Kougar wrote:I dragged an old, very abused install of Win 7 across multiple generations of motherboards and systems and had it for at least five years.
Win 7 was *released* 4 years 11 months ago. So maybe *almost* 5 years... but not more!
Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, Ryu Connor
Kougar wrote:I dragged an old, very abused install of Win 7 across multiple generations of motherboards and systems and had it for at least five years.
just brew it! wrote:TBH most cases of "Windows Rot" these days boil down to accumulating crapware. If you are vigilant about opting out of (or at least nuking on sight) all the useless toolbars and tray icons that try to install themselves, chances are good that the system will remain responsive for a very long time.
cheesyking wrote:Remember when you could run XP quite happily on 128MB or RAM?
Ryu Connor wrote:There are some third party tools, but many of them just make matters worse. CCleaner comes to mind - after it infamously tore up some WIndows 7 installs bad enough they couldn't apply SP1. Sometimes I wonder if some of these third party tools people try are what perversely manage to create the very rot they were trying to avoid.
bthylafh wrote:I ran the RTM of WinXP on 128MB of RAM... a few times. Mostly just when my dormmates wanted to play Unreal Tournament or Rune. It would run, but "happily" was not an adjective I'd use.
cheesyking wrote:bthylafh wrote:I ran the RTM of WinXP on 128MB of RAM... a few times. Mostly just when my dormmates wanted to play Unreal Tournament or Rune. It would run, but "happily" was not an adjective I'd use.
Perhaps "happily" is stretching the point but the fact remains that XP did get a lot heavier as it aged especially right at the end.
bthylafh wrote:If you had to reinstall Win9x monthly you had a PEBKAC problem, not a Windows problem. I used my copies of Win95 and Win98 heavily for years and never once had to reinstall them.
cheesyking wrote:Yeah, I occasionally do work for a guy who has a few machines running win98 and NT4 that haven't been reinstalled for around a decade and they haven't rotted at all. They aren't on the internet and all the do is run officeXP and an ancient bit of accounting software. The only time they give trouble is when there's a hardware problem. One day I'm going to run out of hardware that will support 98 and he'll be in trouble.
cheesyking wrote:Yeah, I occasionally do work for a guy who has a few machines running win98 and NT4 that haven't been reinstalled for around a decade and they haven't rotted at all. They aren't on the internet and all the do is run officeXP and an ancient bit of accounting software. The only time they give trouble is when there's a hardware problem. One day I'm going to run out of hardware that will support 98 and he'll be in trouble.
cheesyking wrote:Yeah, I occasionally do work for a guy who has a few machines running win98 and NT4 that haven't been reinstalled for around a decade and they haven't rotted at all. They aren't on the internet and all the do is run officeXP and an ancient bit of accounting software. The only time they give trouble is when there's a hardware problem. One day I'm going to run out of hardware that will support 98 and he'll be in trouble.
Usacomp2k3 wrote:cheesyking wrote:Yeah, I occasionally do work for a guy who has a few machines running win98 and NT4 that haven't been reinstalled for around a decade and they haven't rotted at all. They aren't on the internet and all the do is run officeXP and an ancient bit of accounting software. The only time they give trouble is when there's a hardware problem. One day I'm going to run out of hardware that will support 98 and he'll be in trouble.
Virtual Machine?
cheesyking wrote:the accounting software is protected with a hardware dongle that I can't get to work under a VM, but we're getting off topic.
trackerben wrote:cheesyking wrote:the accounting software is protected with a hardware dongle that I can't get to work under a VM, but we're getting off topic.
If you don't mind, is it a parallel port dongle which you couldn't get resourced in MS Hyper-V?
cheesyking wrote:Yeah, parallel dongle though I must admit I never tried hyper v. Can't actually remember what I tried but really the whole thing is moot as the software needs replacing anyway.
ronch wrote:I reformatted my PC just two days ago. I play an old game called Thief - The Dark Project and this game uses rundll32.exe. Problem is, I noticed that when I launch the game it doesn't open anymore. I have Thief 2 - The Metal Age installed as well (a Thief series fan, obviously) and the same thing happens when I launch it. Now, I know these two games invoke rundll32.exe when they start so I checked Task Manager and saw that while rundll32.exe and the respective Thief.exe or Thief2.exe program are running, the game itself has loaded only a small fraction of itself to memory (around 1.5K), and not the usual 10K or so. I also noticed that running another instance of said games will immediately launch the game (so there would be two instances now, one fully loaded to memory and one that's still on the fence), and I later concluded that rundll32 was the culprit. When a failed launch happens, closing the Thief*.exe process but leaving rundll32 in memory will result in the game/s launching when I launch them again. I couldn't fix rundll32 and a virus scan turns up nothing and searching the interwebz didn't help. I had no other resort but to reformat. It was the first time this sort of issue happened and I am, as you can tell, an avid Thief fan so I always have these games installed. Using Windows 7 64-bit.
Anyway, I reformat my PC every 1 to 3 months on average. Usually something breaks and I just do a clean reinstall.