Railfan Technology > For those stuck in Win XP-Land

This link may prove helpful for a few.

http://www.linuxpromagazine.com/Resources/Special-Editions/18-Free-From-XP

Gimp's not photoshop, but then photoshop's not gimp ;-)

John.

A few years ago I lost two HP laptops to MS viruses. A friend gave me a disk with Linux
and I was able to retrieve both units from MS land. My new laptop is a MacBook Pro
and never a glitch....Swede...Albany,Or

Co-workers tell me that Linux is very stable, very versatile, well respected and generally well supported. Did a quick check on the www and can't find PhotoShop that works on Linux. Not sure about Photo Scanning S/W but it's worth checking out before committing.

There is an underground network of die-hard XP and even Windoze 95 users that have anti-virus software, etc available. Not sure how long that will last and no idea if it's hacker-proof.

I'm no XP lover, but I sure like it better than any of the products that have followed it.

Interesting thought-piece about PC market:

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/the-un-dead-pc-121815558.html

Smartphones and Tablets are interesting but you can only do so much. The idea is that you need a large screen and a keyboard to 'most' tasks. Kinda depends what the actual 'work' being done is.

Once again, Linux could do a lot of the 'tasks' but there is still after-market requirements.

For scanning use VueScan on Linux (also available for Windows.) I once got Photoshop CS2 working fairly reliably om Linux use Wine, but I use Gimp exclusively these days.

There are settings within Win7 and Win8 as well as 3rd party software which make your desktop screen look and function the same as WinXP. When you install the old XP programs in a 7 or 8 machine you tell the computer to run the software in XP mode and the new software treats them that way. They run at about XP speed while programs for 7 take full advantage of the new chip architecture and speed right along.


junctiontower Wrote:
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> I'm no XP lover, but I sure like it better than
> any of the products that have followed it.

Posted from Windows Phone OS 7

Not any expert on Linux but I have a small system with it I use and I had a lot of old Unix knowledge. What I know about Linux is you have to go out and find software and download it to your system from various sites. It is more self actuated, it doesn't just always do everything for you.

It may also require some command line Unix type commands and some digging to get things working.

Bob

junctiontower Wrote:
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> I'm no XP lover, but I sure like it better than
> any of the products that have followed it.

For video editing, Microsoft has added features to Vista (native support for camcorder .MOD files for Premium & Ultimate editions), Win 7 and 8 (native support for H.264/AVCHD) to make it easier. I've added third-party codecs and converters to my XP Netbook, to make it almost as functional, but that required research and experimenting.

The link TCnR posted is interesting. The forecast for PC "revival" might sound like typical Wall St. pundit hype, except for the upcoming HEVC standard (High Efficiency Video Coding, a.k.a. H.265), which will support video with 2160 and 4320 vertical lines! FYI, current HD video has 1080 vertical lines.

Current PCs and tablets won't have enough CPU power to process the tighter compression of H.265 or 2160/4320 video, so people will have to upgrade to "keep up." The Wall St. soothsayers failed to mention that, although consumers might not go for the crazy video resolutions and prove them wrong. By the way, I read another report from a technical journal saying that tablets are so good people are not upgrading, and sales have plummeted recently.

Depending on distribution (Fedora was mentioned in the first link, and the other famous one is Debian), Linux software installers are pretty easy to use. However, if people want something even more stable and reliable, why not go for FreeBSD, where BSD stands for Berkeley Software Distribution. Yes, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) will run on FreeBSD, as well as on Mac OS X and Windows.

In fact, Steve Jobs chose BSD Unix for the NeXT workstations, which evolved into Mac OS X that we know today. So Mac OS X can be considered a cousin to FreeBSD running on PCs. That might disappoint the cult-like "Mac is better than PC" chants in discussions like this, because there isn't much difference under the hood between the PC and Mac these days, both Intel machines - gone are the days of Intel vs. Motorola where there were real differences.

I've got an older machine here that had XP on it and wanted to reformat the HD and install Win 95 or 98 to put some old games on it for my grandkids. Redneck Rampage and stuff like that.
Got the HD reformatted, but can't get any further for some reason. I still have the 95 and 98 disks (I never throw anything away) but sure am stuck in limbo now.

Frisco1522 Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I've got an older machine here that had XP on it
> and wanted to reformat the HD and install Win 95
> or 98 to put some old games on it for my
> grandkids. Redneck Rampage and stuff like that.
>
> Got the HD reformatted, but can't get any further
> for some reason. I still have the 95 and 98 disks
> (I never throw anything away) but sure am stuck in
> limbo now.

If you remember what FORMAT C:/s does, or what CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT were, you have a fighting chance. One of your Win 95 or 98 disks should be bootable from a floppy...

But I bet your XP machine doesn't have a floppy drive, and USB floppy won't cut it if the operating system (MS-DOS) or the BIOS doesn't support it as a bootable device. I know that Windows NT and later would boot from a CD-ROM, if the computer's BIOS allowed it, and a machine new enough to run XP should be able to do that.

My guess, based on the very limited information you provided is that the HD's partition might be too large for Win95 or Win98 to install. Keywords are FAT16 and FAT32, and you can't use NTFS to run either of those versions of Windows. Good luck.

I forgot about the FAT32 thing. Maybe that's keeping anything that old from being installed. I even have Windows 3.1 disks. Machine has a floppy drive, so that's not a problem. I'll get back to fooling with it one of these days.
Too busy finishing all the brass steam projects I've sat on for years.
Thanks!

I have a couple of old XP programs that I didn't want to part ways with after the introduction of the newer WIN OS's and found that installing XP in a "virtual" drive within my WIN 7 OS enabled me to continue running my old programs right along with the new stuff. As far as I can tell, programs operating within the virtual XP OS function as efficiently as those in WIN 7 and the XP programs access the printer ports and other hardware used by WIN 7 directly. Very seamless, efficient operation. As mentioned above, with a little work, WIN 7, etc., can also be configured to "function" like the old XP OS, with the Start Menu, Quick Launch and many other handy XP features.

I recently upgraded from Windows 8 to 8.1 because I lost a driver (MS never ceases to amaze me). Anyway, the upgrade screwed up my Microsoft supported Live.com email when it converted it to outlook.com. Two MS techs and a MS made it worse. I have a way to access my old email and I just want them to leave it alone! You are supposed to be able to migrate from one to the other but MS techs couldn't do it in my case!

It'll be a MAC sooner or later.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/11/14 15:40 by wabash2800.