Its taken me 10 years I bet,but I finally moved off it today __{{emoticon}}__

It was just SOOOO slow with 40 tabs open in chrome. Nothing else running, either. 4 gb of memory, 2 fast processors, a pair of 7200 rpm drives, and the s.o.b. was slow as mollasses, taking 30 to 45 seconds sometimes to do simple things.

It wasnt virused, it was MS'd and Googled to death!

BTW, my linux box with the same exact 40 tabs plus 41 on facebook chatting and 42 on youtube playing a music video, and 43 here was running 19% of cpu and only 47% on memory, and this laptop has only 3 gb, not 4 gb like the windows one.

Quite a difference...

Better late than never! __{{emoticon}}__

(I realised it was time when 'Vista' came out.)

40 tabs plus 41 on facebook chatting and 42 on youtube playing a music video,

Maniac. Most table dances I ever had going at once was 6. __{{emoticon}}__

Well, over 1/2 the tabs are potential jobs I have applied for recently or need to. That's why I'm running old crap machines.

My old Dell P IIIm choked on the 40 tabs, so I guess its done other than for testing software for performance issues, which its REAL good at, LOL, but at least I got it to where it plays the videos too, seamlessly, without any special tweaking. I suppose I didn't really expect it to be able to handle that using chrome as a browser with only 512mb of memory.

The thing that got me to just do it was when I got my chrome migrated from the windows machine to the linux one. At that point I realized I literally had no other programs running other than to burn iso's and dvd's.

BTW, I ended up using a program called fsarchiver to do the backups and restores to test the system on all my machines, and with the right settings it was quite efficient both in terms of backup/restore time, as well as in minimizing USB bandwidth and space use on the flashdrive.

PS: i still can't burn a flash drive that works with linux, and I only have 1 blank dvd left, having used the other 49 trying different distros the past 6 months. That particular flashdrive model reader seems tohave trouble with some linux versions. It won't even show up with antiX 14 and has trouble with other linux versions too. Unfortunately I have 2 of those readers and 6 chips that fit only those, soit means that literally over 1/2 of my flashdrives won't work under linux. I don't trust linux burning a dvd either. I gave up trying after ruining a few a while back. Male made a comment once about not hearing me mention dd. My Mom always says"If you can't say something nice, don't say it", LOL. Oh well, I better go call her...

Yes even SD card reader/writers are a pain in the behind under Linux as I've been using SD cards for exchanging data between Windows and Linux machines I have. For the most part they work but some of the particular SD cards are dicey. Wonder if the P3 box has issues with USB devices?

LOL, with the P IIIm, its so old that I'm lucky it has ANY usb. Its USB 1.0 I think. For whatever reason, it has worked with both, luckily. Now that I know there are problems with USB, I'll be checking more.

I ordered a different reader that is compatible with USB 1.0,1.1, 2.0 and 3.0. It also works with the SDHC cards and TF cards, so it should be able to work with all the chips I own. Its supposed to be ME, 2000, XP,Vista,7 and 8 compatible as well as Linux compatible, but it cost $8, so I only ordered one and will get a 2nd if it works as well as its supposed to. All of my chips have been tested byte by byte, and are all class 10 chips, which also happen to work recording 1080 hd video in my camera, so its a shame when I went to all that trouble and things STILL don't work.

PS: note they didn't say its 98 compatible. Hopefully it will work with my 98SE.

thriftee wrote:LOL, with the P IIIm, its so old that I'm lucky it has ANY usb. Its USB 1.0 I think. For whatever reason, it has worked with both, luckily. Now that I know there are problems with USB, I'll be checking more.

I ordered a different reader that is compatible with USB 1.0,1.1, 2.0 and 3.0. It also works with the SDHC cards and TF cards, so it should be able to work with all the chips I own. Its supposed to be ME, 2000, XP,Vista,7 and 8 compatible as well as Linux compatible, but it cost $8, so I only ordered one and will get a 2nd if it works as well as its supposed to. All of my chips have been tested byte by byte, and are all class 10 chips, which also happen to work recording 1080 hd video in my camera, so its a shame when I went to all that trouble and things STILL don't work.

PS: note they didn't say its 98 compatible. Hopefully it will work with my 98SE.

LOL you got one machine with Win98SE? Wow, that's older than dust and it has been a while since I last dealt with 98SE, but I did have fun with it back in the day as I tweaked the hell out of it so had a nice 98SE install that rarely crashed for over 3 years unless I did something real stupid.

You should definitely make sure you are buying quality SD cards and flash drives as these can be real picky especially if you re using them at USB 1.0/1.1 speed.

No, I don't have one Win/98SE machine, I have THREE. That's what I use for multiplayer racing games, like Star Wars Episode I Podracing and a heavily tweaked version of Sports Car GT (custom cars and tracks that are totally realistic, matching my real race car lap times on the same tracks) that communicate via IPX over Ethernet. And yes, they are as old as dirt, and no, all attempts at playing them with Win/7 and Wine on Linux have failed, so I still have the Win/98SE partitions ready to boot, and the CD's ready for the drives to play.

I also have two Win/95 machines and one DOS 6.21 with WFWG 3.11. Those are all"lunchbox" portables, and two are blue/white LCD. The one has Ethernet, Token Ring, SDLC Bisync and 5250 Twinax cards for connecting to various machines. Those were mostly for business once upon a time, but none of the code I wrote with those is still running out in the world that I know of.

