when push comes to pull

Here at the data center we can take no chances of down time. We refresh all hard drives a regular schedule. The new hard drives are put through a rigorous test for 5 days before being deployed. We backup the OS only when maintenance or new programs installed. The user data resides on 3 hard drives. The user data is backed up with user written executives. A second computer is standing by in case of out and out failure of TI to restore drive C. The motherboards of the two computers are different but we have learned how to restore to different motherboards and make the OS work. The OS is WIN98/SE. This OS has proven to be the most dependable and stable OS at the data center. TI has saved many a day for us. Our computers run 24/365.

 

I failed to mention we use the Seagate Cheetah 10K.7 300GB 10k RPM SCSI hard drives.

 

Well, I'm surprised. Windows 2000 usually gets that award not old Win98/SE.

Have you really found problems using Windows 2000 or XP Pro SP2? Wouldn't the NTFS file system be more reliable?

 

We have applied all of the updates to WIN98/SE except for the last one, which practically renders the OS useless. Think of all the problems Windows 2000 and XP had before becoming stable. We were up and running while our customers were crashing and asking for their data to be retransmitted to them. We never experienced a problem with FAT32 so I can’t tell you if NTFS would have been more reliable.

 

I can't argue with your personal experience with Win98, but mine differs. I've run all of the Microsoft OS products from the first DOS to Vista, and also several flavors of Linux, and by far the most reliable, dependable and bullet-proof OS I've ever used is Windows XP Pro. I think Vista will get there too; so far so good.

If you have uninterruptible power at the data center then you may be OK with FAT32. For regular home users who may have a momentary power outage, running a journaling file system like ext3 or ReiserFS or NTFS will be orders of magnitude more reliable than running FAT32.

 

Now, I am very interested. What was the identification of this "last" update and what are the problems/symptoms that it caused. I do support some Win98SE systems, so this would be very useful.

Since you are running a data center, I would guess that you have very little software running on your Win98 systems. It's the OS and recovery software, but not the word processing, office, photo editors, games, etc. that office and home users have. In my experience, Win98 is very good under those conditions. The trouble comes with all the other software that people install. In my experience, WinXP is better under those conditions.

 

I don’t remember the actual number but it is the one that eliminates AactiveX. Disables shockwave and flash_player, prevents downloading programs from the Internet.

 

OK, that would be undesirable. How do you prevent it from installing? Do you have it hidden in Windows Update? If so, could you check to see the KB reference number for that patch?

Thanks,

 

If you've never had a probelm with FAT, you are extremely lucky. It is by design prone to problems, especially in an OS where a prog crash can shut down the whole OS. Consider:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journaling_file_system

 

We don’t like to think of ourselves as being luck. We have taken care of power interruptions and monitor the systems regularly. We use the best components money can by. We are on the 8th floor underground so I don’t expect any problems from cosmic rays. What was the nature of the program crashes that you speak of?

 

Hello GroomLake,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

I'm really glad to hear that you are satisfied with the work of Acronis software.

We will certainly do our best in order to provide you with the good and reliable software in the future as well.

If you have any questions concerning Acronis software, please feel free to submit a request for technical support or post any of them on this forum. We will certainly try to help you in resolving any issues.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov