Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Fun with Polls Which OS do you use?

I've been curious for a while...

...and may I had it's a real indiscreet question??? LOL

I use Windows XP and it doesn't work fine at all. :p I had loads of problems with Millenium, but at least I expected them. I've had XP for three weeks and a half and it's a living nightmare. Infrequent reboots whenever I hit the "x" to close a programme (usually Internet Explorer or mIRC). Reinstallation didn't change anything.

I think the next OS I'm going to use is the computer box. I'll stuff the comp into it, seal it with sellotape, and bury it in a corner of the cellar. Pen and paper, here I come!

Kaethel (who is seriously thinking of getting her old Windows-98-Second-Edition-laptop back into the gist of things)

I still use Windows 98 and see no need nor reason to change just yet. It does everything I want it to do and meets my requirements, with minimal fuss.

LabRat

Sorry

That was the reason it was as far as I could from my computer.

That's what I did, until I bought a new graphic card and the processor that I didn't upgrade wasn't able to keep with it. Since I have plenty of RAM, I upgraded to XP, the system works better, it only had frozen once, and you could say I looked for the glitch. At home I've got Mandrake 9.0 (Linux) too. The progam I use at work it's written for Unix, not windows version .

At job, I'm with Red Hat 8.0, and it's fine.

Jose

I use XP at work and at home, and on my laptop, and I love it! No problems at all. Far fewer crashes than ever before - in fact, almost none! And things run faster than they did before too. Looks to me as if Gates finally got it right.

As for Kae's problems, I suspect installer error... and no, Kae didn't install it herself!


Wendy

I use XP at home and at school. They only time I've ever crashed it was when I wrote something really crazy in Matlab and tried to run it.

- Alicia

Let's see.. it all depends on the day, and where I am. Two days a week, I do what's called "Hotline", which means I sit in the supervisor area at 2 Win98 machines and talk to ISP's. We're technically not allowed to use IRC at work, so I telnet home and use IRC on my home linux machine. I love technology! The other three days, I'm usually sitting at a station with a Win98 machine and the iMac running OS 9 & X. One of my programs only runs in OS 9, so I run Classic inside of X. That is, when the Windows monitor hasn't been reduced to a single white line running vertically through the middle of the screen.

At home in my computer room in my corner, I have a Windows XP machine, the aforesaid linux machine currently running Red Hat 9, and a mac I inherited from my father-in-law, which is never turned on. The other side of the room is my husband's computers, the 98 machine, the XP machine, and the Win2000 machine. Then, in the living room is where our laptops usually are.. I have the iBook, also running 9 inside of X, and hubby's Dell running XP. Nope, don't have enough computers.

I've honestly had no problems running either OS 9 or OS X. I've migrated completely to X, as I can do so much more with it than I can with 9.

I really think Kae's problem is her techs. Lemme at it, lemme at it! </cowardly lion>

My XP acts up all the time. My friend says that it's a problem with "service pack 1" It's a fairly new computer for me, so I am going to burn everything to some disks and set up a totally new OS. Probably Win 2000 (or XP without SP1 )

-Breanna (who is now 1 post away from Kerth status and is off to go hunting for somewhere to post).

Ahh the joys of XP. I still have to figure out how to stop the comp from restarting itself. Meanwhile, my main beef is with HP...last time I shipped the wretched thing back to San Jose, they claimed that they fixed the flickering screen...well surprise, surprise. It's broken again.

JeN

Hmmm... I'm the only Win 95 user so far.

Don't think my little 2gig laptop can support anything else, but 95 seems to work most of the time for me... when it's not crashing. I just have to baby it.


Missy

I've started a thread in OT ( here ) to enquire about people who experience problems with XP and see if it's a bug of the system or something wrong with our installations. Can those of you who have had problems with XP please take a moment to check it out and answer that thread? Maybe we can figure out what causes the system to reboot (or crash) and, maybe, just maybe, find a way to fix it?

Kaethel

I use Win2K mostly and it works just fine and dandy. As a Microsoft Certified Professional in both 2KPro and Server and will stand by my opnion that Win2K is the most stable OS Microsoft ever produced! It includes planty of drivers and even those that do not come with it don't seem to have a problem. My scanner, printer, DVD burner, ect all work fine.

