Wondrous Apparitions, Provided by Magicians.

Right now I have two hard drives (one for system/programs/etc and one for media storage), a CDRW, and a DVD. I probably don't need them both removable media drives, but I do try to make system upgrades with minimal PITA, so I would rather not spend a lot of time dicking with the HDDs, if that's at all possible. I understand I'll have to reinstall the OS anyway to work with the new mobo and all, but still, wanting to limit the install/data movement time.

From:

Actually, I kinda liked what

rougewench did, posting her proposed system for feedback from ur-geek friends and then taking her time getting good deals on parts. Biggest problem will be figuring out what OS to install.

I would support you rebuilding your system; you've had yours the longest, and it's starting to get senile. Also if it helps/matters, Office Depot had a 160GB external hard drive for $80 yesterday.

From:

Yeah, will probably post more detail as soon as LJ allows me to make a post long enough to do that. Also, need to check compatibility between chipset and CPU so that I don't look stupid :)

WRT OS: I'm just as happy to put Windows 2000 on it, actually, or even, if it became Strictly Necessary, XP. I hear that there are Linux distros that are useable without the Enochian calls and the sacrifice of goats and virgins these days, but am still not sure if I could, say, play games on one of those or not. I'm sure as hell not buying Vista.

I figure I'll buy it piece by piece, unless money falls out of the sky on me -- I have the $500 on me at the moment, but that's earmarked for upgrading the car, which is far more senile than the PC. :/

From:

True enough on all counts; I just know that the lifecycle for Win2k is going to end eventually.

I'd probably be okay with going to WinXP if we all did so, to avoid those networking problems we had before. Vista is Right the Fuck Out.

From:

I just know that the lifecycle for Win2k is going to end eventually.

I know. I'm not sure what I will do at that point. XP is okay, but it is much more annoying than 2000 in many ways. Probably someday I will come to feel that way about Vista, too - it will be more annoying than XP, but still okay compared to the next horrible thing out there. It's very depressing to think about.

From:

I'm intrigued by the anti-Vista sentiment.

I haven't noticed any problems in four months, and I'm definitely NOT a MS apologist.

Please enlighten me. Also, what's the problem with WinXP? (Aside from it being Very Very Old, that is.)

From:

All the Windows people I know around here who have "upgraded" to Vista have had problems with it. As far as I can tell the only benefits are IE7 and eye candy, and if you really feel the need to run IE you can get IE7 in XP.

From:

The idea of upgrading an operating system always makes me cringe. I'm not at all surprised by people reporting problems after they upgrade an old version of Windows to a newer version. What are these problems you've heard about, and are you sure they're inherent in Vista, rather than the "upgrade"?

I won't bother detailing the improvements I've noticed, because I'm not trying to get anyone to switch to Vista. But it would be nice to hear what specific problems people are having, 'cause I don't have any complaints.

From:

Since I'm not in Windows support, and the only Windows machines I'm responsible for are either due to be phased out or for testing purposes only, I haven't paid a whole lot of attention. But as I recall there are two different classes of problems:
1. Upgraded machines no longer working properly because some device no longer has a working driver included. Maybe that driver can be downloaded, or maybe the device needs to be replaced. In one case the "device" was the motherboard.
2. New or upgraded machines not talking properly to other machines on the network, using Microsoft's own file-sharing protocols, whether the other machines are running XP, OS X, or Linux.

And in the interest of fairness, I'll mention that I recently upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu Dapper (6.06) to Ubuntu Feisty (7.04), and had two problems: the text-console login was strangely broken until I fixed it, and my wireless card no longer worked with my old settings. I was able to dig in and fix both (something much easier in Linux than Windows), but I admit that most people would not be able to do that as easily.

From:

I haven't suffered either of those types of problems, but neither of them surprises me. I was actually fairly well surprised that I didn't have any driver issues, since I'm running the 64-bit version of Vista.

On the other hand, I didn't (and wouldn't) replace my old, functioning WinXP box with Vista. I keep both in service, right next to each other, so if Vista fails it's not the end of the world. I hope that the complaints you've heard aren't coming from enterprise/production installs. I wouldn't trust any version of Windows enough to put it into production until at least the first service pack.

That's not a slam on Vista, though, it's a slam on MS.

From:

Oh yeah, maybe I should also mention this... that laptop I upgraded to the latest Ubuntu Linux was purchased 7 years ago with Win98 (which is long gone). I doubt that Vista would touch it.

Upgrading isn't so bad on Debian-based systems. :-)

From:

Well, sure, but that's only because linux is held together with baling wire and toothpicks.

I kid, I kid! I'm actually a big fan of the open-source ethos, hence my remark about not being an apologist for MS. I may use their products, but that doesn't mean I endorse their philosophy.

