🚀 go-pugleaf

Richard Watson <rwatson@pwdltd.co.uk> wrote in message
news:slrn88a57k.i5.rwatson@bluesharp.pwdltd.co.uk...

> I admit that there are some hardware compatibility issues but most of
> those are caused by manufacturors who don't let anyone else know how their
> machine works (e.g. winprinters- should be called "loseprinters") or
decide
> to remove the brain from a modem (winmodem/binmodem).

I agree here, I wouldn't buy any hardware with the name "win" in it, it
basically means it's going to chew up my CPU's time, gimme a Laserjet with
it's own 68K processor anyday.

> >I didn't dwell on the problem since it was an intellectual exercise more
> >than anything else, but (much as I hate to admit this) I've yet to come
> >across any Win95 installation that I have made which *didn't* pick up on
> >all the hardware, far less concern the user with issues over 'mount
> >points' and 'inode density'.
>
> This is a rather strange point, if you don't mind my saying. One of the
> best features of linux is the filesystem. It requires no defragmentation
> and supports, by default, multiple users and high security. The fact that
> you *can* define mount points and separate your data, programs and
> configuration files and "drivers"  is surely a bonus. I would have thought
> that anyone who has as much experience as you seem to have would
> appreciate this. (I've never needed to know anything about inodes.)

Actually, ext2 does sometimes require degragmentation and there are
defraggers out there for it. As for inodes, in DOS/Windows speak this is the
cluster size, smaller clusters being more efficient on space, e.g. using a
cluter size (or inode density) of 32K means that a file of 1 byte big will
use 32K on the disk, no other file may use this cluster. I once resized a
dos partition from 1031MB to 1019MB, this reduced the cluster size by half
(dos doesn't give you options on clusters, just uses the smallest it can
cope with), although reducing my capacity by 11MB it freed over 100MB of
space..

> In a W9X installation you can have drives C,D,E,F,G .... and the installer
> will put everything on C - swap file, windows directory, programs
> directory - everything. This is a totally inefficient waste of space. You
> can then try very hard to split things up but you'll find that over many
> things windows won't play ball at all.

It's not hard to override, I generally make a small c: partition, install NT
on D: and swap file on another, or spread swapfile across several disks if I
have them. Install programs usually give you the option to install anywhere
other than c:\program files\<app> but some badly written software can insist
on looking in there, can't blame the OS for that. In linux, Nutscrape
insisted on installing on my very small root partition and not on my /usr
partition where all the other apps went, it didn't give me a choice and
nearly broke the OS because the root was nearly out of space.

> I can't really even believe that it could even think of wanting the swap
> space on the same partition as your data. But it does and will advise
> you against changing the defaults should you try.

Message best ignored, for best performance in 95/98, defrag a partition, set
windows swap file on that partition with a fixed size, min & max being the
same, Windows tells you this will hinder performance but the message is
wrong, it gains you performance as Windows will no longer spend time
resizing the swap file so this is faster. The messages like that in Windows
are there because MS consider your average Windows user to be a Current Bun
reader :-) For NT it's best to spread the swapfile over several disks if you
have them (not several partitions on the same disk).

--
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trevor@easynet.co.uk
http://www.trevor.easynet.co.uk