my tired old Amiga vs. Windows

[fudge]

with all this talk of nostalgic talk of the Zork games and the tired rivalry of AMD vs. Intel i was reminded of my trusty Amiga 1200 sitting out in the garage slowly gathering dust, and the pile of 3.5" disks slowly accumulating errors in the afternoon sun..

so out i went and pulled it's tired frame out from under the other junk, hooked it up and the hard drive screamed into life and i was faced once again with my trusty old workbench screen, it stared at me as if to say: "you loved me once.."

i was reminded once again just what a fantastic little machine the amigas were, sure mine only had 2meg of memory, but it was lightning compared to my A500.. it was reliable.. it may have crashed a bit, but you could be sure that it'd bounce right back after it finished flashing its power light..

not like these machines we have nowadays.. oh no.. you have your "scan disk" and your BSOD's and your crashguards.. you even get the almost ridculous, albeit rare, crash that necessecitates a fresh install of the OS.. I ask you.. IS THIS PROGRESS??

IS IT?

...

...



everyone needs a good rant now and then.. don't you agree?
... what i learnt from my Amiga days was to just accept that crashes happened, sometimes you knew why, sometimes you never found out why.. they just did.. so what's the deal with people getting so uptight with the windows series being, apparently, so prone to crashes? i've used 95,98SE and XP and i really haven't noticed any more crashes than i used to get with my Amiga.. except now, with Word for example, you can get your work back most of the time..

SO.. umm.. yeah.. the point: Do any of you out there find XP any better in terms of stability than say 98? or 98 vs. 95? i don't seem to notice a difference, but i kinda figure that maybe i've been dealing with crashes for so long that it just doesn't matter any more..?

[archie]

Well, I do agree that everyone needs a good rant now and then. I did have an Amiga 500 and used only Pro Video Gold for video graphics in lieu of a character generator ... and I don't ever remember it crashing. It may have been because it wasn't used as much. Having used XP for the last 2 months, I would say it is not prone to crash at all ... but so is Win98, so could the crashgards be causing the problem? BTW, is the A1200 going to stay setup or going back to the garage.

[fudge]

sure, i'll try and kept my A1200 going for as long as it can stand it.. i think the HD is nearing the end of it's life but that's not really a problem.. all the games are on disks

there are some fantastic old games on it that i just can't stop wanting to play.. ahhh speedball 2, how i've missed you...

....

i sometimes wonder if the crashguards don't cause more problems than they solve.. i've had scandisk screw up HD's before.. once i had my old win95 drive hooked up to my win98 machine (twas to be a storage site..) and good old scandisk reckoned it had a bad file system and slaughtered the whole thing.. data and all! *sigh* funny thing was for months it was fine.. i guess that it must have just been annoying scandisk..

[doctorgonzo]

fudge, I have been using XP for a couple of months now, and so far it has not crashed. Sure, it may have hung for a few seconds now and then, but so far, no blue screen of death. Much better than 98, which I was using before and would crash regularly.

[satan]

Reminds me of my ibm ps/1 with dos and windows 3.1. It was maxed with 4 megs of ram upgrades from 1, and had an upgraded 350meg HHD, 2400bps modem a SB16 card. I think that thing crashed only once or twice ever, god bless windows 3.1, the most stable windows ever! That computer had to be my favorite. Well, when I built my next sys, basically my current with older parts, I used NT 4.0, and at first I didn't know what a blue screen was until my brother told me. Then I dual booted with 98, then eventually upgraded to 2k. Never was my computer the same, seems like I spent more time getting it stable then I spent using it. Well, thats M$ for you.

Want to remember the old computers that used basic, just get a TI graphing calc. Writing little basic programs during school passes the time for me. Everyone should have one, 4MHz, 128k memory, 24k ram, and 100% stable, well almost, I crashed my calc once or twice.