Lessons in EOL



  • @FrostCat said:

    BT dongles for laptops are pretty cheap.

    Most of the laptops I work with are not mine, and I dislike carrying around more easily-destroyed electronic crap than I have to.

    My primary use for a portable wifi hotspot is nailing up temporary internet connections for customer computers in various states of horrible disrepair. Many of those computers are still running XP. The less fartarsing about with them that I have to do to get that connection up and running, the better off I am.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @flabdablet said:

    Most of the laptops I work with are not mine, and I dislike carrying around more easily-destroyed electronic crap than I have to.

    Fair enough. My thought was that you can get some tiny little transceivers that are basically just a nub that sticks out of the port, so they aren't likely to get smashed. (And of course any phone that supports BT tethering should also support USB tethering, so you could just do that instead, in theory.)

    @flabdablet said:

    Many of those computers are still running XP.

    Yeah, either of my ideas would require a driver installation. Under normal circumstances that's not usually a big deal, but in yours....


  • kills Dumbledore

    @flabdablet said:

    still running XP

    Definitely don't want to faff around with BlueTooth then. I remember bluetooth dongles for XP installing as a faux nnetwork adapter ddue to the lack of support in the base OS. They never bloody worked properly



  • @FrostCat said:

    The reason they stopped letting you theme the UI in XP was because of things like the gradients

    That's no longer an issue considering everything is flat now 😛.



  • @Jaloopa said:

    They never bloody worked properly

    That's been my experience with XP bluetooth networking and XP Ethernet-over-USB, which is what USB phone tethering usually looks like. Wifi over USB is generally much less troublesome, and I do have a little nub-style transceiver on my keyring for that.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Deadfast said:

    That's no longer an issue considering everything is flat now

    Right--the other part, and probably the more important one, if they haven't changed it, is themes bleeding into kernel space.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @flabdablet said:

    That's been my experience with XP bluetooth networking and XP Ethernet-over-USB

    I used it a LOT. the main issue was making sure you had the right drivers. If so you were generally set in my experience.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Right--the other part, and probably the more important one, if they haven't changed it, is themes bleeding into kernel space.

    Hush, you're disturbing my rant with facts!



  • @Groaner said:

    So today I was looking up info on windiff, a useful tool on computers without BeyondCompare

    Did they fix the bug that multiple commas in a line are treated identical to a single one?

    That drove me crazy a few years ago, and I switched to WinMerge, and never wanted to go back.



  • Late to the topic, but oh well.

    @flabdablet said:

    In my experience, any box that will run XP will run 7 as well or better.

    Not always. Had to revert one of my kids' PCs from 7 to XP because it was running like a dog, due to post-XP drivers not being available for some of the more critical pieces of the system hardware.

    Frankly I was impressed that 7 was able to run at all once I found out which drivers were missing - I don't now remember the details, so don't ask - but it was definitely a much happier machine once I put XP back on it.

    @Luhmann said:

    Pretty sure 2000 pro or NT4 workstation where not server releases. They where however business only not consumer like 9x or XP

    Correct, in an earlier job we were using NT4 on our desktop machines when I started, and 2000 by the time I left. The main difference I remember was that it was much easier to play audio CDs under 2000. (I remember using FlexiCD a lot, but I'm not sure if that was the workaround to get audio CDs to work at all in NT4, or the way I managed to get them to work in 2000. I think it was the former, and that they worked natively in 2000, but I could be mistaken.)


  • BINNED

    @Scarlet_Manuka said:

    to get audio CDs to work at all in NT4

    NT4 lacked a lot of audio/multimedia stuff that was present in 9x. These things only got added in 2000 so I wouldn't be surprised that NT4 didn't play audio cd's out of the box. NT4 wasn't ME bad when it came out it was just that 2000 was XP-good.



  • @Luhmann said:

    Pretty sure 2000 pro or NT4 workstation where not server releases. They where however business only not consumer like 9x or XP

    I don't actually remember how or why, but I came into personal possession of Windows 2000 at the time of relevance and used it as my home OS for some years, despite XP being around too. I mostly just recall spending a while convincing Win2K to cooperate with DirectX.


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