windows h& linux history 1835

Neither Win98 nor MS-DOS can be called "stable", due to architectural problems of their. Well, DOS was written for an ancient CPU which could not support the real stable OS, but as about Win98 - its whole design is a mess of patches on top of this ancient MS-DOS.

NT OSes are stable.

Same as other Windows.

It is just subdeveloped compared to XP.

No pain at all. For instance, XP's installation is trivial.

Correct, they are tired of spending resources to support this ancient code base, of testing their software on these OSes (and not only on NT OSes).

BTW - w2k is down too, due to lawsuit with Sun about Java. No more w2k on MSDN Subscriber Downloads, for instance. So, the only MS OSes currently supported are XP and 2003.

Pentium-III 800MHz with 256MB of RAM is fine (my wife's laptop).

Anyway MS was never ever bothering themselves about compatibility with obsolete hardware, this is a known fact.

You can disable the "unnecessary" services. Note that some 3rd party software packages depend on them, so, be careful in this.

They do not think on anybody personally, they only think about the "average user", and the "average user" do not use the obsolete hardware more then 5 years old.

They are the rights holder. Imagine a car company. Many people here in Russia were annoyed by discontinuation of Mitsubishi Carisma (one of the best cheap-and-quality cars) and replacing it with ugly Lancer. So what? It's Mitsubishi's right to discontinue their product. So is with MS.

Ask the same on cars. The car's manufacturer will not allow you to surrender the 5years old car back to them for a discount on a new car. Some dealerships allow this, but not the manufacturers.

Never. They are successful without it, and Linux is not dangerous for them due to lots of issues (having lots of different distros is one).

What ideas namely?

-- Maxim Shatskih, Windows DDK MVP StorageCraft Corporation