"Wayne.B" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 20 Aug 2009 16:47:16 -0400, wrote:
That's pretty much the way I felt when I scored this $90 Compaq XP
machine. I am still running W98 on 3 or 4 machines around here tho. My
wife and I have XP Pro on the two we use all the time. There just got
to be too many new things not supported on W98 and I was dragged
kicking and screaming into the 21st century.
Win2K has got W98 beaten by the proverbial country mile, and you can
still get drivers for just about everything. It was a huge step
forward in reliability, ease of installation, processor support, you
name it. XP has a few nice features that I like but it was just a
small step for the average user.
NT was geared more toward the business users. XP took NT's engine and made
it more consumer friendly, that's all. It's NT in a pretty package. Vista is
worse than Me was, and they tried to do the same thing. Me was designed to
pretty up win98... Vista tried to do the same thing with XP. Both OS's
failed miserably in their tasks.
I was a beta tester from Win95 thru Vista. They listened to us for bugs
(most times), but turned a deaf ear when it came to useability, and
important features. They must figure that they know what the people want
more than the people.
The last experience with vista turned me off MS beta testing for good. I
turned down an invite for Windows 7, but it looks like they're just doing a
public beta anyway. I LOVE the public betas... they get you hooked on it,
and it works (maybe), then you have to buy it before the beta you have
expires. g Else you can delete the whole shebang and reinstall your old
OS.
At least with XP and Vista the testers were given 5 valid install keys for
their troubles... and there were plenty. ;-)
I'm probably sticking with XP until they drop support for it.
--Mike