Rant

It was all just nostalgia, right? It only seemed like that, and if you had to use it now it would grind forever, take a week to reboot, never get round to loading word until it was time to go home ... Except it really was that fast. After spending months struggling with fast pentiums running Win 98 I had to go see a friend to sort out his net connection. His machine booted up much quicker than the pentium, and all round seemed more responsive. And damn it, it was a 386 running Win 3.1. Word came up in a reasonable time, and worked. His internet explorer wasnt as slow as I have seen on some pentiums.

Of course, there have been articles recently about turning your old 386 and 486 machines to surfing boxes. They wont take the latest RealAudio, but the majority of stuff will be just fine. I have also seen a set of speed-up patches that give Win 98 a boost of 15-20%. All they do is downgrade the internet explorer back to version 3 and the entire system is faster. Add one of those WebWasher type programs to remove banner ads, and run something like TweakMTU and your P3-500 could run nearly as fast as that 386 box.

Yes, Win 3.1 is buggy, doesn't stay up too long without crashing, can't run on those fast AMDs ... it has a few problems. So if you have a real fast PC and you want to get some real use out of it, what do you do? Do you go for Win NT? Or wait a bit for Win 2000? Do you really have that much spare time that you want to throw away? Oh, and some of the games wont work. And some of the important software might not either. Doing some sums here, lets add it all up :- new operating system + new software + relearning most of what you know. OK, impressive total there, now that's a lot of effort to go to. So what do you get for you investment of time and money? A slow, clunky version 1.0 of Win 2000. Sometime after Christmas. Hopefully.

There have been serious reports saying not to use Win 2000 for at least a year after launch, because it's such a large project that it wouldn't be wise to trust it until a good service pack or two into it's life. Roughly speaking, your machine will be dependable again in 2001. Except of course there are always security issues. Like that Melissa virus. And the one that was even worse that took out Microsoft and Intel. And those bugs in Active Scripting. And the Java VM. Oh, and soooo many others that I kinda lost track of. Microsoft recommend at the moment turning off just about every feature that makes a page interactive.

I used to spend a lot of time assisting people and businesses with the kind of things they wanted to use computers for. Maybe music, maybe animation, artwork - whatever it was, their problem was how to use the software to do the job. Maybe it was due to the fact that Win 3.1 used text based .INI files, and I sneakily recopied them every boot. Nice, the machine came up exactly the same every session. It didnt take anything more than a copy command in autoexec.bat. Of course now I spend a lot of my time repairing installations, and half of that time having to reinstall windows from scratch. A program like Drive Image can usefully copy a partition and get you back online in half an hour, but if you saved anything to the wrong partition, downloaded anything, had one of those automatic web installs ... what I am saying is the whole thing becomes very dangerous. The creative element seems to have gone out of it, and a lot of pain has come in it's place.

Maybe it's time for a clean start then, so where to go from here? The Mac seems to be running the same old OS it always has, and thus has the same problems coming to it as windows has now. Mac magazines seem just as plagued with "system extensions" as Windows users do with out of date .DLLs. Pretty much the same concept anyway, so why shouldn't it cause the same trouble? The Mac doesnt crash quite as often, but still cant be relied on to be solid when you are doing serious work. BeOS looks good, but doesnt actually work on any machine I have tried so far. Much as I want a serious platform for multimedia, it looks like you build the machine around the OS which is too much trouble if you already have a computer suite or two.

Yup, that only leaves one thing doesn't it? Linux. So far it has run happily on every machine I tried. It seems to have the speed of the slimline OS if that's what you want (using fvwm) or the bloat and friendliness of windows (using KDE or Gnome). Except even in the bloated form, the programs stay rock solid, and the machine responds to your keypresses or mouse moves whatever else is happening. So far, I have NEVER managed to crash Linux. I thought I had managed it once, but realised I had only crashed the video card. When I moved along the network to another machine I managed to bring the desktop up there and sort it out. No rebooting needed. When Netscape crashes, it doesn't really get to affect anything else on the system, so you just open it up again and carry on. Netscape not being "tied to the operating system" means it's just another program not an imbedded time bomb waiting to crash your system.

Staroffice or Wordperfect seem perfectly able to read Word 97 files, unlike Word 95 or Word 6, so seem a better choice as an upgrade! Plus Staroffice is free and highly capable. You can even run it in Windows if you want. There are all the trinkets and media players you could want, servers for anything you care to mention and none of them seem to cost anything.

If you want to develop a sophisticated database to back a web site, there are professional level tools available. Or, if you just want the coolest looking desktop going, it's yours. Please think about it the next time you are sat in front of the blue screen of death, and you know that document you've been typing for a day is screwed. If you want to try it, you'll find it on cover CDs of magazines most months, or for a couple of quid from the Linux Emporium. If that works for you, go for one of the big box sets like SuSE, Red Hat or Caldera.