techrecovery | Just to have an icon of evil..

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Just to have an icon of evil..

I'd heard rumors you can order a disc with XP SP2 on it, for free, from MS's website.

Granted, I don't own a copy of XP, legit or otherwise.

I don't really want to. But if I need something to call on in some dank, Hellblazer-ish incantation, an SP2 disc would come in handy.

I can't find the exact page though. Anyone else know what it is?

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Microsoft says it should be ready by the end of this month, last time I heard.

Nice avatar.

Thanks much, fiance found it for me.

I'm just so happy she also found my missing Hellblazer book 1 graphic novel..

Microsoft has actually tried very hard to improve XP with SP2. For the most part they've succeeded.

If you want pure evil, you'll need to get a Windows ME disc.

How about a disk set of Win95. You know, a 5¼" disk set.

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How about OS/2 Warp then? Win3.11 on floppy isn't too bad - there's only a dozen disks.

I'm tempted to install VMware just so I can bring a win3.1 box to lan parties.

In theory you can install DOS and Win3.1 to a USB disk, as all recentish BIOS's will boot from one. Certainly it gives a use for those tiny ones (tiny as in 16MB).

ouch.. wasn't that like 40 disks?

-A

That sounds about right. Don't have a copy of Win95 anymore so I can't tell for sure.

I had it on CD so that was just a guess.

-A

Ah, in that case count up the number of CAB files. It's one CAB file to a floppy (MS used some obscure format to get more than 1.44MB on a floppy disk).

Come to think of it, the CABs are numbered so just see what the number of the last one is.

I would but I lost my Win 95 CD years ago, which kinda sucks 'cause it was an original PRE-IE CD of Win 95.

-A

PRE-IE? That's old!

The nearest I got to that was a Win95 box I was using to transfer MO discs to CD-R (and by MO I mean one of those external full-height SCSI jobbies that's slower than the 4x burner), and that had something like IE 2 on it. Worked well enough, just didn't support any standard apart from GIF, JPEG and some ancient form of HTML. Wish I'd kept a copy of it - would have made a very secure web browser!

Win95 (preferably OSR2 w/ FAT32) is perfectly usable. Stable, lightweight by modern standards, perfect for old hardware that does nothing but word processing or something. Same goes for Win98 as long as it's 98SE.

Windows ME, on the other hand, is the inbred bastard child of win98 and win2k. Not a good idea. A clean install of that abomination will crash in Explorer.exe if you have too much on the desktop.

WinME system restore is good for nothing but eating up CPU cycles and disk space. If the database gets corrupted, which it will, it spends about 15 MINUTES on a black screen purging itself before it will bring up the desktop.

Plug-and-pray is just that, with cmndinst.exe or whatever they called it hanging when a new device is connected, or sometimes at boot just for the hell of it.

And when WinME really takes a shit, and it's time to repair it, you have a 50% chance of a reinstall over an existing installation will leave the computer in an unbootable state with a corrupted registry. This was never a problem with win95 or win98, and 2k/XP is light years beyond all that win9x cruft.

Did I mention I HATE WINDOWS ME?

Ah. 98's alright, but the USB support is somewhat screwy (then again, you knida expect that with something of that vintage).
Personally I use Win2k, and I prefer it over WinXP.

I have something far more evil.

A set of Hewlett Packard Pavilion System Recovery Disks. With Windows ME included.

It's the OS i'm using....RIGHT NOW >=D

It would have been better if you had said Packard Bell Recovery Disks, with either WIN 95a or ME.

Yeah, that's pretty evil but HP has really changed their ways lately.

Had an HP in the shop today. Bad sector killed the registry, fried modem, probably took a mild lightning hit. Replaced the modem, surface scanned the drive to mark the bad block, copied the registry from system restore, came right back up.

Did a spyware/virus scan. Zero. Zilch. Nada. This is unusual, EVERY machine has some kind of crap on it, if nothing other than some tracking cookies. Did I mention the customer had no antivirus/antispyware at all?

The machine came from HP with Netscape 7 as the default browser.

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Just to have an icon of evil..

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XP SP2 isn't evil enough.

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