - someone in the thread mentioned that XP has an "autoexec.bat".  Ooooooooh no it does not!

XP has boot.ini, and while it can be seen by unhiding system files PLEASE folks do NOT poke around in there unless you know what you're doing.  Boot.ini is a batch file like autoexec.bat ONLY in that it's a batch file.  The syntax of boot.ini is cryptic even to me, sometimes.  ####ing around with it will only lead to tears unless you know what you're doing!  It'd be like deleting your RDB (or having a hardware manufacturer write a driver to do it for you - #### you, Elbox).

[Glaucus]

Well said BOOTdisk, and I think I knew XP doesn't have a autoexec.bat, and I have edited the boot.ini in the past when I setup a dual boot for ME & XP.

  - Mike

[mikeymike]

Having done PC support and network administration for a few years, I can't take statements like that at face value. That's like saying "I was driving down the road and suddenly my car was sitting in the junkyard, wrecked. Man, those 'xyz' manufactured cars suck!"

Hear hear! :-)

My advice? Guys, you might hate PCs and want to spend as little time on them as humanly possible but - and I can't emphasize this enough - spend a little extra if you want the damn thing to work right.

It might not even be a case of 'spending a little extra', maybe less, but learn and research what hardware you should be getting!  I know a fair bit about x86 hardware but that doesn't stop me doing research every time I get a component!

PS - someone in the thread mentioned that XP has an "autoexec.bat". Ooooooooh no it does not!

It/NTx does, it just gets ignored by default without setting a few registry options to get it executed on startup.

[Jagabot]

What the heck do some of you guys have installed on your systems that makes them take over 30 seconds to boot up? lol

Both of my primary systems (one runs 2000 Pro one runs XP Pro) boot up in 30 seconds or less. Even my notbook which is just a Celeron 1400 boots up Windows 2000 in under 30 seconds. It sounds to me like you have drivers installed over old drivers and every time the OS boots up it has to decide what to use, or you have a card in one of your slots that isn't reporting back correctly to the PlugandPlay handler. Also using defrag once in a while helps (do it from safemode, and delete your swapfile beforehand, that way you get a nice new contiguous swapfile the next time you start windows).

I really do like Amigas, I've owned one since my first 1000. I really do like my new PC's. The new games availabe on them are amazing, the productivity I get out of them is what keeps my mortgage paid and my car filled with gas. I couldn't survive without Photoshop and Dreamweaver Ultradev.  Sure, every OS has it's issues. If you want my honest opinion, the newest Macs are the best commercially available system out there, except they suffer from the same fate Amigas did - GM thinking. "Well my dad owned a GM, so that must be the best thing I should own!" translates into "Well my competitor uses PCs so that must be the platform I should use!" This turns into lower volume sales, and even lower software availability ($ drives the computer market, not bravado and emotion).

Windows XP is an awesome OS, windows 2000 is another awesome OS (my 2K server has been on for 172 days), my Linux server has been on for 421 days but is it better because of that? Nope! It's just there because it performs 2 functions I can't get on my Win2K box, and the Win2K box does 20 things I can't do on my linux box. It's all about what you *need* to do with your computer that drives what OS you should be using, my Amiga stuff is all about some latent emotions that keep me driven to support and use it (just being honest). If I could buy a new Amiga that was 2GHz, still had the custom chips (updated to today's graphic and sound specs) and there were a couple hundred software companies releasing new swag for it I'd be all over one. But there isn't, and that's why I use pc's and WIndows for anything productive.

But then I'm some sort of crazy realist.  :-D

[the_leander]

I tried to use BeOS. But there wasn't enough software for desktop stuff like GOOD movie players or word processors. I use linux now with Ximian and it leaves BeOS for dead in the desktop areana.

Movie players... VLC (videolanclient, also available for linux, windows, mac, *bsd and qnx), can run a hell of a lot more formats then the built in media player, and uses a lot less resources to do so. Zeta will have mPlayer if its any consolation.

Gobe productive is a damned fine word processor that can read just about everything going. But failing that Zeta includes a word processor called Zedit, and theres also a port of Abiword for BeOS should neither of them take your fancy. Just how many WP's do you need???

[PPCRulez]

B00tDisk wrote:

Firstly, there's so many cries of "Well, I've got windows running on xyz processor.  It crashes.  It's junk."  or "Well, windows was running until I installed 'xyz', then it totally crashed and I had to reformat and reinstall."

