Simviation Forums

I've been advised by several forum members to steer clear of WinXP, but I guess I'm a glutton for punishment.  A free XP upgrade came with the PC I'm now using, which came with WinME installed, and I guess it's sort of like forbidden fruit....I keep thinking about it .

If you have had or know about any bad experiences with XP, I'd sure like to hear about them.

Thanks,
Doug  

Do you want my short version or long version on how shite XP is???

I'd like to hear as much as you have time to write, but.... so far it's not too encouraging .


P.S.  I'd like to network to one other computer (Win98 ) and share internet hookup (56k) if possible.

I'd also like to hear any good experiences anybody has had....not all at once now .

win xp is great just you need to keep upgrading it, campared to winME (space hog) xp is pretty good. I get to the internet via my dad's winME machine, and my mom and my sister have win98. I liek xp and its easy to set up too.

Nothing against it Doug, apart from I could'nt for the life of me get an XP Pro p4 to network with a pIII with Win98.....

Many older games simply would'nt work.

Old uncertified drivers tended to totally screw it up.....

Some games ran slower (although by not very much)

XP's very easy to keep upto date, especially with Cable/ADSL.

My games crazy brother in law uninstalled his (bloody expensive!) XP pro and went back to Win98 S.E. to cure the above Gremlins.

If games arn't your thing, I'd say use XP without a doubt. Otherwise, Win98 all the way.

Anyway, computing without that "Blue screen of death" from time to time just don't seem right to me....  ::)

BTW, I have XP Home. Its still in the wrapper! If CFS3 requires it (doubtful in the extreme!) I'll duly install & use it from then on in. Until something I want to use requires XP, its staying where it is.

As for sharing 56k, I use "Proxy" by AnalogX http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/proxy.htm its free for 2 machines, I'm using it now whilst my "other half" chats to her friends on MSN Messenger.
I can even play Medal of Honor or CFS / CFS2 on-line whilst sharing the connection (V90 Modem, 56k dial up  ) and I frequently do!

Hope this is of some use to you friend.

Paul.

Thanks, Paul, this fills in some more pieces of the puzzle .

Nothing against it Doug, apart from I could'nt for the life of me get an XP Pro p4 to network with a pIII with Win98.....

I should've mentioned that I have XP Home (in wrapper).  That might not be quite as bad as Pro.

Many older games simply would'nt work. Old uncertified drivers tended to totally screw it up.....
Some games ran slower (although by not very much)

Alas, I just read that XP does not support 16-bit device drivers, and apps that directly access hardware must supply an XP virtual device driver plus an XP 32-bit device driver, or they won't run.  Also "calls made by a 16-bit application must be translated for the 32-bit operating system. This translation process, called thunking [ ], adds to execution time."  

I thunk...er...think it may be possible to run some of the troublesome old apps, but with extreme effort and detective work

XP's very easy to keep upto date, especially with Cable/ADSL.

Looks like I'm going to be using 56k for the foreseeable future.

[quote]Anyway, computing without that "Blue screen of death" from time to time just don't seem right to me....

win xp is great just you need to keep upgrading it, campared to winME (space hog) xp is pretty good. I get to the internet via my dad's winME machine, and my mom and my sister have win98. I liek xp and its easy to set up too.

Thanks for the input, Turtles .

Yep I also have had no problems with XP in the 9 months I've been using it...

Yep I also have had no problems with XP in the 9 months I've been using it...

Thanks for the encouragement, Whitey .

[color=Green]Ok my essay on how crap i find XP (on my personal experience)

To start, a few months ago when i first booted my computer up (after it being delivered) i found that the Graphics card did not have a 'designed for XP' logo on the side of the box and XP refused to accept the drivers. So i had to muddle around the internet and modem options before i could go online.

When i finaly did i was imediatly prompted to sign my .net passport which i could not back out of and still havent been able to disable

Next i had to network this to my older ME machine, and i had been told that networking XP to anything other than XP was a hard hurdle to tackle, perhaps this was an understatement...
I went through the wizzards on both machines about a gross of times, changed cables (spend +

I've been tinkering with computers since MSDOS and PCDOS were the 2 "rival" operating syistems...  back then you could boot and run a PC with a 360K 5.25" floppy. !

Unless, for some ungodly reason you NEED to run XP, stay away from it. I'm on a holy mission to get all my software running under LINUX. (I know it's gonna take a while),,  Until then, Win98SE is far and away the only choice for gaming right now (even WinME is safer in a gaming environment than XP)..  AND TO TOP IT ALL OFF,, my wife (she loves XP) just got "zonked" at the ZONE,, seems the fight between Sun-Micro-Systems and M$ is spilling over there and the "inter-active" gaming is no longer supported for XP.  I told her I could prob get around it by downloading JAVA at Sun's web-site, but she won't let me near her computer, as she knows I'll prob throw it out a window (no pun intended).

XP is everything that's bad about windows made worse.

See ya all in LINUX land some day,,,  

ok whats yur prob with winxp? if you get new hard ware you will be fine with winxp. The reason you are all hating xp is cuz you went out and bought xp for yur old systems and it wont work with em.  Xp is fine for me, i have a bunch of old games and they work. the oldedst i think i have is full throttle which is a win 95 game.

[quote]ok whats yur prob with winxp? if you get new hard ware you will be fine with winxp. The reason you are all hating xp is cuz you went out and bought xp for yur old systems and it wont work with em.

Same here,,  I just built an Athalon 2100,  2gig of DDR2700, Gforce4-MX440,,  and thought ,,"OK" lets try XP one more time,,,   well,,like I said, it's everything that's bad  about Windows,, just bigger and prettier,,

How we ever got to this point is insane.. An OS that's bigger and more complex than most of the applications that run on it is trouble from the get-go.  

The only redeeming quality of XP is the file format it uses,, but disk space is so cheap now,,that it doesn't warrant it's use and all the conflicts that come with it (dual-booting). And, if you ever need any encryption,, you should be "gaming" on a different computer altogether.

Power to the penguin my friends.

Thanks, fellows.  I really appreciate the detailed answers, essays, etc.!!  I'm a slow learner sometimes, but I'm beginning to get the picture.  You may have saved me weeks of grief. :-/  (I'm assuming that these things apply pretty much to XP home as well as Pro.)

I'm going to print out this thread and reread it every time I start thinking about installing XP.  As for my WinME, I'm going to adopt the attitude:  If it ain't fixed, don't break it.  

Now I'm waiting for Son of XP ....or maybe Linux.  I believe I could run multiple OSs under it, as with UNIX.


P.S. to Brett:  I'm looking forward to Bama's game with Southern Miss today.  In my post last week, I think I had reverted to the "intellectual" stage I went through in my youth.