I am a big fat hypocrite
Wednesday, August 1, 2001 by AJCrowley | Discussion: WinCustomize Talk
Yes, it's true. After my little rant about how I wouldn't be upgrading to WinXP for some time yet, I finally caved. My Win2K install was starting to act up, and XP RC2 was up on MSDN, so I did the only thing a big fat liar such as myself could do and downloaded it. My main gripe with it before was the issues with sharing "protected" folders, and since this was on my main machine, I don't need to access these from my other machines. Anyway, after much tweaking, crashing and swearing, I got everything to work except for Gamespy Arcade, which absolutely refuses to co-operate. After all this, I'll probably stick with XP when the official release happens, but I still don't see any advantages whatsoever over Win2K except a few graphical tweaks.
Vaguely on the same topic, I was reading an forum about XP today (may have been on slashdot, if not something of the same vein). People were complaining about the system requirements of XP, and how it would rule many newbies out, as their hardware wasn't up to spec. This reminded me of something I was reading within the last few days, I have no recollection of where (maybe here?), but the general gist of the article was that Microsoft's OSs were being held back by the fact that they were always trying to cater to older hardware, to get more people to upgrade. Because Apple has control of the hardware used to run their OSs as well as the OS themselves, it places them in the position of being able to really get the most out of new technologies, by making their new software, which is bundled with the hardware to take full advantage of this. Anyway, I'm rambling now.
AJ
Vaguely on the same topic, I was reading an forum about XP today (may have been on slashdot, if not something of the same vein). People were complaining about the system requirements of XP, and how it would rule many newbies out, as their hardware wasn't up to spec. This reminded me of something I was reading within the last few days, I have no recollection of where (maybe here?), but the general gist of the article was that Microsoft's OSs were being held back by the fact that they were always trying to cater to older hardware, to get more people to upgrade. Because Apple has control of the hardware used to run their OSs as well as the OS themselves, it places them in the position of being able to really get the most out of new technologies, by making their new software, which is bundled with the hardware to take full advantage of this. Anyway, I'm rambling now.
AJ
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paxx
Reply #42 Friday, August 3, 2001 10:24 PM
Reply #42 Friday, August 3, 2001 10:24 PM
Hmm... I guess, whatever rocks one's boat. I know I would disable just about every WXP feature. Which leaves me two reasons to upgrade from Win2k: transparent icons and possibly being able to play the Tomb Raiders games (the only game I can't get to run on Win2k). Dunno, but for me it's not worth the money. I'm not saying I'm not eventually gonna try it out, I'm just saying I won't pay for it.
hoverboy
Reply #43 Saturday, August 4, 2001 12:59 AM
Reply #43 Saturday, August 4, 2001 12:59 AM
Paxx - I did a little testing this morning and was able to get every Tomb Raider to run, however, I only tried this on a Geforce 2 GTS. Also, TR3 and TR4 each required a patch, but XP's nifty "Compatability Mode" switch enabled all of the others to run great.
btw - which TR are you playing? I Started playing TR4 (Last Revelation) in January and liked it so much that I went and bought the previous three and decided to finish those before I played TR4. I'm about 2/3 or the way through TR3, which is by far my fav so far.
btw - which TR are you playing? I Started playing TR4 (Last Revelation) in January and liked it so much that I went and bought the previous three and decided to finish those before I played TR4. I'm about 2/3 or the way through TR3, which is by far my fav so far.
DaWebMassa
Reply #44 Saturday, August 4, 2001 2:24 AM
Reply #44 Saturday, August 4, 2001 2:24 AM
I'll not further this "war" but conclude by repeating the immortal words of the infamous Hippy... "Bleah!"
Tarkus
Reply #45 Saturday, August 4, 2001 1:08 PM
Reply #45 Saturday, August 4, 2001 1:08 PM
misterME (shouldn't that be misterXP 
):
The multiple svchost.exe listings in the Task Manager is not a bug. The same thing happens in Windows 2000.
It's not the same service running multiple times, either. It's a generic name for Windows services. That just means you have a lot of different Windows services running.
If you want to cut down on this 'bloat,' then stop some of those unneeded services from running. Here is a site that will give you a good head start (despite being written for Windows 2000).
http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/win2k_services/
):The multiple svchost.exe listings in the Task Manager is not a bug. The same thing happens in Windows 2000.
It's not the same service running multiple times, either. It's a generic name for Windows services. That just means you have a lot of different Windows services running.
If you want to cut down on this 'bloat,' then stop some of those unneeded services from running. Here is a site that will give you a good head start (despite being written for Windows 2000).
http://www.3dspotlight.com/tweaks/win2k_services/
paxx
Reply #46 Saturday, August 4, 2001 3:56 PM
Reply #46 Saturday, August 4, 2001 3:56 PM
hoverboy, I started with the original, then I totally loved it so I bought the second one when it was released, and so on.