Have you tried Beryl? I've heard that's a pretty nifty-looking GUI manager, but I suppose your old Win98 laptop probably doesn't have the graphics acceleration to support it. I'd be tempted to install Ubuntu on a virtual machine, but I understand that Beryl needs access to the actual GPU, not merely a virtual display adapter.

From:

I haven't tried Beryl, though I've seen demo videos. My machines were built with 2D graphics in mind, so they don't have the required 3D capability. I don't really miss it.

Oh yeah, and those Vista installs I mentioned were the everyday desktop systems of co-workers. Definitely production, and enterprise depends on how you classify the company. Nobody ever accused the place of having a sane IT policy.

Finally, and to take this back on-topic (listen up,

featherynscale!), NewEgg does seem to have adapters to connect old IDE drives to SATA ports, for less than $15.

From:

What I disliked about XP was its friendly insistence that it should know better how to configure and manage things than I would, and its equally friendly refusal to allow manual changes after it had configured something incorrectly. I appreciate that a program wants to make things easy, but in that, you should also get an easy in-door to fix things when the make-your-life-easy subroutine fails miserably. We went to Win2k after XP's friendly networking utility failed to allow us to actually network, and also prevented us from fixing the problem. There had been other things of that nature previously, but that was several years ago, and I can't remember them all.

Re: Vista, I don't have it, I haven't used it, so I have no personal issues with it, I merely have come to understand that it is even more Friendly and Insistent than XP, harder to tinker with if it needs tinkering with, uses up an insane amount of memory to idle at desktop, and is involved enough with rights management that it won't play some media and won't install some programs that are older than its base level of content protection. Also, I hear that it's unpleasant to re-install and that it doesn't care to let you re-install other programs within it. All of which makes me think, hrm, no thanks. Of course, as I say, I haven't actually used it, so all of my objections are other people's objections.

From:

Hm. I guess I must have a blind spot, because everything you've described sounds familiar, and yet I can't recall ever actually finding any of it to be problematic. *shrug*

As far as Vista's DRM complicity, all the more in-depth analyses I've read indicate that the protected path nonsense is purely for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD playback, and is required for Vista to be able to play HD media at all. AFAIK Vista's DRM has got nothing whatsoever to do with older media, it's strictly Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. This is why I will never use either of those formats. Sooner or later all this DRM bullshit will go away, I'm sure of it.

From:

If that makes you happy, that's cool. It makes me irritated. It's like the whole system is being run by the Helpful Microsoft Paperclip:
"It looks like you're trying to network into the Death Star! Let me connect you!" And I'm like: "No! I'm not trying to connect to the Death Star, all I want is to connect to this other box over here! The one with the cable to it! Can I have an option for that?" "I'm sorry, the connection to the Death Star has been interrupted. Now we will shut down everything else going on." "But! I didn't want the ... oh, fuck." :)

From:

I could be wrong, but I think Win2K has already passed its expiration date; I installed it on a machine a few months ago, and it was able to get updates, but only up to a point. For example, IE7 was out of the question, even though it's nearly forced on XP users.

(I would comment on Linux gaming if I knew anything about it, but as a non-gamer all I know is that gaming is there but not to the extent it is on Windows.)

I wonder if there are IDE-to-SATA adapters out there.

From:

I'm still getting upgrades from Microsoft through Windows Update, but I confess that I haven't scanned them closely enough to see if they're OS-related or software related (like others, I tend to forget that they're actually separate projects at times).

Linux gaming is still rough enough, I think, that it would be a deal-breaker for us, even though we don't play many games. Actually, since NWN has a Linux port, that particular point could be moot...

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2000#Current_Status

From:

This is why I don't upgrade; much less frustrating to just build a new machine from scratch, and keep both in operation until such time as the old one becomes unnecessary or excessively annoying, at which point your old hard drive can be screwed into an external enclosure and plugged into the new box.

From:

theslice.livejournal.com

Yep, same thing just happened with my mother. She had 4 PATA devices and a SATA drive and now 2 of the PATAs are useless. She also had to born both classic PCI slots on a sound card and a parallel port (!) since the printer, while it does have a USB port, doesn't allow all the features when used USB, only parallel. Just been one thing after another with a new system.

From:

mrfunk2u.livejournal.com

Sorry to intrude, but, one option is to use a 25 dollar PATA controller that will give you 4 IDE channels. You would have to copy the drivers on to a floppy disk ( in the root directory not in a folder), and hit F6 when prompted at the beginning of the install. No new HDD's needed. Most likely you will only have to do a repair install, so you will not lose your data or programs.

XP is a mature, solid OS. Vista is a new OS that is plagued by the things that plague all new operating systems, It’s new. Vista Ultimate uses 830 MB of RAM just sitting at the desktop. The other favors are more efficient but still need more recourses than XP. Hardware and software vendors are slow at times to release updates, so compatibility will be spotty for awhile. Stick with 2k or XP for the time being, less hassle.

