Beware the ghost of operating systems past: In which our hero is visited by an old friend

With the Twelfth Night approaching, we finish our 12 Borks of Christmas* (12BoC) series by waxing a little Dickensian as the ghost of operating systems past pays a visit. Spotted by Register reader Don Harwood at the platform of Radley (near the UK city of Oxford) a while ago, the Help Point seems to be in need of help. Our …

[Version 1.0]

Sure, it wasn't the most stable of systems, it was pretty much like Windows 10 although it booted up about ten times faster. I wonder if they will try to fix the problem by plugging in 1 gigabyte of RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

10 times faster? I think not.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SjIB0P9-lY

[shade82000]

It may boot 10 times faster on modern hardware, but the hardware back in 2001 was about 30 times slower so it's all relative.

[chivo243]

First stop

Back when I deployed PCs with XP, the page file was the second thing I adjusted... right after adjust for best performance and use classic mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: First stop

Pick a size, any size, but for the love of defrag, don't pick a range of pagefile sizes.

Never understood how MS thought a process that pretty much guaranteed a severely fragmented pagefile (not to mention the boot disk in 90% of installs) was a good idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

User Name: Administrator

Brilliant.

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: User Name: Administrator

Its just lazy

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: User Name: Administrator

Or incredibly clever.

Someone I used to work with used to make sure the user called Administrator had the most restrictive access on the computer. The real admin account was called something completely different.

[chivo243]

Re: User Name: Administrator

nimda?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: User Name: Administrator

If I remember correctly, I think he used to call it "guest". Because everyone knows the guest account is useless.

[Stoneshop]

Re: User Name: Administrator

The real admin account was called something completely different.

Nqzvavfgengbe ?

[Captain Scarlet]

Re: User Name: Administrator

Ah yes silly of me to jump to conclusions, thats actually a very good idea.

[Steve Foster]

Ah, BG Info

I still have that on some of my servers...

[Sandtitz]

Re: Ah, BG Info

Judging from the BGInfo image this XP has been trucking for over 2 years without a reboot...

Is it XP and one of its components, or is it the Help Point software(?) that has been (slowly) leaking all the memory?

[Gene Cash]

Thanks, El Reg

Thanks for this series... it did bring much-needed smiles this Christmas. Cheers!

[earl grey]

And a happy new year to all

I'm sure there will be no more borks in 2021.