Would MORE RAM help?

[WA4OTD]

You still have command line in XP and even Win 7. I use it often.

Hi All,

Currently I'm running X-Pee but as soon as I can aquire the 2 gigs of RAM, I'll be mounting it
and switching to a Linux that has the ham radio programs to run the Dell 2400. To me, MICRO$HAFT screwed up when they got away from the Command Line and went to the Apple-like GUI. With Linux I can have my old command line again and "fix" things when they break.

If Bill & Melinda Gates want to help someone, they could GIVE, through their "charity" and
send it to the Treasury to take care of some of our mounting debt. This is NOT a political
"jab" and no Democrats or Republicans were hurt by this message, LOL!

GOD BLESS,
73,
Don/KA5LQJ

[AK7OZ]

There's a slight difference with command line. Pre Win95 we had a 'real' command line. Remember the lovely days of booting up the computer and you still had to type 'win' to start windows? We were running on a DOS platform. In those days if you opened up the command prompt from Windows you were actually going outside of Windows, back to DOS. Post-Win95, MS decided to go with an Apple-style GUI. We were no longer running on a DOS platform; Windows effectively became the platform. Yes, the command line function is still there, but you're not actually exiting or working around/outside of windows. In effect it's really just another application not much different from Word or Solitaire. I don't use it all that often anymore - although I loved working through DOS & was very reluctant to accept the change - but the capabilities were severely limited in 95 & were getting better by XP. From my understanding, under Win7 (Vista was nothing but a train-wreck anyways), they've got it about as close to returning to DOS functionability while still operating within their GUI & platform.

My $0.02

[KT1F]

It's true that Windows 3.x was the last version where you could start in DOS and then type win to start Windows but I don't think it's accurate to say that the command prompt was severely limited in Windows 95 and they've been slowly adding the functionality back since then. Windows 95 effectively had a full version of dos. It was called DOS 7. There was nothing limited about it. I think there was a C:\Windows\Command folder where all the dos commands lived.

I've written bat (or cmd) files from time to time since Windows 2000 days and I don't recall the command shell being particularly limited compared to what we had in dos.

The latest versions of Windows server can be installed as "Windows Core" which is pretty much without the GUI. It's true that the command terminal you get is still "graphical", i.e., it's not using the character generator in hardware that we still see at boot time but the "GUI" is minimal.

These days PowerShell is the way to go if you want to do any sort of shell scripting.

[AF6LJ]

I have xp on a 1 ghz machine and it only has 128 mb of ram in it. I think that is the minimum xp will run on. They never would have had to have faster machines if the programmers would write tight, efficient code. Wordstar used to be 64 k in size!

I halfway agree with you;
Take anybody who has been online gaming for most of the last fifteen years or so...
The first 3D rendered games had their success ride on how tight the code was in their rendering engines. The first 3D shooter to incorporate online play, Quake had much of its rendering engine written by hand using assembly code. This could be verified by looking through John Carmack's finger. (very early version of a blog or twitter take your pick)
Still the minimum system requirements were a Pentium and 32MB of ram....
That was in 1996. More to the present, you can play Quake1 on your smartphone and enjoy the same level of performance we did back in 1996 minus the Open-GL extensions and the stereo sound....

For those who don't know Wordstar had no WYSIWYG ( What You See Is What You Get) That didn't come along until Word Perfect arrived on the scene. Font selection was poor and you were limited to text only, that was the first Dos versions of Wordstar.

I wouldn't by any means return to the days of DOS with it's intrrupt issues and memory management issues. I don't have to run Fastopen to get timely file access.
Fastopen was a program that came with DOS that provided file cashing which enabled the timely opening of files once used during a session. I'll admit writing batch files was fun and configuration files were easier to deal with than the Windows registry.

We haven't even touched on the Internet yet...........
I hated the cluged mess that Winsock was, without very careful attention to hardware and driver comparability there was no end to the heartache that was in store for someone using Windows 3.11 and Internet connectivity.

If you really want the good days back again get FreeDOS and run it....
If you really miss the command line get one of the versions of Linux, the command line is very powerful and you can programs out of several command prompts at once. There are a number of flavors of Linux that will run really well on your machine. This box dual boots Windows Seven is on an SSD and boots in less than twenty seconds to my login and another three seconds and I am on the desktop after login. .
I have Ubuntu on another drive an SATA-II drive and it boots up in about a minute to the login screen and about another twenty seconds to the desktop.
The last two MS operating systems I have run, Seven and XP have been trouble free and the transition to sixty four bit has been not without issue however has not been a struggle.

If I want nostalgia there is an IBM PC and a K-Pro 484 in the garage and both still work, but why would anybody in their right mind go back to that stuff for their day to day needs?, I wouldn't, not on your life.

[KA8NCR]

You need to forget about the Ram as the cure. That isn't going to help much - if at all. Have you considered finding a dual core 2 to 3ghz used computer? Very cheap these days. Should be more than a few of those in Shreveport. I don't know what speed Comcast is out there, but it should be fast enough to not take that long. What is their rated speed at your location?

It is going to help considerably. At that amount of memory, the majority of system work is spent swapping memory in and out of the virtual memory file and not doing work processing web pages. It is heavily I/O bound dealing with its own resource issues.

[KA8NCR]

I have xp on a 1 ghz machine and it only has 128 mb of ram in it. I think that is the minimum xp will run on. They never would have had to have faster machines if the programmers would write tight, efficient code. Wordstar used to be 64 k in size!

Do you still use Wordstar?

Can you provide some examples of "tight, efficient code" and why you feel it is such? I'm a sucker for someone who talks algorithm analysis.

[WA9SVD]

Do you still use Wordstar?

Can you provide some examples of "tight, efficient code" and why you feel it is such? I'm a sucker for someone who talks algorithm analysis.

If you want to see "tight" code, go back to the Apple //e days. Appleworks (and VisiCalc) on an Apple with 128 KILObytes of memory could handle larger spreadsheets than Lotus or VisiCalc on the IBM PC.