My keyboard died and I had to do a hardware reset.. and Boom.. Windows2k didn't boot anymore. A good OS shouldn't be able to be destroyed that easily.

Having done PC support and network administration for a few years, I can't take statements like that at face value.  That's like saying "I was driving down the road and suddenly my car was sitting in the junkyard, wrecked.  Man, those 'xyz' manufactured cars suck!"

The analogy with the car and my experience above would be something like a got a flat tire had to turn of the engine. When I changed tyre and tried to start the car it just didn't start anymore

That doesn't mean buying Crucial RAM (although it helps), but know what kind of gear you're putting together.  If you can spend $120 on an AMD CPU, then save your pennies and spend the money on a decent motherboard (Asus and Abit are particularly well-regarded).  Don't buy no-name junk with unsigned drivers.  Buying a NIC? Skip over that $5 card and spend the extra money on, say, a Netgear or Linksys.  One of the worst problems with XP I had was due to a bad NIC driver - buffer overflows would cause the damned system to reboot!  Swapped it out, put a $15 Netgear in place of that SunshineRainbowFarEastRicePaper piece of crap card and presto!  No more issues.

True some hardware is flaky, and really cheap stuff should be avoided. But sometimes good brand name hardware isn't much better anyway. And when Linux can run stable on the same hardware that Win2k can't run stable on.. then it can't be a hardware fault.

Actually I don't find win2k particularly unstable.. it's quite stable and I'm pretty satisfied with it. But the times that it do crash I'm afraid that it will not start again. Something that I don't have to worry about with Linux or AmigaOS.

Secondly...the issue of RAM and HD footprint?  I think we can all agree here that despite the "bloat", WindowsXP or 2000 can easily fit on a 5gb HD, right?  And run well enough with 128mb of physical RAM, correct?

Yes, but with 128MB you better have a fast harddrive. And still 64-128MB for just running the OS is bloat in my book, but Linux is quite bloated also when you want to use a decent gui. Doesn't matter that RAM and HD's are cheap.. an OS shouldn't require that amount of RAM. The OS can't be very well optimized when it uses that kind of memory footprint.

Which brings us to the ridiculous subject of "boot times" or "response times".

Guys, the "issue" of OS size and RAM requirements is nonexistent. RAM and HD space are commodity items. This isn't the days of 5MB fullheight MFM drives anymore. Incidentally, you can install a stripped down XP or 2000 on a 1gb HD...

And that is exactly the kind of attitude among programmers that leads to bloat and unoptimized software. RAM and HD is cheap so who cares if it's optimized. Just let people buy more RAM and better CPU's.

Not "you don't do as much with it", but it in and of itself doesn't do as much.  Take 3.1*, out of the box, and tell me how you network it with other systems.  Tell me how you set it up to have a static IP or use DHCP.  Tell me how USB classes work under it.

Still I can have AmigaOS with MiamiDx, Poseidon (for USB), Turboprint, Apache Web-server all running at startup and still it takes less than 15 seconds to boot. AmigaOS is really efficent and so are all it's programs. Which gives even greater speeds when run on something like a MorphOS/AOS v4 box with a G3@600Mhz

But with Win2k it takes ages to boot. WinXP is alot faster at boot, although it's nowhere near the AmigaOS boot times.

And with AmigaOS just press the power button when you want to turn off the computer. No ridiculous shutdown stuff.

[vortexau]

DonnyEMU said-

Get with the ball game folks, Windows 98 and ME are built-on MS-DOS but windows XP is built on windows NT (and is the next generation of NT).   It has a full multi-tasking kernal with much more memory protection and virtual protection than DOS/Windows ever did..

From I hate MS
"If you look in the executables in the Windows (XP) directory,  you find internal labels like 'ProductName: Microsoft Windows (TM)  operating system;  ProductVersion:  3.10'.  There's even DOS 5.0 code with a 1981-1991 copyright date.  What a great new product!"

98/ME contains partial 16bit support making things like VXDs (Virtual device drivers) necessary. There is such a performance jump because 2000 and above is completely 32bit.

Sure?
" . . . to find the bulk of Windows 3.10 and DOS 5 (all of it 16-bit code) under the hood of Windows XP makes you wonder about the design princibles that have gone into each 'new' version of Windows."