From:

830MB? Jesus Murphy on a Pogo Stick...

Is all of this benchmarked for different flavors of Windows anywhere?

From:

mrfunk2u.livejournal.com

That was Vista Ultimate only. The other versions are better but I would use a minimum of 1GB on any of the others. Home Premium uses around 450MB. We have not benchmarked the others but Home Basic and Vista Business most likely use less because the Media center stuff is not included.

From:

Thanks for the info - I figured that one could get a controller and circumvent the problem, but have not played with the concept enough to know how to make it work yet.

And I'll be happy to use 2k for as long as I can. No rush -- let the initial wave of exploits go by first.

From:

liquidfun.livejournal.com

Eh, I'm in the same boat, my several years old, then-uber, now-barely-passable video card blew out its cooling fan and now overheats when running intense 3D games.

So, I can:

1) attempt to replace the cooling fan
2) buy a new, not-uber, but more-than-passable video board
3) replace nearly everything internal except the case and power supply
4) replace the whole box

Option 2 is looking the most cost-effective while getting me semi-current, but I'd have to find an AGPx4 compatible board, which is still "old school" by today's standards ...

Where are you in the decision-making process?

From:

I'm in the piss and moan about it stage. Yes, I can get an old-style vid card from the refurb rack, but I don't think that's a good long-term solution.

And I got an email from Tiger today, which had in it a number of pre-built systems that I could buy for almost exactly what I can build the box for, except that the new box would you know, have a hard drive in it already. Fuckers. I do not want that.

From:

kellan-m-solan.livejournal.com

Begrudgingly, I've become a fan of XP. After nearly three years running Gentoo on my PC and Yoper on a secondary machine I'm back to XP on both (though I do have a dedicated P2P machine running PuppyLinux from cdrom). If you're interested in my reasons there's an XP vs. linux doc in my picture gallery. To sum up though, linux fits my philosophy: you can make linux do what you want it to HOW you want it to and most importantly do nothing else. The same cannot always be said of windows. But the reality that it took me a long time to admit to is that I spent half again as much time setting up, tweaking, updating (fighting with drivers and broken dependencies), and hacking linux and than I did simply working around the quirks in XP. You can rarely simply buy a peripheral and plug it into Linux. After a desperation switch to ubuntu and then Fedora Core in the hopes that it would be easier to administrate than my convoluted Gentoo scheme it proved not to be so. Since switching primarily to XP I haven't had a single system related issue and simply spend more time actually doing things with my computer instead of to it. Outside of the fact that I cannot seem get windows update to run only when it is scheduled to (though this just forces me to run it manually which is fine) I've been able to get a handle on most of windows annoying tendencies (xp-antispy makes this somewhat less registry intensive) and implemented a partition scheme that has made OS reinstall a breeze (not that I've had do, though I did it once to see how hard it would be) and parallelizes disk access almost as well as my Linux arrangement. I run mostly free software and really have no complaints. Learning to edit the registry was not significantly more difficult than editing config files is in linux. And I can rest assured that anything I might impulse buy is going to be compatible with my OS. It's kinda nice. The only downside? I gave money to a company I despise, a company which has conspicuously failed to innovate or encourage innovation. *shrug* Can't win em all. Atleast the Gates Foundation does some useful stuff.

This post is heinously long, but I'll add that there are some decent reasons to look at Vista. The fact that most drivers no longer run in Kernel is a huge improvement. Superfetch is vastly superior to XP's prefetch function. The networking stack has been rewritten and on paper at least looks much more stable, logical, and extensible (they also say faster but I haven't tested it yet). I happen to be a stereo nerd and Vista's audio stack is vastly superior (not being a gamer I don't lament the lose of hardware acceleration). Speaking of games; DirectX10 is the future and it is never coming to XP. As an aside, friends inform me that linux gaming is pretty damn weak, though Cedega helps it is far from a workable solution if you're hoping for strong future compatibility. Aero has nothing on Beryl in my opinion, but the 3d accelerated UI is the future. Much stronger support for high resolutions and resolution switching (no more font scaling headaches when I share documents with people), I can run Maya spanning two monitors, and multitasking at high load doesn't leave me with a desktop full of big white holes anymore. Anyway, I'm trying out vista on a friend's PC for a few more weeks, but I plan on ponying up for my own copy soon. It seems a lot of complaints about Vista are performance or gaming related. I can't comment on gaming, but performance will no doubt improve as drivers mature. Just my unasked for thirty-five cents.

From:

Can you expand more on your problems with Ubuntu? The rumormill is that it involves significantly less "10 hours to fix the problem, whether that's upgrading your kernel or changing your screen resolution permanently", but if you found otherwise, that'll be important to know.

Otherwise, post looks spot on, thanks!

From: