Gullible Jones wrote:FWIW I've heard wildly conflicting things about NT4, ranging from ridiculous UNIXesque stability to constant crashes. What's your experience with it?
My experience with NT4 has included none of the sudden unexpected rebooting associated with 95/98. Most of the time, it's been very stable, and it has some features that I miss if I ever have to use 9x (WINFILE supports LFNs, for instance) and you couldn't get me to go back to 9x kicking and screaming.
In fact, for software development NT is the clear winner: if you're not careful and write an infinite loop by mistake it locks up 9x and you have to power off or hit the reset button. All your work since your last save is unrecoverable. Whereas with NT, just bring up Task Master and you can end process.
That said, it does have a few quirks. My particular machine won't play MIDIs. I ended up having to delete my MIDI sequencer because every time I'd go to a website with one of these embedded in it I'd get a BSOD. Then there was the time I tried to install a Lexmark printer (big mistake - they suck) and not only did the printer not work, but my sound stopped working. This is with a sound card, as the onboard sound is not supported. Also, when listening to music if I scroll or a window pops up, thanks to a bug in the drivers, I get clicks and beeps in my audio. (Gosh why does it seem like all my problems revolve around the sound card?)
Another weakness of NT4 is it doesn't support USB. That is to say, it doesn't support it
natively: I actually found a driver that lets me use my Flash drive. It won't handle anything fancy like a scanner or digital camera, but it facilitates a very convenient means of transferring data.
Nighthawk wrote:My biggest complaint is that mine had "memory leaks" and the resources would drop and I would have to reboot once a week.
I shut mine down every night, always have, so that isn't even an issue for me. :)