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Windows XP on PowerPC?

bunnspecial said:
Win2K is the gold standard of where we leave them operating. By extension also, there's one particular Dell tower that is a "sweet spot" of running Win2K well, but also has SATA and even a PCIe slot. The last one I set up got a nice GPU to let it run a 1080p monitor.
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I ran a 2560×1440 monitor off a Windows 2000 box using a GeForce 9500 GT. The drivers for it “officially” require XP but turned out to work just fine. And I'm fairly confident I could have done 3840×2160 at 30 Hz from the card too but didn't have a suitable monitor back then.

AthlonX2-Win2000-2015-03-14.png
 
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Not connected to PPC but still relevant to XP, the other day I noticed in a local store (which is part of a national chain) that their NCR POS self-service machines are still running the XP variant Windows Embedded POSReady. Microsoft terminated support final support for it last year - I have no idea what the status is with these machines, as to whether they're air-gapped etc (and I highly doubt that the staff would know either) so is it safe to say that I should only pay with cash during any purchases from that store (and other branches)?
 
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If you are using Apple Pay, what do you think is the risk? I don't think the POS machines are trying to download wAReZ-CrACkZ over NFC.
 
I never really liked XP all that much. the UI was garbage, and theming it to Classic you might as well just go back to Windows 98 SE. Windows 98 SE was up until 2011 my favorite OS, just as in 2020 my old Samsung phones running TouchWiz are my favorite phones. I have a ton of experience in Win98SE, and it was super fast running on systems designed for XP running 1GB RAM. I managed to keep Flash working up to version 10 via the self-extracting archive to enable those goofy Facebook games to work in the 'unsupported' OS.

Windows 98 finally died with HTTPS killing the ability to browse and login to those sites. I for a short time worked around it by going to http://m.facebook.com back when it would produce a text-based version, after Facebook killed their 'Facebook Lite' website, but eventually that got updated to look like the phone app and broke compatibility with SeaMonkey 1.1 and Firefox 2.2.

By that time the better looking (to me) Vista and later 7 came out. In 2012, however, I got spoiled by Mac OS X Mountain Lion having bought my first MacBook Pro after being spoiled by an iPhone 3GS my boss handed me (get rid of that awful Nokia or you're fired, I can't afford losing calls from you due to its horrid battery) and I later got an iPhone 4 to enjoy retina for the first time.

However, my memories of Windows 98 SE remain my fondest. It was to me the fastest, most stable platform I used. I HATED XP. It looked awful, it was super slow to boot, and tended to BSoD far too often. It was a major system resource hog, and it was trying to do far too much and many options were dumbed down 'for the masses'. The only thing I remember fondly of it was title.wma on first-boot, but that song track was also on the Internet Explorer 3.01 Starter Pack disc that came with Windows 95. Many assume it was exclusive to XP.

Many other things XP did made itself a nightmare to use. Office with its Clippy assistant, BonziBuddy finding its way onto my system, Messenger spam, the Klez worm, and the fisher price UI design. One could call it proto-skeuomorphism but Apple did far better with that than Microsoft ever could.

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IME 98SE was way too unstable for any kind of serious work. XP was an ugly resource hog and dumbed down for the masses but it was more stable than 98 unless you had hardware problems (in my case, a hard drive that was on its way out) or incompatible drivers/software.

With that being said, Windows 2000 is where it's at for me.
 
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I once bought an HP tower computer that came with Windows XP and it always performed super slow. Didn't crash but was always churning the hard disk. Ended up it was pre-installed with like 48 different viruses and one Klez worm. We got that info verified with HP too, and they sent back a total restore disc set that wiped and reinstalled a 'clean' version of Windows XP with hardly any HP bloatware as well. Still wouldn't perform nearly as good as it did once I wiped the entire thing and went to Windows 98 SE, which was a challenge trying to get video and sound working. Had to put in an older video card, and a SoundBlaster AWE64 PCI card which had Windows 98 drivers. Actually an improvement over the motherboard video/sound.

Windows 2K was nice too, but without real DOS support you lose the ability to play DOS games and I still played them. Windows 98 was the last OS to include real DOS mode.
 
I always viewed Windows 2000 as XP minus all that bloat. It had a similar compatibility layer for software/drivers but depended an awful lot on service packs to do so, similar to NT 4.0. Windows 98 SE was just better for me. It had that active desktop and some things that differentiated it from Win2K, and I've always been quite averse to change, no matter how minor. If one thing is different enough it bothers me.
 
I liked QNX. It was a very polished and stable Linux lookalike but it never took off, sadly. I was super, super impressed with the test boot floppy, which had a browser you could surf the web on via a modem. Truly jaw dropping stuff at the time cramming all that in 1.4MB.

I agree that Win2K was the last time I liked MS's offerings. Particulary Explorer, which had a touch of QuickView built in so that you could preview photos or play mp3s without firing up another helper app. That all got wiped off with XP's messy setup. Everything seemed to take more clicks and Explorer XP was dumbed down as far as I was concerned.

Win98 was a load of meh, though. DOS in high heels. Still wobbly and fell over like on a good Friday night out after closing time.
 
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The last system I ran Windows 98SE on (was designed for XP, had XP on it when bought from Goodwill for $10) was a Compaq DeskPro that had a Pentium 4 and 1GB RAM, and a 5GB Hard drive. I used it well into 2011 where HTTPS killed the ability to use the internet in any usable sense. I could leave that thing on for days or weeks without any RAM usage, or any errors. Every so often Flash would encounter an 'illegal operation' and shut down but that would just involve relaunching Firefox.

XP on the other hand was crash central. BSOD randomly browsing the internet. Slower than molasses. Ugly as heck. Open IE, crashes trying to load Google. It was awful. My experience with XP was similar to folks' experience with Vista--and overbloated, resource hogging mess. Windows 98 SE on that same system used no more than 1/3 the RAM and no more than 25% CPU.
 
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weckart said:
I liked QNX. It was a very polished and stable Linux lookalike but it never took off, sadly. I was super, super impressed with the test boot floppy, which had a browser you could surf the web on via a modem. Truly jaw dropping stuff at the time cramming all that in 1.4MB.
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I loved that Demodisk too and have collected quite a few versions of it.

I also have a prototype-ish/demo system of a QNX4-based "PDA" from 1998. Gotta take some pictures of that beast. They managed to fit quite a bit of stuff into its 4MB flash.


Last but not least, QNX6 was also ported to the Compaq iPAQ PDA. That machine was fun to play around with back in the day. WinCE, Linux, QNX, others - I wouldn't be surprised if Symbian OS (with the Quartz/UIQ interface) secretly also ran on it.

Screen Shots | eQip Project

eqip.openqnx.com eqip.openqnx.com
 
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The problem with porting windows xp to ppc macs (even if the kernel supports ppc in the code) is that macs uses a different implementation of the power pc instruction set compared to the ibm machines for which the ppc support was made and also those machines supported switching between little endian and big endian modes, of which windows uses the first one, while ppc macs just supports running in big endian mode with no swithing, so a port to ppc macs should very much be a brand new target for the os, and all the software shuold be compiled on purpose for that os
 
@weckart and @Amethyst1 Sorry i didn't notice this thread until it was recently revived. I loved QNX. After the gtk toolkit was ported, i wound up compiling or porting a bunch of software over that got included in their software repository. That was eons ago, like 2001/2002-ish. The last thing i remember that used QNX in a consumer product was the Blackberry Playbook tablet (which i have in a drawer somewhere). Oddly enough i recently stumbled across an old website of mine i had forgotten about and found some of my QNX screen shots from 2002. Here are 2 of them for nostalgia sake.

Sorry for being off topic of the original post, but once i saw QNX mentioned i had to post.

Cheers
 

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wicknix said:
The last thing i remember that used QNX in a consumer product was the Blackberry Playbook tablet (which i have in a drawer somewhere).
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Blackberry 10 (the smartphone OS) identifies as QNX 8.0.0 iirc. (The Playbook runs 6.6.0.) I'd love to get my hands on the Dev Alpha A prototype that looks like a miniature Playbook.

I had a Playbook too, fun little device but I'm just not a tablet guy. If my phone is too small or inconvenient I step up to a laptop.
 