I only have one Win/2000 machine, but its got a dead drive and not worth reloading, and two still running XP machines, three run Vista, and three that run Win/7 (two of them plus one laptop drive the 18 screen array). There are no Win/8 machines here and no Apple stuff of any kind. And Oh yes, there is an AS/400 Mainframe that's too heavy to move in the corner of the living room, but one drive died, so its done.

PS: there are 3 more that only have linux on them now, and I left out 4"parts" laptops that no longer work. They all were once working machines, and have dead motherboards, but have other usable parts because I kept buying similar machines over time.

thriftee wrote:No, I don't have one Win/98SE machine, I have THREE. That's what I use for multiplayer racing games, like Star Wars Episode I Podracing and a heavily tweaked version of Sports Car GT (custom cars and tracks that are totally realistic, matching my real race car lap times on the same tracks) that communicate via IPX over Ethernet. And yes, they are as old as dirt, and no, all attempts at playing them with Win/7 and Wine on Linux have failed, so I still have the Win/98SE partitions ready to boot, and the CD's ready for the drives to play.

I also have two Win/95 machines and one DOS 6.21 with WFWG 3.11. Those are all"lunchbox" portables, and two are blue/white LCD. The one has Ethernet, Token Ring, SDLC Bisync and 5250 Twinax cards for connecting to various machines. Those were mostly for business once upon a time, but none of the code I wrote with those is still running out in the world that I know of.

I only have one Win/2000 machine, but its got a dead drive and not worth reloading, and two still running XP machines, three run Vista, and three that run Win/7 (two of them plus one laptop drive the 18 screen array). There are no Win/8 machines here and no Apple stuff of any kind. And Oh yes, there is an AS/400 Mainframe that's too heavy to move in the corner of the living room, but one drive died, so its done.

PS: there are 3 more that only have linux on them now, and I left out 4"parts" laptops that no longer work. They all were once working machines, and have dead motherboards, but have other usable parts because I kept buying similar machines over time.

Nice museum you have there...and an AS/400? I remember those well when I worked in a small data center in the early 90s. One was an F10 (size of a filing cabinet) and the other was an E model. Some of the newer models could run Linux so why not search for a replacement drive for your machine :^)

AntiX on AS400 would sound darn sweet haha

Its a sickness, I tell you... And BTW, my wife has other words for it besides"museum", LOL, ones that are four letter and begin with"S" are common.

Anyway, my AS/400 was one major release too old for linux, and the OS/400 upgrade alone would have cost the price of 10 new PC's (like $5000). And it was too slow, too. But it paid for itself in its day, so it owes me nothing. Same with the others, they all earned their keep.

But today, I make do with whatever I have, and find some way to make things work, and work well, regardless of the obstacles.

It keeps my brain from going stale, LOL

thriftee wrote:Its a sickness, I tell you... And BTW, my wife has other words for it besides"museum", LOL, ones that are four letter and begin with"S" are common.

Anyway, my AS/400 was one major release too old for linux, and the OS/400 upgrade alone would have cost the price of 10 new PC's (like $5000). And it was too slow, too. But it paid for itself in its day, so it owes me nothing. Same with the others, they all earned their keep.

But today, I make do with whatever I have, and find some way to make things work, and work well, regardless of the obstacles.

It keeps my brain from going stale, LOL

LOL at least keeps you happy though __{{emoticon}}__

I'm not totally off of Windows as I still need it for peripherals and some software packages. However, I need it only sporadically so now run it in a VM instead of dual-booting like I did when I decided to give Linux another look back in 2012.

KrunchTime wrote:I'm not totally off of Windows as I still need it for peripherals and some software packages. However, I need it only sporadically so now run it in a VM instead of dual-booting like I did when I decided to give Linux another look back in 2012.

I myself keeps a Windows XP VM (in Virtualbox) on my big rig for those time I need to work on MS Office 2007 documents as well as working with PDF's in Acrobat X, or for those few times I need IE 8 for some (broken) bank sites.

I have cleaned up excess files and am pulling off data, and it was a nightmare and it took a whole day to do it, but i managed to shrink the ntfs boot partition enough that i can fit my linux partitions, and will setup a grub2 multi-boot with linux as the default but still giving me the ability to boot windows if i need to.

Once I get the linux onto the main drive, I'll remove the 2nd drive that the linux is on, and install a 7200 rpm 500 gb drive in the 2nd bay, and then duplicate the old primary drive onto the 1st half of the new one, and then take the old primary out, and put a 32 gb 300-450 mbs SSD drive in its place, and put the boot and linux on it, and just use the hard drive for big data and backup of the SSD.

So at that point, the boot, os, and applications will all run from ram, and even the swap drive will be in ram. I spent about $70 on the fast 500 and 32 gb fast SSD, but I'm hoping it will make the system fast enough that I'll be happy with it for a few years more at least.

The apps that force me to keep windows are my Brokerage trading apps, AS/400 client access, SAP logon, sony camera video's PMB, robosoft, fitday, and if I ever have to use MS Office again. At least I've whittled it down to a short list. My intent is never to need to buy any more MS software.

I need to try virtualbox to see if I can get those apps running under it.

@thriftee: I put together a how-to on installing
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url was:"http://crunchbang.org/forums/viewtopic.php?id=36436"
linktext was:"Windows 7 Pro in VirtualBox"
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over in the CrunchBang forums. You might find it helpful. There's also a link to a PDF version at the end of the how-to.