atw: Re: more tips

Well Michael (Lewis) and Bill (Parker),

Perhaps "WinDoze", rather?

I have never had any woes with XP, provided it is loaded from a complete 
install CD-ROM and is running the latest editions of every software 
application made to suit it.

Never, I repeat NEVER, use a Microsloth "Upgrade" to change your PC from 
another (especially a dissimilar, FAT file, rather than NTFS) operating 
environment or you are asking for trouble.  (I suspect that the PCs that 
people were having trouble with have been recently "upgraded" to XP, 
thereby massively downgrading their reliability and performance.

With XP being NT6, you can upgrade from NT4 or NT5 (aka 2000) with a fair 
chance of success, provided your PC has nothing but the latest (XP 
supported) components throughout, but if you try to move up from ME (the 
Masochists' Edition) or 98 (flavour one or two) you will end up with a very 
dodgy PC indeed.

In fact, this raises the ugly spectre of changing the WinDoze flavour / 
install pack on older equipment, to which I must reply DON'T DO IT.

XP on a brand new machine with mind boggling resources (at least half a gig 
of ram and 40 gigs of free hard drive space and a CPU with a clock speed 
frequency that causes radiation burns and cooks toast within a 3 metre 
radius) is de riguer, if you want the thing to run and keep running.  Plus 
you'll need a CD or DVD burner and a fast network connection over which you 
should / must back up your work.

The other musts with XP are having a separate software firewall (the 
default XP one is designed to be readily breached so that MicroSloth can 
send your equipment details back to MS - the Mother Ship to see if you have 
a legit install of everything MS - and, I hear, track your browsing habits) 
and a well supported antivirus tool.  So you need the AdAware or similar 
spyware detector as well.

As for the Mac, well it's a lovely tool that no client I have experienced 
outside of the advertising / graphic design industry uses, which sadly 
limits its usefulness in the Australian corporate marketplace.  If it were 
more widely entrenched here, I'd love to have one.  I used to run a Mac 
emulator on my Amiga, back in the pre RISC chip days (Motorola 68k series 
CPUs) when having a Mac was by far the slowest way to run Macintosh software.

Now it is a whole new ball game and a much more HP-UX / LINUX style of working.

Mind you, if all the regular software tools that I require were available 
and properly supported on well supported LINUX GUI on a 
do-it-yourself-PC.  I'd rather go for something efficient like that, which 
makes the most of decent (not over specified) resources, thereby massively 
reducing the outlay I'd have to make on computing equipment, of which the 
Mac hardware, which is very widely considered to be "boutique" machinery, 
is (and has long been) some of the most overpriced.

Cheers,

Michael Granat
Write Ideas


At 10:20 17/3/2004, you wrote:
>Bill Parker:
>
> > ( taking the view that "windows" is effectively your operating
> > system).
>
>Ineffectively, rather.
>
>
>Michael Lewis

Michael Granat -- Write Ideas*

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