Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

Thanks - I was looking forward to staying off the computer for a day, but didn't factor in a quick trip to the son's place, grey box under one arm - slab tuther.

Good thing is, I have one son an IT manager and the other works for a big retail computer place, so the price will be right.

Checked out the insides:
AMD XP1800+, this was top of the range when purchased
coupled with 2 by 40GB hard drives - the largest at the time was 80GB

so it was showing its age (unlike its owner )

right, so we don't need to lust after Vista then (not that we were )

Reality Jaymie is that to run Vista (acceptably) most people will have to upgrade their systems to a minimum of ...

P4 HT or Duo Core CPU > 2.8mhz
1 Gb Ram
Good Quality 256mb Video Card
> 15Gb free disk space to install
Preferably an SATA or fast Hard Disk Drive

and that's just to run the home version ... which doesn't really do much for you other than give you pretty pictures...

All this is MHO....

IMHO Vista (we have a copy of business) is only a flashy new mod for windows XP. It doesn't run faster because of the hardware requirments, common things like network setting take an extra three clicks to get to. It is a pathetic example of an operating system.

It is running on Intel Core 2 Due, X850 GFX and 1 GB of RAM and it is still abit choppy. Good to hear SP1 is planned already for later this year.

Aero, is cool, but you can only go to it through a button on your taskbar. So in dragging your mouse down to it you may as well click on the minimised windows. Unlike the MacOSX (I am not biased, I hate both OS equally) which has screen corners for these things.

Gadgets doesn't have an auto hide funtion so it is either always on top (blocking other windows) or always behind. When you hit show desktop equivalent, it minimises gadgets as well. I mean come on!

Take ROZ advice buy XP while you can.. cheaper. $150 fo XP Pro or Vista for $350.

And also "Vista Home Basic" edition doesn't include the "aero" feature any way, you need to buy "Home Premium" for that feature...

If you really want to "look" like Vista ala "Aero" style GUI there's a portal available.... which is really neat and small..... installs straight over XP

i'm of the if it a'nt broke don't fix it.

I'll wait till everyone else suffers from the glitches and vulnerabilities of vista.................might try it after they've released service pack 1 and 2 for it but then maybe not.

I'm happily running XP PRO on a amd athalon 1400 with 512 RAM. does the job.

If i was going to upgrade i'd still keep XP and have more processing power left ofver from not running a greedly little new OS

XP is still bugy as hell just like any other MS operating system, but it does the job. We were going to get Vista on all the new machines at work, but it seems Netware is having a very hard time getting the Novell client to work in Vista, so therefore no one could log in and access the internet at work. Microsoft Office 2007 is so completely different we didn't buy it this year simply because it will be too confusing for the students and staff. The worst part is we have to buy 60 licences of 2007 to use 2004 which makes sense for the future but it costs a lot more.

Wow Tim,.... there's still people running Novell out there??

What version???

LOL tim, soon to be BIL works at KPMG there was an obscene amount of time and money spent rolling out XP onmly a few years back. EVERYTHING had to be tested for compatibility and stability. I cant see enterprise moving over too quickly.

Hey why not try Fedora....It's Free! and does most everything and will run most anything. Did I mention it is free? And it will run on most machines with no need to upgrade. Oh and its FREE.

Yeah, but try teaching staff to use linux or any non MS OS.

ROZ, we currently have 5 netware servers (6.5) doing the job of 10 Windows Server 2003 machines. They basically just sit there and do their thing. The windows servers we have we have to restart and troubleshoot almost every week.

At least the staff seemed to have managed to get beyond the intellectual snobbery of only a "mac" will do....

Surprised as it seems almost universal for schools to be Mac OSX around here anyway, not many other places these days that I know of that run Novell.

Last time I dabbled was doing a contract at WD & HO Wills... Novell 4.?? something... ran up against 2000 user limit and 5.0 was going to be a major upgrade...

Put in a DEC Alpha system running NT 4.0, and sucked the entire Novell registry, user accounts and files over automatically overnight.... sat there seeing everything else and being seen on the netware network no probs...

Eventually set it up as main server (no 2000 user limitation) till they sussed out and implemented an upgrade strategy.

Mind you that was NT 4.0.... written by Dave Cutler and the guys from the DEC VMS team.....

Unfortunately MS decided to blow them off after that and have bastardised NT (now known as XP) into an almost unusable op system...

Pity, because still nobody can match the reliability, security and features of VMS and it's now 30 years old....

Pity the DEC guys never knew how to market it and never developed a decent windows gui interface.... yep "pathworks" was a joke...

Still VMS is still out there (new version 8.2 released recently), still in use on many commercial systems and probably would have been resurgent if only Compaq hadn't taken them over and stuffed the company... at least HP has carried the torch somewhat....

After Sep. 11, 2001, for example, word spread that seven disaster-tolerant OpenVMS clusters actually survived the ordeal. That's why most of the big financial services houses, healthcare, telecommunications and big government agencies are firm advocates of OpenVMS.

Commerzbank, International Securities Exchange, VeteransAdministration, Dow Chemical, Vodafone, and the U.S. Postal Service are just some of the business that rely on it to continue operations. (Also NORAD, CIA etc)

Surprisingly, the stats of this old OS are impressive...



In five years I only ever took the NSW Department of TAFE Institute VMS systems down for 2 occasions of hardware failure (disk replacement) and preventitative maintenance and op system upgrades... <0.01% downtime in 5 years.




VMS is still the only operating system that has never been "hacked" by the boys at Defcon

The unhackable claim was validated at the DefCon 9 Hacker Conference where OpenVMS did so well they never invited it back.

It beat out NT, XP, Solaris and Linux, and then was graded as unhackable by the best hackers in the business.


PS... Bit of History First Version of VMS was release 1976 as a 32 Bit Risc C3 classifed (military standard) operating system...

1992 (I think, checking) released as 64 Bit system...

AND I BET MOST PEOPLE HERE HAVE NEVER HEARD OF VMS----SADLY

nope.

But i'm not surpised something that good is not well known. fits the profile, shit is popular.

Give people shiny lingts and it must be good. Back when i was an instro tech, a US company that produced non contact infra red thermometers decided that their product sales needed a lift. they incorporated a 1mW red laser diode into their prodict. thats all. Sales went through the roof, now there are multiple companiesd manufacturing a simmilar product, and you can buy them anywhere from snapon tools to bunnings!

oooooooooh pretty lights......................

lmao...VMS.........we had a dec system at Melbourne Water..the old vax gear lol............im gettin tearey eyed now, vt100's etc......memories.oh and the joy of backups on the huge removable hard disks,so compact (not)roflmao.........and as for oracle lol....we use that at work...give me unibys anyday