Walking on Water

Hey Rickeroo,

Been a while so I thought I'd see if you were still alive? And let you know I think I'm going to start walking on water soon <VBG>. I have managed to bully W2K into actually sharing w/ another OS. Something that has hitherto been impossible.

Don't know how he could release this thing in the face of the lawsuit going against him. Seems like he figures he'll just donate a few bucks more to the political coffers of both parties (hedging a bet) and get the thing set aside by Congress or the President or somesuch. The OS itself is predatory as I told you before: you can get it to behave *somewhat* if you install it over say the release candidate or the 'evaluation' copy, which kinda makes my point that they did do something to the final release code to add that predatory behavior.

What? You have a non-M$ operating system on this machine? Well, we'll fix that! And then they do whatever it is to eat your MBR, trash your other bootable drives, and Bob's your uncle (Bill's your uncle? <G>) I am not certain why it behaves when installed over a prior release, it may have something to do w/ the waaaay too swollen Registry.

That was the other thing I did to make it behave, at least a bit. I got into the Registry and deleted the keys for Notepad (hate that thing) and Netmeeting, which we aren't even going to use and which takes up a huge amount of space. Same w/ Outlook and some of the other silly things it won't let me uninstall (it will now! <VBG>). Of course it will probably try to put all that stuff back if I ever have to reboot into it again. I just felt I had to brag to someone, and you're elected. <G>

Wish I could understand code better, I'm guessing there is more of the stuff they pulled as far back as the DR-DOS wars, where they had code added to Windows that would give error messages if it detected the DR-DOS install, and you'd get these weird messages about being 'unstable', and errors that would appear to require you to contact your nearest M$ rep. Where you'd be told that DR-DOS just was rally buggy and not fully compatible w/ Windows. Although none of the errors that were generated stopped the machine from running, and Windows ran as well as it ever did, the object of the exercise was to make the user 'uncomfortable' and to make him believe that any errors that stopped the machine were caused by DR-DOS' buggy code. So the user would go and get an MS-DOS copy and install that and reinstall Windows, after that they wouldn't even dare try a non M$ solution!

Bless his pointy head. <G> He's such a crass little jerk, he gives 'geek' a bad name! (Nerd he may be, he is waaaay to uncool to be a geek. <G>)

Anyway...

Wow, I just figured out something, when I uninstalled W2K last night, it complained about my vidiot driver. It's something that Micron did and not 'M$ signed'; however, it actually runs much better than w/ the MS driver. Only all night I've been trying to get it to run the screensavers I had previously installed, and they just won't run, even tho they seem to be properly installed.

So I just checked, and sure enough, over my selection to leave that driver in place it decided (as per usual) that I am an idiot so it overrode my choice and installed the W2K buggy driver. Bleah!

One other thing: they did something to the TCP/IP code between the evaluation copy and the 'gold' release. We had three machines all hooked up to ethernet that all had communication until the last go, where I installed the 'eval' copy on two of them. At that point none of the machines could even 'see' each other - or themselves! Network Neighborhood didn't work at all etc. But, w/o changing any settings, I installed W2K gold over the eval copy and immediately el workgroup was visible and we could once again move files hither and yon. Tsk tsk, how you s'posed to eval a 'business OS' these days if it won't even see the other machines on its net? No settings or tweaking or nada would get the things to see each other. Weird. Networking anyone? <VBG>

Hope you finally got some sun, we are being warned in dire tones of a maybe gonna be hurricane. And it was already a bit humid here, but that is why God (or someone) invented air conditioning!

huggers Sweeting,
this blonde is trashing Windows, yet again <VBG>
j