IPython 0.2.5

[Fernando Pérez]

Terry Reedy wrote:

> You wrote further on your web page: "Hopefully Windows users will
> quickly migrate to XP (which is actually quite good in many respects)
> and we'll bury Win95 and children were they should have been buried
> years ago."
> 
> Don't hold your breath.  XP is a greater resource hog than ME is a
> greather resource hog than W98 is a greater resource hog than W95, so
> many (most?) users can't upgrade, even if they would want to pony up
> the upgrade fee and run the risk (in some cases, certainty) of
> disabling a hardware system and set of software than currently work.
> (XP does NOT run everything that runs under Wxx.)

Well, my feeling is that things aren't all that bad, given you have *memory*. 
I recently upgraded my oldie desktop to XP, an aging PIII-450 with a slowish 
hard disk, but with 256Mb of ram. And it's just fine. I turned off most of 
the eye candy and it runs quite well. It feels barely slower than it did 
under 98, and the gains in stability are priceless.

And it had lots of old hardware: a parallel port CD burner, an old Epson 
Photo 700 printer (parallel), an old winmodem without driver disks, etc. I 
had to get various updates on the web and move the printer to the  usb port 
(with a parallel/usb converter), but now *everything* works 100%.

I'm sure others may have had other experiences, but the key factor seems to 
be memory. Have >=256Mb of ram, a processor >= 400 Mhz and you should be 
fine. And most hardware and software makers from what I saw have free patches 
for XP on their websites.

At the end of the day,  I'm quite happy with the results. At least it doesn't 
crash every 5 minutes!!!

> That said, I may download and see what happens on my Win98 system.

Let me know how it goes. I didn't mean to sound hostile to Win9x users, it's 
just that I'm sick of dealing with the instability of that thing. And now 
that I've migrated to XP, I have no way of testing under 98. But with some 
luck things should work, even the unix/windows-dependent code is minimal, so 
I hope it will be fine with 98. If you find a problem and can fix it, send me 
the patch and I'll include it in a new release.

Cheers,

F.