[Gloucs] Operating System - Update

[bjh]

Hi Guy's,

Thought you may be interested in the following detailed in the latest FREE Newsletter from my old friend Fred Langa.

Tips from Fred and his readers have been a constant help to me and my business contacts and personal friends in recent years and are cross platform related - from Windows through to Linux!

If you would like to sign up to his newsletter just follow the link:
http://langa.com/join_langalist.htm

Best wishes to all...
Barrie Haycock

*Who's Using Which OS?
(and: Options For Win98 Users)*

In the last issue (and in item #1 above) I mentioned that Win98 will
become officially obsolete (in Microsoft's own terms) next month on
January 16th.

But that prompted many readers to write, wondering what percentage of
people were still using Win98 and how many were on XP; others wanted
more info on options for Win98 users.

The best information I have on what LangaList readers are using comes
from the anonymous server statistics for Langa.Com, which includes a
gross tally of browser types and OSes accessing the site. Although this
information isn't definitive--- some browsers misreport themselves, for
example--- it's probably a reasonable representation of OS use among
your fellow readers:

As you might guess, Windows is the most-commonly-reported OS in use.
Within the Windows group, the largest single subgroup by far is XP, with
52% of the Windows OS tally. Far, far behind, roughly tied for second
place, are Windows 98 with 19% of users, and Windows 2000 with 15% of
the count.

All the remaining Windows slices are quite small. For example, WinMe
accounts for just 6%; WinNT for 1%; and Win95, Windows Server 2003,
WinCE, Win3.xx and the Longhorn Beta (the next version of Windows, due
out in 2005) all with less than 1%.

And note that the above is just for Windows use: Many other OSes are
represented in the overall counts too.

*nix is the second most popular OS type overall, although its total use
is only about 1/10th that of Windows. Of the *nix flavors, various Linux
distributions aggregate to a 50% share, with the rest divided among BSD,
SunOS, HP-UX, "Other" Unix, OSF1, AIX, and IRIX.

A small but nontrivial percentage of Macs visit the site too, with Mac
PowerPC the most common identified type, followed distantly by Mac 68k,
and "Unknown" Macintosh.

Way down in the single digits--- and sub-single digits--- we have
visitors using WebTV, RISC OS, OS/2, the BeOS, and even the Amiga!
For me, the three "take away" points in the above are that, among
LangaList readers (1) WinXP is far and away the mainstream OS choice;
(2) Linux use is significant but still small; and (3) the 19% of you
still using Win98 are facing a tough choice as your OS slips into
nonsupport by Microsoft.

If you're using Win98, I suggest you upgrade to XP if you can: it's
probably the best available choice, and as the numbers above show, is
working for a very large number of your fellow readers. The official
Microsoft information at http://langa.com/u/2r.htm can help you see if
your current hardware will support XP or not. Please also check
LangaList back issues ( http://langa.com/u/2i.htm ) for tons and tons of
information on getting, setting up, and using XP.

If an upgrade just isn't in the cards, and if you want to stick with
Windows, then use the information in item #1, above, and here (
http://www.freetune.com/most_popular_pages.htm ) and here (
http://langa.com/u/2j.htm ) to clean up your current installation and
get it rock-solid. Then, because patches, updates and such may not be
available in the future, preserve that perfect setup in an image or
backup ( http://langa.com/backups/backups.htm ) so that you can restore
your system to that perfect state without having to re-download, re-
install, or re-setup anything.

If you're open to a non-Windows option, check out any of the various
flavors of Linux, we've covered. See http://langa.com/u/2k.htm  for
Standard Edition discussions; there are many more items in the Plus!
edition, too). Linux can run decently on older, slower hardware, and the
price is either nil (for the do-it-yourself distributions) or small (for
the prepackaged and supported versions).
                                      Click to email this item to a friend
                                              http://langa.com/sendit2.htm

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gloucs/attachments/20031218/616b86dd/attachment.html