our department and research group are receiving several (perhaps 2
dozen) donated multiprocessor pentium pros from various sources. i'm
told that each of these systems will be delivered with some version of
Windows (NT is extremely likely) installed and, perhaps, we are under
"agreement" to keep NT on at least half of them. what is a reasonable
man to do? (don't _even_ get me into a discussion of this
"agreement", or the source thereof.)
i'd like to make most of them dual/multi-booting, but it's unclear what
media i'll receive, how "customized" their installs will be (i.e. can
i duplicate it if i have to wipe a disk?), etc. <sigh>
besides, and because of, my experience in the sys-admin domain and
system consulting in the large, it's likely that we'll have to follow
the "don't touch it because it might break" policy. how depressing.
good luck rohit. just think, NT 5.0 might be decent since it his
hitting that magical microsoft third release plateau. microsoft _is_
promising to solve all of the world's distributed computing problems.
we're just not getting _anything_ done today and it _is_ the
renaissance of DC, didn't you hear?
joe
Rohit Khare writes:
> Why, oh, why do I still use this shitcan OS Win95 when even the M$
> lovers among us cry out NT4.0? The little bugger was slurping data
> to a telnet log as I was rushing aboard this flight, only to have
> its telephone cord yanked and put to sleep. Once airborne, I wake
> it, the display comes up, it 'burps' -- flashes the screen, makes
> violent noises, usually reinstalls PC Card devices on the
> pessimistic assumption everything always changes -- and nothing.
>
> No computer, just a picture of one. Three-fingered salute. Twice.
> "Please wait for Windows to display the Close Program dialog
> box". I wait, the picture comes up, "msgsrv32 [Not
> Responding]". Now, I have no idea what msgsrv32 is, but it's ALWAYS
> crashing. Daily. It freezes, freezing my entire world. Sometimes,
> if you kill it, you can keep going, because another zombie msgsrv
> comes back to life. This time, I tried again, but the mouse wasn't
> working. Neither was the keyboard: it had mustered the strength to
> tell me it didn't like me and expired. Remind me why I shouldn't
> shoot the messenger?
>
> I reboot. Log file, nuked. Must have been in the write cache, but
> then, there's no excuse for that, I was dribbling megs of
> copy. Just guess that reliable FS operations are an option. I wrote
> a furious note to Adam complaining about shitty plug-and-pray
> promises -- I'd be better off without the illusion, frankly.
>
> But that's not this note, not. I had WinZip decompress a 1.6 mb
> Gzip file in the background, and wham, "Your computer has become
> unstable". Not Win95, nooo, not its fault. Must be those nefarious
> Compaq engineers. All my Netscape mail compose buffers, gone.
>
> Frankly, Microsoft is the only vendor who understands their
> OS. Word95 is about the only usable app on here, primarily because
> it's so paranoid about the OS, it logs every keystroke to one of
> hundreds of incrutable tmp files (would someone please potty-train
> this app?!)
>
> Chinese wall, perhaps. Keeps the barbarians out. Just not clear
> which side of the wall the barbarians are on!