I thought that was windows 7 with 8 being the version for touchscreen tablets. If I'm honest my favourite is XP and occasionally returning to it (for programmes that don't work in anything later) is like meeting a best friend from school. I much prefer 11 to 8 or 10 except I haven't found a way to defeat Bing which manages to pretend to be Google.Ah. Maybe that's why I've been keeping away from Windows 11 !
... and, anyway, what happened to the assertion we once heard that Windows 10 would be "the last ever version of Windows" ?
Kind Regards, John
New home for the Ohms symbol ?
- Thread starter bernardgreen
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XP will probably always be my favourite. I confess that I still use it on some machines, years since it cessed to be 'supported'. It did everything I wanted and, had those "everything's" not evolved in ones that wouldn't work with XP, I';m sure that I would still be using it routinely today!
I was essentially eventually 'forced' to change, but I jumped straight from XP to 10, hence minimal experience of anything in-between.
... and I certainly don't 'need' anything that 10 can't (currently) do but do not doubt that I will eventually again be 'forced'.
However, I really don't understand all the interest people seem to show in operating systems, 'advances' therein and differences between them. As far as I am concerned, an OS is something which ideally would be totally invisible to the user, being there only to facilitate the operation of software applications - so, in an ideal world, I would not expect users to have a clue as to what OS their computer/device was running!
After all, do you know what 'operating system' underlies the software running in your TV, or whatever? (and do you care?)
Kind Regards, John
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Yes with tablet it does publish before I am ready. Phone hardly ever use. Prefer using laptop as I can select pictures easier.
I agree with everything you say and no I don't give a flying fig what the OS is if it does what I need it to do. However I hate IOS with a vengence.
I still have one PC running windows 3 (not 3.11) to programme some elderly bits of radio kit and likewise XP.
I had to progress to 8.11 and a new machine for exactly the same reason for newer kit. leading up to the cessation of support for Windows 8 & 8.1a year ago they updated it to death, to the point it basically stopped working and sent it to my personal PC engineer to upgrade to 10. The statement 'it won't take windows 10' resulted in me buying this windows 11 machine. However new HDD, RAM and firmware flash later the machine came back running 10 very nicely and ready to go to 11.
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Indeed.
I must say that I finally 'retired' my machines running Windows 3 /3.1 / 95 / 98 quite some time ago, but i still have one running 98SE as well as some running XP.
Interesting. However,I fear that it might be more of a problem with upgrading to 11. None of my present machines are said to be able to run 11 and, since that's seemingly primarily because of their CPUs, I suspect that may prove to be insuperable ... but we will see (sooner than I would like
). I'm a little surprised that Microsoft have been 'allowed' to do this !Kind Regards, John
Sad to say I have several towers (I think 4) still populated and I suspect ready to run and I think all 486's loaded with 95 and 98se which I simply can't bring myself to scrap, actually before that I really need to unload the documents from them, especially photos. One has 3x 8gig hard drives (Huge for the day) crammed with music for radio station use, possibly none of them have ever been linked to internet so no gremlins either.Indeed.
I must say that I finally 'retired' my machines running Windows 3 /3.1 / 95 / 98 quite some time ago, but i still have one running 98SE as well as some running XP.
Interesting. However,I fear that it might be more of a problem with upgrading to 11. None of my present machines are said to be able to run 11 and, since that's seemingly primarily because of their CPUs, I suspect that may prove to be insuperable ... but we will see (sooner than I would like
Kind Regards, John
If you think Microsoft are bad for redundancy; take a look at the antics Apple get up to, 2 year old phones simply stop working at the end of a 2 year contract when their most capable OS is closed down.
Yes, I also have umpteen of them, and also many of their non-tower predecessors!
Good grief - I'm not sure that I knew what a gigabyte was back then - some of those old machines have 40 MB or 80 MB HDDs, perhaps going up to around 320 MB.
I, too, really need to discover what is on those drives (if still accessible), but I doubt that it will be anything particularly important - unlikely to be any self-created photos, since I think it was well into the 90s before I had a reasonably-usable 'digital camera'. In addition, I have vast numbers (certainly hundreds, probably thousands) of 3.5" and 5.25" 'floppies' (and a few 8" ones), and even some tape cassettes and 'punched tape'!, which contain 'something', but haven';t been looked at for decades!
Sure, I didn't even bother mentioning Apple
A couple of years ago I was (very reluctantly) 'forced' to upgrade my (perfectly functioning) iPhone 5S to an 11, simply because 'apps' increasingly would not work on it. Mind you, I think that the'app' developers also have a fair bit to answer for, since I feel sure that many of the 'apps'could be be designed to work on old phones and/or old versions of IoS!
Kind Regards, John
I have only one left which I suspect is non functional as it was left at a hilltop radio tower site for maybe 20 years standing on edge on the concrete floor, it was used for several purposes, for a short while as the RDS generator into the stereo multiplexer, to programme eproms and 2 way radios. We had a multiuser repeater on site and adding/removing users required altering the EEprom then a later version of the controller was RS232 programmable and a 3rd was RS232 and DTMF so added an additional receiver to be able to perform remotely.
My first HDD was 10MB 5¼ double height in a desk top machine which must have been 2ft wide x 8" high with 5¼"FDD and 3"FDD(not 3½") in 5¼" format. The noise of the HDD was such that I would move away to speak to someone.
I seemed to pick-up other similar machines with huge HDD's, all the way up ooh maybe 80MB then one arrived with 160MB which had so much stored on it it must have been something like 20% full.
Then I started picking up Nokia PC's from work, still 3.11 286 desktops but only about half the width and 6" high containing 3½" drives, commonly standard 1.4MB and 4MB HD FDD's and 2HDD's typically a very small like 4MB and a 100-200MB. I simply removed the useless cards, deleted the existing data and dragged data from the bigger machines via parallel ports and delivered the big machine to the scrap metal yard for about £1 a time.
Some of those Nokia machines had 2 monitor outputs, I think; 9 pin CGA (or EGA?) and 15 pin VGA one of them contained software for 2 keyboards; one on 5pin din, t'other on 25pin RS232 and 2 windows on each screen, one keyboard typed into top window on one screen and bottom window on t'other and 2nd keyboard Vice versa. We put that to good use in radio stations between the studio and the control room, typically a message such as 'Fred on phone answering quiz' or script for news report or travel news etc
Those were then replaced with the towers with everything bigger and faster as newer mother boards wouldn't fit in them. The very first HDD I purchased was 1.2GB at £149.99 trade and everyone asked what the f*** I needed all that space for then 4.7GBseemed to be standard. The playout machine started as a normal 4.7GB and as music filled it an 8.4GB added and two more HDD's as they became full, when an 'engineer' did some work on it he nearly croaked seeing 30GB of storage. I think that has something like 30K songs stored and all were audio analogue recorded from vinyl or CD using several machines then transferred - either by parallel port or moving HDD's around.
In their day they were very much state of the art and a lot of money, the playout machine probably cost more than 2 months wages.
I've found with apple products when a device reaches it's maximum IOS and they stop supporting that IOS it's not uncommon they simply switch it off which bricks the device.
After a reorganisation of my little bedroom office/small item workshop/printer room, a couple of days ago, to make it more usable - I awoke at 2am during last night, and decided to, rather waste the wakefulness, have a go at waking up my old WinXP desktop. It hadn't been used for around a decade, apart from it hadn't worked a few years ago, with some complaint about no boot disk.
Once in the BIOS, it was obvious, it was attempting to boot from CD. Having fixed that, it booted up, but had no access to the Internet, or LAN. It was set on a fixed IP, a range no longer part of my LAN. Once changed to DHCP an IP, from my router it began working fully. The first thing it did, was log into my old Tiscali email, and grab all the mass of spam, accumulated since the last time it connected. Surprised it was still able to login to Tiscali, after all the threats they made after I changed ISP's, to switch off my email account, unless I paid a premium to keep it live, which I never did.
I was surprised at just how quick, neat and usable that old desktop was, compared to my Win10 and 11 systems.
Next job, will be to see if I can fire up my big old WinXP laptop.
Yep, I've always reckoned XP was quicker, despite the fact it's on older slower machines.
Oh well that's progress.
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