To sum up- "An internal memo amoung Microsoft developers mentioned 63,000 (yes: sixty-three thousand) known defects in the initial Windows 2000 release. "

If Your House had a roof made by Microsoft - you'd be advised to don raincoats (or hold-up umbrellas) if it started raining OUTSIDE!  :-P

[vortexau]

bhyman1 ADVISED-

oh, and to those who have complained about Windows in general, you are dillusional.   The problem is YOU. You are either impatient too  learn someting new, or just plain ignorant.

GEE - Are YOU campaigning to be voted Chief Astroturfer?
or . . . did you arrive from a alternate Earth where their MS actually produces quality software?   ;-)

[Glaucus]

The OS can't be very well optimized when it uses that kind of memory footprint.

Fact is, the memory footprint is not an indicator of optimization. System caches for example can use up tons of ram quite easily. And like others have mentioned, Windows provides far more services then does AmigaOS right out of the box. If you are hell bent on running an OS on 64MB then you can simply disable every service on XP, and you'll get a system similar to AmigaOS in functionality.

The fact is, it's AmigaOS that needs to mature. AmigaOS needs to add more services and to exploit the new resources available on today's hardware platforms. It's perfectly acceptable to use up three times the memory if that memory can help you speed up certain tasks. As a programmer I know that one can optimize for either execution speed or memory usage, but rarely both. with today's cheap memory it's quite acceptable for a system to be memory hungry if that's what it needs to perform a little faster.

  - Mike

[mikeymike]

From I hate MS
"If you look in the executables in the Windows (XP) directory, you find internal labels like 'ProductName: Microsoft Windows (TM) operating system; ProductVersion: 3.10'. There's even DOS 5.0 code with a 1981-1991 copyright date. What a great new product!"

That is probably the dumbest assumption I have EVER heard.  Does AmigaOS 3.1 have MS-DOS code in as well because the version is 3.1?  Does any v3.1 MS product therefore have to have MS-DOS code in then?  Is it reasonable to assume that the version number 3.1 could have been used and not necessarily had anything to do with Windows 3.1?  For example, MS *could* have used a version numbering system for Win32 starting from v1 and it not necessarily had anything to do with Windows 1.0!

Sure?
" . . . to find the bulk of Windows 3.10 and DOS 5 (all of it 16-bit code) under the hood of Windows XP makes you wonder about the design princibles that have gone into each 'new' version of Windows."

That is complete cobblers.  The DOS support in the NTx series is extremely minimal.  Only the most well-behaved DOS applications will work under NTx.  And a program written in native win32 code doesn't necessarily have to even include let alone be the native 16-bit code.

To sum up- "An internal memo amoung Microsoft developers mentioned 63,000 (yes: sixty-three thousand) known defects in the initial Windows 2000 release. "

Software has bugs in!  AmigaOS has bugs in!  "Known defects" can be anything, things that no user is ever going to notice or be affected by!  I'm not saying MS software is "that much better" or anything, I'm just saying it's not perfect, which everyone here is perfectly aware of.

Your argument would be much better if for example you cited the bug fix list for NT4 SP6, which is a good 300 issues in length.  What about the original release plus 5 service packs previous to that service pack?  Those are issues that users are experiencing!

[PPCRulez]

The fact is, it's AmigaOS that needs to mature. AmigaOS needs to add more services and to exploit the new resources available on today's hardware platforms. It's perfectly acceptable to use up three times the memory if that memory can help you speed up certain tasks. As a programmer I know that one can optimize for either execution speed or memory usage, but rarely both. with today's cheap memory it's quite acceptable for a system to be memory hungry if that's what it needs to perform a little faster.

I don't agree with AOS needing more builtin services. I prefer to have a choice of for example network stack. Look at how much better the Amiga TCP/IP stacks are just because you have a choice. It would be accepteble to trade of memory usage for speed. But speed isn't particular good in Windows and it has a large memory footprint. In fact Windows has speed issues. Sometimes you can click on something and it just takes a while before something happens. Multitasking isn't exactly Windows strongest point. ANd we shouldn't even mention the horrible Virtual Memory implementation.

And system caches is a solution to an unoptimized system in the first place. With an optimized system you wouldn't need that kind of caches.

I find the memory usage of Windows unaccepeble even when running a bare minimum system.