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Amethyst1 said:
IME 98SE was way too unstable for any kind of serious work. XP was an ugly resource hog and dumbed down for the masses but it was more stable than 98 unless you had hardware problems (in my case, a hard drive that was on its way out) or incompatible drivers/software.

With that being said, Windows 2000 is where it's at for me.
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This post is almost 4 months old but I still feel like replying to it. As someone who worked as a Windows developer during the 9X/NT segregation and into XP era, I despise 9X. Everyone knows ME is trash, but I am amazed to see praise for 95/98. Both were extremely unstable and collapsed easily with even marginally complex workflows. 95 in particular I was able to bring down with ease, even some early USB devices just completely crashed my OS. Thought drivers were bad but as late as 2002 I was able to replicate it. So much for plug and play.

I always used NT 4.0 as a result of this, and then 2000. 2000 in my view was a rock-solid OS, easily the best incarnation of Windows I have encountered. I moved to XP at launch however, and while not quite as impregnable it seemed to work okay for me. Some incompatibles I had to suffer through on NT but they were well worth the stability. I assume that most of the nostalgia for 9X comes from consumers that only used basic apps and external devices with it, and/or forget the unstable nature of the OSes. I've had people get quite heated over this argument which is somewhat unsettling to me, especially when they were only 7-14 years old at the time.
 
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retta283 said:
I despise 9X. Everyone knows ME is trash, but I am amazed to see praise for 95/98.
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Not from me though. 9x was a good gaming platform but that's about it.
retta283 said:
I assume that most of the nostalgia for 9X comes from consumers that only used basic apps and external devices with it, and/or forget the unstable nature of the OSes.
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Or just used it for gaming. And you know what "blasted" nostalgia is like - you don't remember things as they actually were, but as what you make them to have been. (Does that sentence even make sense LOL.)

retta283 said:
I've had people get quite heated over this argument which is somewhat unsettling to me, especially when they were only 7-14 years old at the time.
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If they don't have better things to do with their time... ;) But I know what you mean. Best to stay clear of that. Not worth the time.
 
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retta283 said:
I assume that most of the nostalgia for 9X comes from consumers that only used basic apps and external devices with it, and/or forget the unstable nature of the OSes.
Click to expand...
I've got no rose-tinted nostalgia for 9x! In order to install/re-install Win 95 I had to use two different graphics cards because otherwise it would lock up and I ended up keeping notes on when I needed to halt the installation, shut down the computer and swap the video cards during the process. It's unbelievable to reflect that for years, I accepted this as a standard staple of computing. I used Win98SE on several computers right up till Microsoft ended support in 2006 and those that I didn't move over to Win 2K were air-gapped.

What appealed to me about the Win9x was being able to finish working within the Windows environment and then easily exit to Pure/Real DOS mode for gaming under 6.22. DOS games often ran badly under the NT family and always had sound issues - although DOSBox and other solutions have rectified this in more recent years. Also, I could add the FASTVID tweak to my autoexec.bat file in Win9x and enjoy a substantial graphics boost courtesy of write-posting being enabled on my Pentium II machines. I kept several PII computers on Win98SE because I wasn't prepared to lose that tweak as the difference it made to their performance was like night and day.

retta283 said:
95 in particular I was able to bring down with ease, even some early USB devices just completely crashed my OS. Thought drivers were bad but as late as 2002 I was able to replicate it. So much for plug and play.
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Plug and pray.

Remember this?


retta283 said:
2000 in my view was a rock-solid OS, easily the best incarnation of Windows I have encountered.
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Agreed. :)

For me, Win2K was the best of a bad bunch: more reliable than its predecessors (which wasn't too difficult!) but still falling short of what Microsoft's rivals had to offer. I still use Windows everyday on an air-gapped machine which operates as my Personal Video Recorder but the only reason that it runs Windows is because MythTV didn't provide quite everything that I needed.

retta283 said:
I've had people get quite heated over this argument which is somewhat unsettling to me, especially when they were only 7-14 years old at the time.
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It's also unsettling to me and it's even worse when the culprits have to be in their 40s and 50s and are behaving like 7-14 year olds.
 
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