As for that new thread....in the stated example given of a single standing machine, how does one do a ghost install to a network machine when there is no network ? You keep coming up with solutions by changing the question as with the next instance.
My example never had a key flaw cause it never had no firewall. The question was how is XP with its firewall any more secure than NT4 or Win2k with Zone Alarm. XP's firewall is better than nothing but it is inferior to Zone Alarm's.
Er....no Intel didn't manufacture my MoBo, Asus did. But again, just look it up. There are no 3rd party USB drivers for Windows XP. Win9x yes, Win2k yes (well at least until SP1), WinXP no. MS 's own site says that USB drivers are provided by MS and there are no, nor will they certify ANY, 3rd party alternatives. It's the same thing with PostScript and SCSI.....In the early years, you used a 3rd party SCSI Management utility and you used a 3rd party Type Manager. Try installing them on a Win2k box or an XP box.....they don't let you. Do a web search on USB2 driver....let me know if you find one. The only hits I got were questions from users asking where to fnd one for their new USb device. The answer every time is " There is no driver required, do not install any driver manually."
And yes Win9x (the newer) was defintely slower than W4WGs (the older), and the proof is in published form. Look at the December 95 issue of PC Mag. They tested 100 machines 65 with Win95, 35 with W4WGs. Most major manufacturers submitted two machines. When you look at the benchmarks on the same machine from the vendors, the W4WGs machines avaeraged 37 % faster, look it up. Look at Bill O'Brien's tests on the same subject....he needed a Pentoum 90 with Win95 to match the perofrmance of a 486/66 with W4WGs.
We did an in house test using twin Toshiba laptops with a choice on initial bootup between Win95 and W4WGs. We selected Win95 on one and W4WGs on the other. Winstone on Win95 was 44, Winstone on W4WGs was 60. After a little tweaking, we were able to get the Win95 up to 45 and the W4WGs machine up to 63. That's 40%. Subsequent tests using NT (after SP3 came out) brought performance up to 68 using the same tests.
NT4 may be done with MS support soon but is it not still the only MS OS approved by the National Security Agency ? You don't use it, you don't do business with the government on any security sensitive matters. I last read that MS was pursuing Win2k approval but haven't seen anything since.
Again, I don't publish a web site listing 200 things that SP2 broke. In coprorate IT, our definition of a Beta OS from MS is "anything before SP3". NT4 became stable and useable by the masses with SP3.....Win2k got useable for corporate IT with SP2 but didn't really hit its stride, as expected, with SP3 and Xp with SP2 is obvioulsy problematic or MS wouldn't be warning us with web pages telling us all the things it breaks. When I want to look at what is stable, I look at what the Fortune 500 IT guys are doing and for the most part they still weren't doin XP as of earlier this year when the lst study was published. XP sales were so bad in the corporate sector that to keep wall street happy, MS redefined a Win2k sale as a purchase of a WinXP with a "free Win2k downgrade".
Again I am not basing tis on "a" setup....I am basing it on my experience with 54 of them. I would expect a severe drop in calls from any Win9x box as the Win9x was only exceeded in headaches by WinME. Fortunately, our experience with Win9x was limited to the test bench and we were smart or lucky enough to never put a Win9x machine on a workdesk. Everything went from W4WGs to NT4SP3.
As for MS support ending, I don't much care. At $180 a pop last time I called (NT4SP3 was the latest MS OS at the time) what MS supports is of little value to me. Last I checekd the web site, it was $235 to "start". And it wasn't the non english part of the activation experience that really annoyed me....it was the 20 minutes of arguing that I was entitled to it. I am not the first to experience this. as is well documented.
The fact remains if XP were faster / better / more secure than previous OS's (as actually deployed, not as it comes from MS), IT directors throughout the Fortune 1000 would be all done putting it in place by now. Why haven't they done so ? No, they haven't for the most part because they are doing what they have always done....waiting for the stable driver base that should arrive by SP3 and for when they upgrade hardware. The last market study of corporate IT installations that I have seen was done by a canadian company back in March. In that study, XP's share in Corporate IT was substantially less than 50%, if memory serves it was about 34% XP, 41% Win2k and 25% NT4....2/3 of corporate NT installations were NOT XP, almost 2.5 years after it was released. No one in a corporate environment asks the boss for budget increases to "upgrade" existing box to XP because it will have a positive ROI. The reason is ina work environment you have to priduce more than a subjective result, you gotta have facts and figures. They are goinna have to show a "facts and figures" return on that investment and it is obvious that such will not materialize. If it did, it would be being done wholesale across the country.
I should also mention that I have a NT4 P2P server right behind me that has run 24/7 since 1997 or so. It's BSOD'd twice. My son's XP machine has been running a week. It's BSOD'd twice already. It's simply a matter of fact that a more mature OS will have numerous advantages. Yes a new one might have some bells and whistles, some new features, a few of which might even be useful. But the things that have to be recognized and I will close my comments with these:
1. The more time a company has had to deal with fixing things, the more stable the platform will be. Anything and everything that could have conflicted with NT4 has happended already and the conflicts resolved. 99% of everything that coud possible conflict with Win2k has been resolved, 95 % of it was resolved by SP2. We'd be at the 95% with XPSP2 except for the fact that MS tried to address numerous long term security defects in their OS's and while increasings ecurity, it did so at the expense of compatability. Only once MS has had a chance to address the incompatabilities introduced by SP2, combined with those that would normally be washed out between SP2 and SP4, can it hope to be as compatable. It's simply a matter of how many lines of code you have to debug and how much time you have had to do it.
2. Computing is a zero sum game. You have a limited amount of memory. The more processes an OS runs in the background, the less is available to programs. The more memory each process consumes, the elss is available to programs. Therefore the OS that has the smallest memory load is in the best position to allocate memory to programs. This was readily evidenced by the PCLite folks when they developed their utility to rip IE out of the OS and saw (and published) performance improvements as high as 15%.
3. It's all "been done" . All the encessary or useful computing taks have already been developed. The strain put on development teams to come up with new features has them scaping the bottom of the barrel. I think it was Office 97 with the ad campaign that oushe dupgrades cause with Office 97 "you could put a pie chart inside a pie chart." As if it would ever make sense to do that. Our return on the investment of what we get with each new OS release gets snmaller withe ach new release.....for the most part, it's all been done. So what we get is more features that we have no desire for and that we have toi struggle to find time to turn off. Like the annoying pop ups that tell me my AV software may be outdated....after all the def files are only 3.4 hours old. So we have 100's of so called "features" that we don't use or turn off. The downside is that the more features we havem the more code we have....the more code we have the more chance of a conflict, the greater amount of stuff to debug, and the greater amount of stuff running in the background. The auto daylight savings time adjustment thing for example that messes up file dates.
Will I ever like XP as much as I do NT4.....sure, well probably.....but not until I buy new hardware and not until SP3 comes out. I will never upgrade existing hardware. I wouldn't use NT4 until SP3 came out, ccursed myself for early adopting Win2k at SP2 and, learning my lesson, will not do XP in the work environment until at least SP3 for XP.