Is a stable operating system too much to ask for...?

[StageLeft]

Win2k at work on a Celeron 600 + 128 ram. I am working with vis studio today and I have various other things open. THen the thing gets reeeeealy sluggish so I have to hit reset. Upon resetting I find that all email in my outlook inbox are gone. More fun than this is that the project I had in VB was magically deleted from the directory...yet MORE fun is the fact that it totally buggared Interdev and I finally had to reinstall win2k Prof...of course for some reason the CD isn't working so now my computer is waiting for another copy of Win2k (working on a sick employee's comp now).

GRRRRR Win2k server works like a dream at home, this is terrible though and its been slow and crappy for months.

 

[Ranger X]

Did you shutdown properly? Sometimes a sudden reboot can make you loose what you were working on. Why are you running Win2k server? Are you managing workstations?

 

[StageLeft]

rangerx No, I'm running professional.

red dawn when I say sluggish I mean _goddamn slowly_. It does this every few days it will take me like a minute to move the mouse across the screen, really really annoying and I have to hit reset! I do need more ram I should ask for some...

 

[DAM]

skoorb; does this happen when you are using things like word or other small appz? outlook 2k, viz studio, or pretty much any MS programming program are memory hogs, i have 256 megs of ram, and i only open three large appz at a time as a general rule.



in conclusion, what red said.





dam()

 

[StageLeft]

Well with the 256 I have at home on win2k server with dual 533 celerons I can open anything I want to. Here I'll admit I have a lot open, at any one time on this 128 megs ram I'll have:

Windows explorer
Visual interdev
1-2 instances of visual basic
sql server 7
1-2 windows of IE
winamp
ICQ
MSN messenger
seti@home

Other than the last 3 I need the others to work!! I agree its an awful lot and I'm surprised it doesn't screw me up more...I also compile a vb project every hour or so. I'm going to scratch out ICQ and seti@home once the computer is up again.

 

[Rogue]

Need more RAM.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

Heh, an NT4 box here at work couldn't take a joke from the power company (2 second power outage) and when it came back up the software hive had been selling nuclear secrets to china. 4 days later I'm trying to figure out why a couple of files from dell don't exist anywhere else (on any computer) and why NT keeps looking for them.

 

[tim0thy]

all the developer applications from microsoft are general memory hogs. i suggest at least 256M RAM if possible, faster processor would be good too, but it seems as if the swapping is slowing you down.

 

[Viperoni]

I leave win2k on all day (16 hours) with my poorly ventilated Dual 366's @ 550 box.
My tnt-2 pro runs @ 65 celcius!!!
No hicups or anything.
Then again, 272mb ram helps

 

[Mday]

stable in terms of what?

real world OSes that people use are made to take everything the designers of the OS thinks the user will throw at it.

obviously the designers did not think of everything.

 

[Mday]

it's easier to design an OS that can only do one thing, but... we don't have those OSes do we?

 

[Hawk]

You "hit reset" as in hit the reset button? Or actually told it to shut down and reset? Just hitting reset is bad. =)

 

[Mark R]

If you are using NT/Win 2K using NTFS rather than FAT on drives can also help.

In the event of a system crash/reset - NTFS is partially fault-tolerant meaning that it can recover from corruption of the critical filesystem data. A system crash should almost never cause loss of a file that had not been opened for writing at the time.

The FAT FS, OTOH is quite prone to losing large chunks of data in the event of a crash.

Additionally, I've found 2 major things that can make an NT system unstable:

1 - poor drivers
2 - insufficient physical memory

 

[KotchY]

win 98 is stable, my box been up 6 days..

 

[nd]

6 days? bahahahahaha..

[nd : ~]
(vivid) uptime
6:59pm up 29 days, 10:53, 1 user, load average: 0.00, 0.01, 0.00

And this isn't even remotely impressive for UNIX..

 

[StageLeft]

Win98 is NOT stable. I've used it as a development platform and even small compiling of Java code will crash it in an hour, seriously. Win98 is absolute garbage. Win2k (assuming you have enough memory!) will stay up basically as long as you care to keep it going, my one at home I only reboot when something physical needs to be done.

A good OS (linux or stable NT variant) will stay up for months or even more!!

 

[NicColt]

win98 is very stable, it's what we do to it that makes it flaky.

 

[nd]

NicColt,

Yeah, like attempt to run 3 things at once. If you think Win98 is a stable operating system, then you are 1) not a programmer, 2) not someone who's used more stable operating systems (UNIX, hell, even NT/2k is far more stable).

Win98 is a single user operating system that let's basically any crash take down the operating system with it.. not a lot of protection. Memory is not protected between processes.

 

[NicColt]

I agree with you nd it's no UNIX or Win2k but what im saying is that win98 and even winME are geared towards home or personal use and not as a development platform. ICQ has been using us as ginny pigs with every release of icq, every beta realease and every beta drivers. Who here doesn't have some sort of shareware, beta software or beta drivers. Heck even Openvms is more stable but I can't play HL on OpenVMS. I'm even surprised that it's that stable with what I do to the poor thing, like I said it's quite stable, it's what we do to it.

 

[StageLeft]

Well Win ME is certainly better than Win98, but even as a home machine I find Win2k infinitely better than win98 because I don't have to reboot daily and it doesn't chunk out after playing a game for a few hours

 

[Hawk]

WinME sucks big time, too bloated, lots of useless features, and it's more sluggish, and isn't really more stable than 98.

 

[Viperoni]

I like WinME
I'm not worried about leaving my box running all day (16hours)
I was worried when I had win98 though :Q
Win2k is really stable for me, I like it.

 

[ToBeMe]

I think WinME is fine...yeah, it's bloated with some useless junk, but disable what you don't need and mine is just as fast as Win98SE and I have yet to have a crash with it on two systems at home......my kids crashed 98 almsot daily! Of course I have to agree.....2K is better yet but not yet diverse enough for my kids system. I can't even tell you how many days WinME is up on the kids system W/O reboot....personally on mine I know I've gone at least 5 days. I'm sure it's not great for everyone.....but in my situation ME does seem to out do 98!