Is the consensus here that XP rocks?
There are some hardware support gaps, but they shouldn't hit most people. It's when you have "nontypical" equipment that I've seen this pop up.
I didn't like NT4.0 myself, as I got way too many instances of the blue screen of death, but now I feel like any later OS built on NT (Win2K and XP) is amazingly solid. Well, "amazingly" only in comparison to 98, 95, and 3.x. Those were awful. XP just plain keeps running and manages resources pretty well, which is what the norm should be.
I've got two XP machines and one running Win2KAS, and none have required a reboot unless I turned the machine off myself to mess with hardware or the occasional software install insists on it.
Getting back to my earlier discussion of DirecWay, it's been more reliable lately. It does frequently cut out, but when it does, and any machine on the network issues an internet access request, the machine that's handling the internet immediately dials the modem. Except for one time yesterday, the DirecWay connection came back quickly enough that the modem didn't even finish dialing.
I've also found that reboots usually are unnecessary. Instead, one only needs to disable then re-enable the DirecWay connection. ICS switching has to be done manually, too, if it switches to dialup.
Should be possible to write a script that'll ping a reliable site at a specific interval, and if the ping ever fails, switch to dialup, enable ICS on the dialup, then continue to disable/enable the dish and ping it, and shut down dialup and move ICS to the dish whenever it comes back up.
Such a script would bring Direcway up to "pretty cool" from the "acceptable" level, IMO.
Got a better fix on speeds now, too. During really busy times, I get about 150/30 (kilobits up/down), during moderately busy times I get about 250/30, and during off-peak I get 800/30 to as high as 1600/30. They advertise 400/128.
I'm reading a message board about broadband and the outages I was seeing were brought up by a lot of others, so it was on "their" end, not mine. Also, my bandwidth results are typical. A bit less than the advertised download rate during peak times, and as much as 4 to 5 times FASTER than advertised rates off-peak. And everyone complains that they've never even gotten close to the advertised 128 uprate that's advertised. Too bad. I wanted to use this machine to host my own small websites and to develop/test another site I'm working on before moving it to an ISP, but with a max uprate of 30k, combined with huge latency, it won't be workable for either one.
Speaking of latency, a typical ping to a friend's machine about 20 miles away comes back in the 1000-1200 ms range. Big latency.
Though I'm not "happy" with DirecWay right now, I'm at least "content enough" with it.
But I'm still spending most of my free time right now learning all I can about fixed wireless, with an eye toward becoming a local ISP providing it. Once I find out how I can get my backbone connection. |