I was in the middle of playing TR3 when I changed my OS from Win98 to Win2000. And could never continue my game cause it won't run on my machine. I even aso have Last Revelation sitting on the shelf still in the wrap. I checked on their website and they clearly say that although TR MIGHT work on Win 2000 they do not support it. I took my chance and sent them an email, and they basically told me they couldn't caer less if it doesn't work on Win2k. Last time I checked, there was no patch available.
I was in the middle of playing TR3 when I changed my OS from Win98 to Win2000. And could never continue my game cause it won't run on my machine. I even aso have Last Revelation sitting on the shelf still in the wrap. I checked on their website and they clearly say that although TR MIGHT work on Win 2000 they do not support it. I took my chance and sent them an email, and they basically told me they couldn't caer less if it doesn't work on Win2k. Last time I checked, there was no patch available.
misterME
Reply #47 Saturday, August 4, 2001 10:31 PM
Reply #47 Saturday, August 4, 2001 10:31 PM
Thanks, Tarkus.
I don't know if I'd simply optimized my install of Win2k better, or maybe it just used more descriptive names, but I never recall seeing svchost.exe more than once in Win2k.
I'll check that site out, though. It would be nice to know what's gobbling up all my RAM after boot, and get rid of that which I don't need.
I don't know if I'd simply optimized my install of Win2k better, or maybe it just used more descriptive names, but I never recall seeing svchost.exe more than once in Win2k.
I'll check that site out, though. It would be nice to know what's gobbling up all my RAM after boot, and get rid of that which I don't need.
hoverboy
Reply #49 Monday, August 6, 2001 11:52 PM
Reply #49 Monday, August 6, 2001 11:52 PM
Paxx - I have a patch for TR3 that *may* enable it to run on your 2k machine. It a compressed TR3 executable.
http://communities.msn.com/MarkRabold
It's in the files section, under games/game patches/tomb raider 3. It replaces your current Tomb3.exe. I think this is what I had to use to get it to run in Win2k. This file was widely available at Eidos.com but now it's a bit difficult to locate there.
You may need an Passport to get to the file
http://communities.msn.com/MarkRabold
It's in the files section, under games/game patches/tomb raider 3. It replaces your current Tomb3.exe. I think this is what I had to use to get it to run in Win2k. This file was widely available at Eidos.com but now it's a bit difficult to locate there.
You may need an Passport to get to the file
Tarkus
Reply #51 Tuesday, August 7, 2001 3:29 PM
Reply #51 Tuesday, August 7, 2001 3:29 PM
Also, don't forget about the handy Compatibility tab in your executable's file properties. That will fix a lot of WXP incompatibilities.
misterME
Reply #52 Tuesday, August 7, 2001 8:32 PM
Reply #52 Tuesday, August 7, 2001 8:32 PM
Tarkus: Yeah, that Compatibility tab is a life-saver. I've used it on about 10 different apps so far. I had to do some tinkering to figure out which compatibility mode to run each in, but ultimately I got them all running like champs.
Another check in XP's column.
Another check in XP's column.
paxx
Reply #53 Tuesday, August 7, 2001 9:27 PM
Reply #53 Tuesday, August 7, 2001 9:27 PM
I asw that Windows 2000 also has a compatibility tab. When you in Properties of a shortcut, you can run the app in compatibility mode, you then have the choice in the dropdown menu for Windows 95 compatibility layer, Windows 98 compatibility layer, or Windows NT4 SP5 compatibility layer.
I don't know if it works, I only tried it on one program so far and it didn't do anything.
I don't know if it works, I only tried it on one program so far and it didn't do anything.
AJCrowley
Reply #54 Wednesday, August 8, 2001 3:53 AM
Reply #54 Wednesday, August 8, 2001 3:53 AM
Grar, XP is horrible. It's not that I have anything against MS, there's good reason that they've conquered the desktop OS market, but I just don't like this OS. The whole experience to me felt like downgrading to WinME. The compatibility mode is nothing that wasn't on 2k from the start (check your CD, there's a file on there called apcompat.exe). I also found that the application compatibility mode simply didn't work for anything that I was unable to run on XP outside of compatibility mode. I had lots of stability issues, though I understand that the majority of people here didn't. It might turn out to be a good OS yet, but only time will tell, and in the meantime, I have no plans to attempt upgrading again until at least SP1.
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Reply #41 Friday, August 3, 2001 9:22 PM
So I ran Win2k. But a lot of things I wanted to run (especially games) didn't jive well with Win2k, so I was SoL.
Along comes WinXP, with the stability and recovery features of Win2k, but compatibility that exceeds by far even the Win9x line, bundled with a host of easy-to-use (and easy-to-find) tools, and a much improved interface (even without all the Luna stuff). I guess for me that's worth the $200 upgrade price.
YMMV.