BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - Help needed

Ian Malcolm

wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 17:17:22 GMT, "JoeSpareBedroom"
wrote:

wrote in message
. ..

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:37:18 -0500, wrote:

On Fri, 11 Jan 2008 06:44:10 -0500, wrote:

Boot times were far more important in win9x because you have to do it so
often.

I have machines around here that run 24/7 and never get rebooted.

Sorry, but that is an exaggeration, unless you just boot them and
never use them, or you possibly meant they run for 24 hours a day for
a week between reboots. :')

There is a reason for that. Win9x was designed with a fixed 64kb of
system resources. As programs are opened and closed, system resources
are used. Not all are returned when you close a program. Eventually,
you run out of resources and your computer locks up or blue screens.
At that point, you have no alternative except to do a reboot. Ther is
no way around that.

Win XP and 2000 are completely different and do not have this well
documented limitation.

Maybe he only runs one app on some of the machines, never bouncing between
other apps that get started & shut down all day. When I ran WIN98SE, I saw
the problem you described all the time, except on occasional weekends when I
knew I'd be getting massive numbers of faxes, so I'd restart the machine
late Friday, turn on Winfax, and let it run all weekend. Monday morning, the
machine still ran briskly. Of course, as soon as I started up the other 5-6
apps I work with all day, things went back to normal. Nasty, in other words.

Resources running down would not affect speed at all. The computer
would run until resources went below about 5%, and then it would pitch
a fit and freeze. There was no gradual slowdown associated with this
problem. If you had memory leaks in your apps that slowed the computer
down by forcing greater use of the swap file, that was entirely
unrelated to system resources.

There was another issue with win98 that existed in all versions that
guarantee that they have to be rebooted periodically even if you never
open a single application. There was a patch to fix it, but it rarely
got applied because it was rare to find a win98 computer that ran long
enough (49.7 days) for the problem to occur. :')

Yes, I ran into the 49.7 day bug on our server at my former employer. It
lived in a cupboard together with the telephone switchboard and was up
24/7 running 98SE, FTP, EMail, various shares, some VPN stuff and an
intranet web server with a fair bit of CGI stuff with only a scheduled
monthly reboot from 2000 to 2006. (The MS patch didnt actually fix all
the 49.7 day issues) It did get the occasional new hard drive, RAM or
CPU upgrade etc. but never needed a reinstall.

Should have seen our POS box on top of the till on the counter. Ran the
Accounts, cash sales and Invoicing + word 6 and Lotus 123 for windows
for doing estimates for 10 years, 5 days a week, on a Dell 486/50
running stripped down Windows for Workgroups 3.11. If we were still in
the repair business it would still be in use, the UK hasn't swapped
Pounds for Euros yet and that would have needed the accounting software
upgraded. We kept its predecessor (A very small form factor Elonex 386
box) up to date apart from the data files which were backed up to the
server daily, as a hot swap backup, that system was mission critical,
but never had any trouble with it.

--
Ian Malcolm. London, ENGLAND. (NEWSGROUP REPLY PREFERRED)
ianm[at]the[dash]malcolms[dot]freeserve[dot]co[dot]uk
[at]=@, [dash]=- & [dot]=. *Warning* HTML & 32K emails -- NUL:
'Stingo' Albacore #1554 - 15' Early 60's, Uffa Fox designed,
All varnished hot moulded wooden racing dinghy.