I continue to stand by my findings. Also keep in mind that virtually every enthusiast site in existence today has at least one “Optimize Windows XP” series. I believe history proved me right, and current events continue to prove me right.

Dave, could this be the article you’re referring to?
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayNew.pl?/livingst/990322bl.htm

Gen X/Boomers –

Well, it looks like I have my choice, sort of. I was the oldest and born in 1960. Of course I only have one sibling (a brother born only a few days before 1963) so it is not clear cut.

Maybe that means I get to have my cake and eat it too for rare change of pace! 🙂

What are your experiences with 98lite? I will be using it to install soon and would appreciate any tips from someone who has already done it.

Thanks,

Bruce

Laptops: A desktop will always be faster than a laptop if the vintage is even close. Remember most laptop hard drives spin at 4400 rpm and have high seek times. IBM just recently released a 5400 rpm laptop drive. So a machine with a decent CPU and a 7200-rpm disk will kill any laptop for disk-intensive tasks.

Samba: Trial and error is the key. If I could work out a formula that always works, I’d write about it.I always eventually get it working but I’m usually scratching my head afterward. (If it’s any consolation, Netatalk for Mac connectivity is even tougher.)

GenX: Most people say GenX ran from 1960 or 1961 to 1982. The boundaries are tough; someone born in 1960 who was the oldest in the family tends to identify with GenX, while one born in 1960 who had older brothers and sisters tends to identify with the Boomers. At least that’s my experience.
Someone born in 1963 or 64 is certainly a GenXer.

Well, my main all around PC that I use at home is an AMD K6-2 550 MHz on a FIC motherboard w/2 Mb cache(can’t remember the model number right off the bat but it lets you tweak the settings quite a bit whoich I have only done a little), 256 Mb PC133 RAM, 7200 RPM Maxtor 30 GB HD, average Matrox G450 video, etc.

This PC is notably faster than the PIII 800 MHz Dell Latitude laptop I’m using at work or my wife’s Celeron 500 MHz PC.

All three of these are running Win98SE w/latest updates and have had many of the tweaks you recommend in your book and elsewhere done. None have had IE extracted with 98lite – yet, because 98lite’s site says Outlook Express (I’m still using IE 5.02 w/all updates) will not run w/the explorer engine from Win95.

I do have a 1 GHz PIII w/Intel MB sitting here that I need to configure. I’ll probably do the custom 98lite install on it and see how that works using the Win 95 explorer. The 1 GHz PIII is probably going to be my dedicated viedo manipulation and production PC so hopefully the software I will use with that does not depend on the newer IE components that will not be there by using 98lite.

Any advice or thoughts appeciated.

Sincerely,

Bruce

P.S. – Diff. subj – I thought baby boomers went through 1964 although I just recently read someone claiming to be Gen X born before 1964. What are your thoughts on this?

I’ve just done the hardware upgrade thing, replacing a motherboard that died with a 1GHZ Celeron and a Shuttle motherboard in a new Antec case. I don’t know about the quality of the board, but Frys was selling the two packaged for $99. I put Red Hat 7.2 on it and am amazed at how fast it boots and runs compared to Win 2k Pro on my other PC–a 500 MHZ K6-2 based PC. Memory is 256 MB Crucail PC133 on the new machine vs 192 MB PC100 I think, but hard drives recent 7200 RPM IDE on both.

I had dual booted Mandrake on the PC that died (a K62-300MHZ), and thought that with the gui it was similar in speed to Win 2k. So, I’m not sure how much of the newfound performance on the (mostly) new PC to attribute to Linux and how much to new hardware.

Like you say, a fresh OS install often helps, but I did install about everything I could so it’s not like I don’t have anything installed–there are an amazing number of packages on the Red Hat 7.2 CD. I’ll probably try your suggestion of Debian sometime, but for now I’m pretty new to Linux and want a little more hand-holding.

I didn’t know you could get rid of IE on Windows 2000. I like it as a browser, but the OS integration is troubling. I remembered your suggestion of Galeon when you talked about desktop Linux in December and found that it came installed with my RH setup. I like it a lot, especially the tabs for new windows instead of having to open a new instance of the browser for each different window.

I had Ad-Aware on the PC that died and it seemed to work well. I’ll have to put it on the Win 2k Pro machine–I’ll have to bookmark this page and try the rest of the tips at a later time as I’m currently busy trying to figure out how to use Samba for file and printer sharing between my Linux box and the Win 2k box.

You’d think that between lots of web pages, the Red Hat site, and a 1000 page book on RH 7.2 I’d have an easier time getting Samba to just work. Worth figuring out, though, since if Linux is to make inroads it will have to operate in an environment which will usually have MS clients and likely MS servers.