Quote:
Originally Posted by Mark McLeod
I even have a couple of Mac OS 10.4's
|
Way back to 10.4 eh?

I still have a few machines running 7.5, although I pulled those from active service in 2005. Shoot, I still have my Apple IIC+ I should fire up, and a family member has an Altair 8800 fully functional, but kept in storage.
Although we're diverging from the thread's original topic, a good lively discussion of operating systems is always a fun one. I still have two frequently-used XP systems running very well. It's incredibly fast on an old Pentium D with 2 Gigs of RAM. One is on a network, the other is not. The use of USB flash drives in each does scare me a bit. Both are CNC machine controllers, and I find XP better suited to this task, especially on the older hardware, than a more modern OS. One of the CNC machines used to run MS-DOS, and even that worked pretty darn well, and was incredibly fast even on a Celeron 400MHz machine. In fact, my little CNC mill at home still runs MS-DOS, although if I were to do it again today, I'd go for LinuxCNC.
I ran XP daily in my Intro to Engineering class up through June of 2014, and it still worked quite fine for our purposes at that point. We still have middle school tech classes and computer labs running XP, but we've essentially eliminated it from our high school campus, aside from the aformentioned machine controls. The problem with XP was that around 2014, software companies stopped supporting new versions of their software on it, and XP's days were quickly becoming numbered. The other problem was that it was 32-bit, and could really only practically address 3.5 Gigs of RAM. There was 64-bit XP, but it was never really a thing for the typical desktop user.
These days, it's getting kind of difficult to install a fresh copy of XP from scratch and fully patched, since I believe they've taken down the update servers. Last time I did it was a couple years ago, and it took a few
days to install and update everything, even starting with an SP1 install CD. There was a total of something like over 600 updates between SP1 and a fully patched SP3 system.
As for 8.1, I have it on a Surface Pro 3 and although I consider myself very proficient and fast in 7, I feel like a bumbling idiot trying to use 8.1. People say it's not that different, and it isn't, but some of the simplest tasks are so convoluted to do or access in 8.1. It's UI is honestly a huge step backwards. I do wish 7 had the same Window snapping and resizing that 8.1 had though. Other than that, 7 is excellent. I used 10 only once on a laptop on demo in Costco. It seems okay, but the start menu still does not provide the power and function of the Windows 7 one.
Anyhow, OP, please let us know if we can help you any further with your team's specific needs in specifying a new system.