The message
from "al" contains these words:

You know that's not what I meant. By singular I meant in terms of amount of
PCs as a "testbed" to form an opinion .... ie. a person with one PC that XP
won't work on doesn't really represent much in the scheme of things. Other
people out there like me with substantial experience on 1000's of machines
with various OS's will on the other hand have a much more valid opinion of
what is stable/good or not.

Hmmm. I have three full towers, all with caddies. Between the three of
them I can run Win 3.11, Win 98, Win 2000, OS2, Mandrake, Debian, FT,
and using an emulator, CP/M. Red Hat and SuSE have been dumped.

I have been beta-testing our ISP's software for years and I was going to
alpha-test PetrOS but found myself lacking suitable accommodation. Now I
have my own house I can spread a bit. Haven't heard anything about
PetrOS recently - must ask Peter Tattam what's happening.

I have a midi tower (ATM) used exclusively for writing CDs and three
PCWs running CP/M and CP/M plus. The rubber bands in the 3" drives of
two of them have broken/stuck and I CBA to fix them for the time being.
The Speccy was used for amateur radio programs. I did have a wee
AppleMac but I gave it to a collector.

My opinion based on this is that XP is the best out there, Linux aside.

Ah.

However, putting XP on an old machine may cause you problems if it doesn't
like the hardware (this PC I'm using is 5 years old and runs it like a dream
though!). It's not fair to tar it as crap just because it won't work on
older hardware.

I never did tar it at all. I have no experience of it. What I have keeps
me busy enough, and (ATM) does everything I want it to.


PS, I still remember the kit I was working on in 1983 and have a front
panel decal to remind me.


Yes, those were the days ... buffer overruns weren't really an issue then!!

But in even earlier days bugs were a problem when they walked over and
shorted the HT bus.......

I still have my trusty BBC Model B with an extra 32k shadow RAM and a floppy
disk drive! All my best software's on tape though ... takes a bit of
patience to load it up ...

Never had a BBC, but I know where there's one on offer....

--
Frère Jaques
They knocked the Bell down and erected a charade of pops.