swaaye wrote:What do you hate about XP, when compared to 9x? The theme?
Nope, not the theme... I could care less what it looks like <grin>. There are a bunch of things, but here are a few that pop into my mind:
Directory dates; why the hell does NTFS stamp the current date on any directory that has been modified (files copied to or deleted from)? A royal pain, as I've always used directory dates as an idea of when I had originally installed a program or started a project.
File dates; the files on every single CD that I own or have created usually has the file and directory dates off by either 5 or 10 hours. Now, I understand why NTFS does this, but man...
NTFS; while NTFS is a much better and more stable file system, my previous hard drive backup scheme/method is now unusable. Under FAT32 I'd use Windows Commander and a spare hard drive (already partioned and bootable to match my regular hard drive) to copy the entire hard drive in verbatim to the backup drive. I'd use those removable hard disk "caddys", and pop in my backup drive anytime I wanted to completely back up my working drive... select all files/directories in WIndows Commander, F5, and have lunch 😀 Can't do that with an NTFS file system.
The infernal taskbar; why, in Bill Gates infinite wisdom, does the taskbar have to "jump up" everytime a program requests attention? Another annoyance...
No real DOS; I understand that NTFS doesn't support this, but there was a lot of things I could do in native DOS that I can't under WXP. One that comes to mind (at least on customers' PCs) is the ability to virus scan or scandisk from a DOS bootup... the *best* way to do these sorts of things (virus scan; boot from a CD or floppy to a sterile envrionment, scan disk; from DOS without having Windows thrashing the hard drive).
No real DOS #2; and of course, all of my DOS games. Like I posted before, if it weren't for DOSBox <grin>...
swaaye wrote:I would never want to be on 9x again for any real work. It is inherently unstable
Like I posted previously, I've had very few problems with W98SE throughout the years.
swaaye wrote:and how it is gimped by its native support for 8/16-bit DOS and 3.x apps
To me, that's a selling point 🤣!
swaaye wrote:Even just burning CDs on 9x is scary because of how flaky it is. Remember the days before the "burnproof" buffer underrun protection? I used to burn coaster after coaster due to random IDE DMA flakyness. Uhg. 😁
I've used NTI CD Maker Pro for (maybe) over a decade... never had a single problem with it, short of low-quality CD blanks. Heh, I was so dead set on using that version at the time (verses something newer such as Nero), I had made several hacks to the program so that it would recognize any newer/faster CD burner that I had bought <grin> 😀
swaaye wrote:The jump to 9x from 3.x was huge
Heh, I went straight from W311WFWG to W98SE... totally skipped the W95/W95B/original W98 thang/era <grin> 😀
swaaye wrote:MS can't really figure out a way to do that again and that's why XP is still popular today even though it has been replaced twice!
This I must agree with. Even though I dislike XP, Vista and 7 is an abomination IMHO.
Anyhow, that's only a few... I could prolly think of a bunch of other gripes I have about XP, but it's a bit late here <grin>.