Longest OS install you kept?

[NewBlackDak]

My mom had a K6-2 based compaq that I bought for her in early '97 with win98 on it. She used it until June 05, and bought a very nice laptop. The compaq got handed down to my step-sister. She types her papers, browses the intarweb, and plays simple games on it still. It's had the ram upgraded from 64-256, the processor upgraded from 300-466(OCed 450), and a voodoo4. I installed 98SE upgrade when that was new, but that was the last time I touched it.

 

[Smokey The Bear]

98 for 8 years and still a going

 

[shortylickens]

My dads celeron 466 eMachine came with win98 when it was still new. He had it for 7 years. The only thing that died was the power supply and it didnt fudge up the hard drive.

 

[SynthDude2001]

I can't remember for sure, but probably somewhere between 6 and 12 (maybe 18) months, I don't tend to go without reinstalling for very long. Just reformatted yesterday actually, because I was getting some strange problems like IE no longer being "a valid Win32 program", and other stuff refusing to run randomly...didn't have any viruses that I could detect, but whatever. I probably should have done a full reinstall instead of just a repair when I swapped out my motherboard/CPU in November. Anyways, the last reinstall before that was in May/June and only then because I got a new hard drive that I wanted to use as my main. Used to reinstall almost exactly every month without fail back in the Win95/Win98 days...

 

[magomago]

On my current XP install. Since Summer of 2004. That is actually good for me since I used to install 98 every 3 days or so. Actually I wanted to reformat to make it feel clean, but I found that I have so much junk installed (ironically on which ubuntu it has most things built in so I don't have to go around digging for it) that I occaisonally use that it is WAAAY too much of a hassle. Also, some sites I forgot the passwords and I use them every few months as well, and thankfully firefox saves those passwords
Though currently when I load up windows I get a bunch of NVWIz errors and I end up closing them and they don't affect preformance at all

 

[drag]

I had a Debian install that lasted maybe 2 or 3 years.

Used it daily, installed and uninstalled software on a whim.

It outlasted 2 computers and a harddrive, as well as being moved around a couple different partition scemes. cp is great, then I discovered the wonders of a knoppix cd combined with netcat and tar.

I hate having to reinstall a perfectly good operating system, especially to do something as small as switching out a motherboard or a harddrive or whatnot.

Eventually I blew it away to try out Ubuntu, Fedora, and a couple other distros. But now I am back to Debian.

 

[EPZ Soldier]

Windows 95!!! had that for 4 years and loved it!

 

[Ausm]

Originally posted by: Powermoloch
Me

Puke bucket Icon needed BADLY!




3 years Win2K


Ausm

 

[spyordie007]

Of the stuff I've currently got running there are win 2k installs that have been running about 6 years now and XP installs close to 4.

I had NT 4 boxes that had been running longer, but finally retired them last summer.

Even if you only do a moderate job taking care of your installs the majority of the time they should last until the origional hardware is too obsolete to care... :roll:

 

[Nothinman]

Even if you only do a moderate job taking care of your installs the majority of the time they should last until the origional hardware is too obsolete to care...

Even then they should still last, swapping out hardware isn't an excuse to reload unless you really want to or you're running something like NT4 wihch won't cope at all.

 

[JonnyBlaze]

a little over 2 years. windows2k3

 

[ValuedCustomer]

Originally posted by: nadirshakur
I am finding that I have to format for often these days, 6 times in the past 3 months. I do use a lot of software gaming and lots of upgrading. I am not surprised that I need to do so more often.

That's ridiculous. I don't care how much un/installing you're doing, needing to format twice a month is an indication that something is very wrong. ? specifically what symptoms appear that lead you to believe you need to format?

 

[QueZart]

I have 2 P-O-S RapidFire Boxes at work running on DOS 6.0 , that work perfectly everyday for about 15 maybe 16 years now...

2months ago i coulda said 3 But a HDD finally died and had to put a new one in, course I didn't really re-install DOS since I long lost the disks many years ago, made a floppy on another system with the DOS 6.0 system files and format caommand, format /s the new drive then slaved it on my home computer and abd dumped the contents of the old drive back \on it..

 

[PorscheMaD911]

On my own, built PC, probably a month at most. But I REALLY want that to change, so I'm not hacking around with my current install. It's only been about 6 hours so far though ;-)

 

[xgsound]

Originally posted by: Link19

Originally posted by: pkme2
Win 98 for 6 years.

That is shocking. Windows 98 would always $hit on itself after having the same install for much longer than a few months long because it was a POS OS. You were probably very lucky. Or I should say you didn't have many programs loaded and/or installed. If you loaded a lot of applications, Windows 98 would $hit on itself real easily. It was only a matter of time before it did because Windows 9X sucked

I have had Windows XP SP1 installed on a system for about 2.5 years before eventually wiping it out and installing Windows XP with SP2 slipstreamed.

He's not alone. I believe my install is from 1999 or so. I still have Wingroove on here from before I got my DB-50 wavetable card. My current win98se started on an old 100 Mhz pentium modified to take an amd K6 200. It's been through several motherboards and now it's on this 700Mhz Athlon (fic sd-11 just to tempt fate) I'm using right now. It's had dx everything on it at one time or another. It's had numerous browsers . I encode (slowly) Mp3's (about 6 Gb), save, print, and edit pictures. I found that win98se can be very stable with 128 Mb and above if, as you say, you don't overtax it. Even when you do, with 128MB , it doesn't eat itself.


Jim

 

[Nothinman]

He's not alone.

But he's definitely in the minority, Win9X is a real PITA to keep running well. IMO it's not even worth running Win9X because of the maintenance costs.

 

[fartbag]

Originally posted by: ValuedCustomer

Originally posted by: GreyMittens
I have an NT 4.0 server box that I installed in 1996 that is still running in production

edit: on the same hardware!

GreyMittens with the win! :shocked:

Especially since it is an NT 4 install. Install a driver and the piece of Shiot BSOD's.

 

[Link19]

Especially since it is an NT 4 install. Install a driver and the piece of Shiot BSOD's.

Windows NT 4 is still far better than anything piece of sh*t Windows 9X based OS. At least it is a real 32-bit OS and not some fake 32-bit OS with a native 16-bit architecture underneath.

 

[Nothinman]

Especially since it is an NT 4 install. Install a driver and the piece of Shiot BSOD's.

Same thing could happen on any version of NT, but yes NT 4 and earlier were somewhat less resilient and harder to fix in those cases, and I really don't think servers should be considered because they take a lot less abuse. Usually you install them and let them be, besides installing patches. I mean hell we just recently moved our DNS servers off of bind on NT 4 last month and previously we had a NT 3.1 WinFrame server around because of 1 remote user.