Anybody else running legacy windows?

running windows 98... all i can say is that legacy windows + legacy mpc = fantastic. atleast for me and my setup... just wondering if anyone else is doing the same?

I can C that...to be honest I got spoiled by the eye candy in the recent iterattions of windows n is harsh on my eyes to use older OS. but If I had to I would no doubt.

remember Windows ME after win98, that was total crappola

Lampdog wrote:Win XP via vmware on Win 7 64 os is about the oldest I got going on.

xp was awesome, i hate seeing the ads for windows 8 that just looks like they added a bunch of swooshy overlay bullshit (same goes for new versions of osx). it honestly seems like they added new skins on top of the existing framework, and they kept adding and adding more overlay every iteration. i know most users on the forum here wouldnt benefit from such a radically minimal setup but im enjoying it immensely. but im sure atleast a part of it is nostalgia.

the old windows "sound recorder" is pretty awesome. and i love not having random errors when im using floppy disks. i used to get the most annoying random bs, especially on windows 7.

Lampdog wrote:

m56p87 wrote:xp was awesome.

I only use XP for aksys w/ mpc4k and modding handheld psp-2000's, lol.

i remember when xp came out, it looked like the future arrived. to me xp was the first release in what i consider to be modern OS's. it was basically Microsoft's "OSX Jaguar" in my eyes. i really like how everything in a legacy OS is useful, compared to now days "wow factor & apps junk" approach. but of course thats all just my opinion, ive always had a very minimal approach to my setup and making any art.

Lampdog wrote:WinME was a bastard child like Vista, but I had no problems with WinME at all. EVERYONE I knew with it had problems, I had not one problem back when using early version of Vegas, Sound Forge along with
.

hahah yea it was, I think ME had shortest shelf life outta all microsoft windows operating systems...you must have lucked out cuz just about everybody hated it.

Im hearing that windows 8 sales arent turning out too hot

I have a machine running share_10s windows xp build... it's one of the fastest custom builds I have seen that actually run stable. I have tried quite a few different XP builds over the years (including legit and pirated copies) but this one is my favourite. It loads very fast... I am quite impressed. I currently have an age of empires 2 computer running that.

Also, I have a brand new condition NEC versa laptop with 24 megs of ram running windows 95.. floppy drive, 2 pcmcia slots, track pad with no finger wear, mint keys with no wear... it still has the plastic foggy type finish on the surface.. still has the stickers for the OS etc.. and the battery still lasts 3 or 4 hours like new.

windows ME was okaym but that is when the world started to realize that the 9x/fat file system was no longer going to cut it... ntfs was where it was at... I think because of winME's premature death, getting the proper drivers was not too easy for a lot of hardware... remember, in those days plug and play was not taken for granted. You needed a driver for anything you plugged in, or installed... or connected... often you were stuck trying to use windows 98 drivers to see if those worked.

mr_debauch wrote:You needed a driver for anything you plugged in, or installed... or connected... often you were stuck trying to use windows 98 drivers to see if those worked.

this sums up pretty much my entire experience with windows in the 90s. I remember my dad got an ethernet card for the very same compaq presario im using currently. It plugged in and loaded all the drivers by itself and worked instantly, that was absolutely incredible to me at the time. I remember many situations where I ended up in MS-DOS with my dad to fix things, you really had to know your shit to make any modifications. I dont think alot of people these days could troubleshoot without the internet.. you had the generic booklet that came with whatever you bought then the knowledge and experience from whatever real world network you were apart of... thats it. I did video back then, and everyone in a grouo seemed to use the same thing, because you went with what was familiar cause you knew it worked.

On another note, i just ran some sound tests with the ADC/DAC on sed compaq presario 1640. You actually get some of the subtle high end roll off i hear from other 16bit AD on hardware released around the same time, and you can overdrive them a tiny bit for punch.

Two other things that are really cool with the old laptop + windows 98 is the "sound recorder" application that comes with it. It dosnt monitor the incoming audio, so it could physically resample back into itself without creating a feedback loop. Combined with the ability to Pitch +/- 25% you could do some quick pitching and resampling for artifacts. The other interesting thing is Sound Recorder also includes non destructive format conversion. You can convert/record to whatever quality you want and retain a 16bit 44.1khz file until you save. Also Resampling/Overdriving seems to really throw off Bit Depth Quantization of the ADC, you can see the resolution of the waveform degrade considerably pretty fast, and start to clump/drop off in odd places.

I also like to keep things minimal and tidy, but I wouldn't personally go early than XP.

I have set up a very old desktop recently, just for use with my newly purchased MPC 4000. The machine is an old Dell from around 1999, running my own custom version of XP and only a couple of very lightweight apps.

I stripped out nearly everything from XP except what was required for my purposes (CD ripping with CDex, graphical audio editing with Wavosaur and file transfer / backup with ak.sys). It ran well with only 64mb ram but I put another 256mb inside for editing larger samples (it's the same ram as the 4000).

I found the main advantage of such an old machine is the low heat means it runs nearly silently.

mxbdev wrote:I found the main advantage of such an old machine is the low heat means it runs nearly silently.

and probably no aksys/usb drop outs when transferring files? i find the "synergy" from using devices/software made at the same time (not to mention they are both DOS based) to be my main advantage.

m56p87 wrote:

mxbdev wrote:I found the main advantage of such an old machine is the low heat means it runs nearly silently.

and probably no aksys/usb drop outs when transferring files? i find the "synergy" from using devices/software made at the same time (not to mention they are both DOS based) to be my main advantage.

I have had no issues so far transferring files with ak.sys, I think the most I've transferred at once was around about 800-900mb.

Not sure if it's related to the machine's age or I'm just lucky.

mxbdev wrote:

m56p87 wrote:

mxbdev wrote:I found the main advantage of such an old machine is the low heat means it runs nearly silently.

and probably no aksys/usb drop outs when transferring files? i find the "synergy" from using devices/software made at the same time (not to mention they are both DOS based) to be my main advantage.

I have had no issues so far transferring files with ak.sys, I think the most I've transferred at once was around about 800-900mb.

Not sure if it's related to the machine's age or I'm just lucky.

its age... most users seem to report drop outs during USB transfer with anything more recent than XP IIRC.