Subj : Files on LAN. To : Gerald Miller From : mark lewis Date : Fri Jul 09 2004 01:32 pm GM> I'm procrastinating about moving everything to W98SE -- it GM> doesn't seem to be totally stable. there are a great many things to consider when one talks about the stability of a system running windows... i've found that one must take decent care to not install errant device drivers and "whatever" programs... i've a win98se machine here that has been running the same install since Dec 2000 and doesn't have any freezes or lockups at all... that machine has 12 programs in the systray (where the clock is) all the time and maintains plenty of resources. it may get rebooted once a month if it is lucky... it is fully patched and updated... IE is only used for windows update and occasional testing of web pages under development to see how they compare with mozilla's rendering... OE is not used at all... mozilla 1.6 (IIRC) is used for all browsing and email... xnews is used for the occasional newsgroup foray... the programs in the systray are as follows... kerio personal firewall 2.1.5 resource meter folding at home distributed computing protien processor proxomitron filtering web proxy abouttime atomic clock sync mouse driver utility motherboard monitor radius electron microscope monitors the folding at home machines distributed.net's client doing ogr and rc5-72 calculations antivir free virus scanner antivir task scheduler the system has 256meg of ram and is very stable... GM> I've got a spare Maxtor 7200RPM 20GB that I'll partition GM> and reinstall W98SE. What would you recommend as a GM> partition size for the W98SE boot drive and the GM> number/size of partitions for the 16-bit DOS programs that GM> I will eventually move over? honestly, i'd probably leave it as all one big 20gig partition... makes things much easier to handle... especially when you consider that you almost can't have a dedicated boot drive because of all the stuff that gets installed into windows\system when you install programs... and some programs insist on going to C: no matter what... this system has three full bbs installations along with several mailers and other bbs oriented software... there's also a slew of 16bit tools and programs that are used on a regular basis... there's another machine on my lan that is almost the same configuration that's not running as many programs as this one in the systray. that one has problems from time to time... however, there are three programs that are running on that machine that aren't on this one... webwasher (filtering proxy being replaced with proxomitron soon), webshots (gets pics off the web and puts them in albums, desktop background and other similar stuff) and flashpath (used to read memory cards in the floppy drive)... i suspect that machine's problem to be either one of these programs or that mozilla mail on that machine runs all the time while the browser is opened and closed all the time... the stable machine runs mozilla mail and browser and then they are closed when finished with them... the unstable machine generally leave mozilla mail open all the time... so its possible that part of that machine's problem is also within mozilla... we're working on it <> anyway, the main gist of all this is that you can't look solely to the OS for stability problems... if your video card has whacked video drivers, they can bring the system to its knees very easily... the only fix is to update to new drivers or replace the card with one with stable drivers... same goes for soundcards and software modems... one also must come to terms with the fact that that one program that they insist on using may also be the culprit for their woes... )\/(ark * Origin: (1:3634/12) .