Nuke the site from orbit--it's the only way to be sure!

[sinanju]

Or, to paraphrase Darth Vader, "Don't fail me again...Win XP!"

After spending several hours last night and most of the day today wrestling with Windows 98*, I've decided that it's time to nuke the entire site from orbit. In other words, tomorrow I will order a complete-install (no upgrade) version of Win XP with two licenses. When it arrives, I'm going to reformat the C: drive on my computer and install the brand spanking new OS. And in a few days or weeks, when snippy has prepped her computer, we'll install it on hers as well.

I've stuck with Win98 as long as I have because I hate having to upgrade, and because I still played DOS-based games that wouldn't run under XP. But I haven't played any of those games in a long, long time. And I'm tired of wrestling with Win98 on a regular basis.

And because, much as I hate to admit it, I've been working with XP at my job for the last two or three years and it's been remarkably stable.

*I tried to open Forte Agent after playing BF1942 last night and the system locked up. Reboot. Since then, neither Agent nor Mozilla nor ASE nor Semagic (the LJ update program) nor, basically ANY program that accesses (or could access) the internet will connect...if they load at all. The cable modem and router work fine (I'm typing this on snippy's computer in the next room). Occasionally, right after rebooting (again), I can get Agent to open, but it times out while trying to connect to either news or mail.

And the system is quite unstable now even when I use non-internet-access programs. I've rebooted a zillion times so far today (aside from TWO complete reinstalls of hte OS from the OEM disk in hopes of fixing the problem). All this on top of weeks of having the system lock up periodically, and getting "please wait while Windows updates your configuration files" on booting, when I've made no changes and installed no new software or hardware. SOMETHING is changing every time I start the system, but damned if I know what.

So I've had enough. I'll be switching to XP as soon as I can get a copy and finish backing up all my data files (yeah, yeah...) and saving all the install files for programs I've bought or downloaded free via the net.

Comments

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

I just got XP for the first time on my new laptop. (It's a Vaio, and that pretty much means that the fan is a little bitch and I have to keep it on a cooling pad.) As far as the XP goes, I wasn't too fond of it since the laptop is missing every update since like, XP was released, and that has been nothing but a nightmare. Once I got it on the wireless card I could install the updates and everything seems to be in order. Before that it shut down whenever it wanted and did all kinds of crazy shit. Until recently I couldn't shut it down because a driver was being batshit insane and just kept restarting the whole thing, and hibernate wasn't an option. Dumbass computer.

I did set the appearance for classic windows, though. I hate the new XP look. I also downloaded mozilla, and man it is fifty time faster than IE or netscape.

[sinanju.livejournal.com]

I've heard that Service Pack 2 for XP is evil incarnate and should be avoided at all costs (someone at my wife's office downloaded to her PC and lost a week of productivity before the contract IT guy showed up to fix it and read her the riot act--they'd specifically warned the office not to get that one). But my experience with XP, as I say, has been positive. I've have almost no trouble with it in all the time I've been using it.

And once I've got the new OS loaded--and ONLY the new OS--I'm going to load Norton Ghost and image the clean new set-up for the next time I have trouble.

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

See, that's funny, because all my problems ended when I was finally able to get the damn service pack 2. I have heard that it interferes with a bunch of stuff, but if you get the custom job life is good.

(Plus my husband is a computer engineer.)