Just my 2 cents.

well, let's see... the one that was running 95 is gone. the one that was running 98se was downgraded to ME. the old favorite is still running DOS 6.22/win 3.11, but we only use that at all because mom is too technophobic to learn a new system. still, i miss DOS. i used to know that whole comp backwards and forwards. my main computer (this here laptop) is running XPlode, but other than not recognizing the built-in network card (keep forgetting to call tech support about that) i haven't had too much trouble yet.

Paul

I have had XP now for about 2 weeks. It works fine to me, no problems, yet. I'm hoping it's better than Win. ME.

Ja-10 the computer illiterate

LOL, Paul, I still remember fighting with config.sys and autoexec.bat in my old i486DX 33 Mhz to free enough base memory to play some games. I don't remember which was but I found one that asked for 600K :rolleyes: .

Karen ,I do pretty much the same . I do telnet to remote machines that are running IRIX. However it last between 4 and 6 hour to finish each calculation.

I had forgotten to vote . I'm surprised that there are DOS/Win 3.X users out there, and how nobody surf under VAx/VMS with Lynx :p

Jose

Aww, I remember the days of DOS and Windows 3.1...And there was this computer game I had called Taipei...it was, like, *the thing* to play...memories *happy sigh*. Of course now they call it Mah Jong Solitaire, and they made *levels* /me shakes head...I know the truth!

Win3.1 users are getting less and less. I do tech support, so I talk to a fair amount of people using different OS's. When I started 5 years ago (May 1998), 1 in 15 or so users were still using Win3.1. Now, I get about 1 3.1 call a year. I don't think we even train the newer techs on it. My way of thinking (even if it isn't our higher-ups) is that if Microsoft doesn't support their own OS, why should we?

And I love lynx. Great for fast surfing, when you don't feel like waiting for pictures to load. Granted, I don't use it on VAX (my work has a telnet login via VAX/VMS which has lynx, but why use it on a tiny screen?), but I do on linux, and even found a Windows client once.

Guess this lost my last post. In my house, I have a number of computers, all of which I built myself from components except for the Mac, of course. The Mac is running MacOS X Jaguar (10.2.x). Most are running WinXP Professional. The guest computer runs Win2K Pro. My son's computer runs Win98SE. The server runs Win2K Server.

Jaguar for the Mac is a very good OS, far better than its OS X predecessors, which lacked speed and connectivity with Windows networks. The current version only lacks drivers for older hardware.

I think it was Kaethel who opened up these computer-related threads to ask if people know anything about bugginess of XP. Every MS OS is buggy, but XP is fairly reliable I've found. Of course, manufacturers of hardware can easily provide a driver that can bring down the whole OS (drivers must run in ring 0, for those who understand Intel lingo) so a single bad one can do untold harm. The usual way I deal with a problem like this is to uninstall hardware or software (usually latest first) until the problem goes away.

In worst case scenarios, I reinstall the OS and add hardware one at a time until it destabilizes, then back out the offending hardware. Then I do the same with software packages, though those are less likely to cause system-wide reboots.

If reboots are a serious problem without BSOD's (Blue Screen of Death), turn off the option for rebooting automatically within the System Control Panel.

hey, someone else voted for DOS/win 3.11! cool.

so, who are you?

to clarify my vote, we've got a few computers in the house. dad's runs ME, mine runs XP, and mom's (which used to be the only one in the house and which was under my primary care) runs win 3.11.

i had fun with it, and didn't so much fight with config.sys and autoexec.bat as update them on a semi-regular basis. i got to know both files (as well as a couple others) fairly well. i also upgraded the thing by hand, with gateway tech support (from back in their early growing stages) talking me through the difficult jobs step by step, sometimes spending hours on the phone.

the comp, btw, is a 90mhz system, bought a week after they came out with the seriously fast 100mhz systems. it's got a blazing fast 14.4 modem, and the original unthinkably huge 1 gig hdd (one of the first!) has now been replaced with two 2.2 gig drives. it uses an old version of compuserve with paid connect time and no local access # (the extended network requires updated software). it's a little shy on memory to run win 95.

as for unix, linux, and lynx, my school computer system runs on unix (which can, of course, interface with a linux box). i've been learning it slowly. tried using lynx, but i like graphics too much. luckily, the default browser on the school system is netscape. even more luckily, netscape is actually relatively stable on unix.

the thing i really want to say, though, is that i object to your use of the term "operating system" in reference to various programs which contain the word "windows" in the title. :p

Paul