Why not reinstall 98SE?

As you saw in those links you posted ~ July: those who tried XP (for similar simple usage) then replaced with SE said - and they are unanimous in that - it FLIES. Ever count the default running/idling processes in either/both?

(Others confirmed my SE 'sleeper-immunity'? bug-free experience, since the crackers have upgraded their targets -- even sans that Unofficial [link|http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=38193| SP-2] .. which does look intriguing though, for the picky (or paranoid.))

My grunt-net-machine just passed 5.3333333 years sans reload.
Why.. would you want to inflict XP on self + [anyone you don't secretly despise?]
Surely not.. one's Mother !?

Unclear if my neighbor, after hundreds of hours of self-education, loads, reloads via pundits + experiment - has yet succeeded in making her XP-Pro survive on hi-speed. She's been focussing on *nix distros, last I heard -- remains somewhat in isolation for awhile. I gather that exposure to 63 BUG-fixpacks and 213 things to manually disable 639 ways {well, this week} can do that to a person of delicate sensibilities.

Note that, in addition to all that useless corporate AD-related crap you have to disable: Pro has more Means for disabling, than the effete Home POS. The pundits regularly remark on this difference.

That much I verified, loading both ... back when I thought I might actually try to use it on the laptop / on hi-speed somewhere. [Hah.. you can't even 'maintain' XP's daily addiction to fixes, sans hi-speed] So I have both Home and Pro available - neither destined for use by moi, except in a pinch.

Maybe XP could work OK.. if connected to Nothing, like that NT 3.51? but for the unwashed: the fussiness of all procedures Still Sucks IMO - compared with the simplicity of SE.

If you're doing trivial stuff, you don't need a turbo encabulator with DRM.
But it's always Hard to explain to a newbie why the Popular flavor is 'sweet' - because that's the taste sensation of arsenic compounds. Luck!

My [-]biased Beast bash +
Hey! you already. knew. all this stuff, better than I.

I think she's got some USB peripherals that are problematic on Win98. And I don't think 98SE is still on the disk (it was preinstalled and I don't have the CD). But even if it were, she's among the masses that are convinced that anything less than XP is worthless.

I've seriously thought about putting Ubuntu or MEPIS on it, but I know she's hate it even if it did everything she could possibly want.

I'm going to take along TweakUI and a few more things to try to make the speed bearable, but I'm not optimistic that it'll make a difference as far as the speed goes. We'll see.

Trouble is, no matter how I set it up, it's probably going to break shortly thereafter. Even before her stoke, she had a way of breaking PCs. If it gets bad enough with this one, Santa might bring her another machine a little early to save me spending too many hours on it.

I just know that come January she's going to want Vista.... :-/

Thanks. :-)

Cheers,
Scott.

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