Thanks for the reply DL and John

DL, and J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

*do not even think about* trying to configure WinXP to your old tried & Tested ways

I fear he's right; they're _very_ different.

OK guys, between you and the machines themselves I've pretty well got
the message. My temptation is to leap in and use these two netbooks as
workhorses, being as they have 300 Gb storage between them, and a
flippin GiGabyte of RAM each. Cripey. I think now though with your
good advice I will tread lighter.

John, your idea of partitioning off the system files and such didn't
occurr to me, thanks, I'll do that. What I did right off was make a
lot of directories "hidden" so at least I didn'r have top look at the
mess they'd made of the C: drive. Then though I was faced with the
godaufull dogsbreakfast of the program files directory. Could they not
have made one folder for Microsoft products at least? I made my own
programs directory with accessories, bases, browsers, editors,
graphics prog subdir's all neat in a row. I have installed a few of my
favourites, but open office for instance got shanghiad and ended up
installed in the "proper" program files dir. there probably are good
reasons for that, I guess mother knows best.

First thing I did was install XYPlorerFree ver 5.55.0
[www.xyplorer.com] so I at least have a decent file manager. My first
look at XP's "find::files and folders" arrangement did not activate my
sense of humour, even the cute pup, especially the cute pup.

I like the LAN functionality so far, it took no time at all to create
a 100% clear line to my old machines and download a whack of tried and
true apps and utilities zips. All of them have been handpicked over
the years for speed and reliability and it is a delight to see how K-
Meleon 1.5.3 for instance rockets onto the screen and snaps from page
to page, must be all that RAM and 2 cpu cores or something. My good
old dialup doesn't seem any faster though.

I guess what I'll try to do, though I don't know if it's possible, is
do a remote desktop on a XP netbook, from a w98 desktop, with its nice
monitor and keyboard and periferals. Heh heh. I am working my way up
the ladder with that one. At present I can run Komposer 0.8 on the XP,
open and edit and save an html file, from any one of my old 98's. I
don't know what will happen tomorrow when I try to open firefox 3.x
which won't run on win98se (at least it won't allow itself to be
installed, there is a difference) then save a web page so that I can
then edit it with kompozer. Do I want too much from the poor little
things?

I just had a hell of a fright. John's mention, I still use
XTGOLD for the same reason. of XTGold, which I don't know about,
had me off on a google picnic tracking it down. Panic set in when I
realised this forum was gone, buried under googles, xtgolds, and ZTree
for windows pages. Then I realised I had written my reply on a sticky
note. Whew!

Well, there's light in the sky, and the chickens will like some feed.
So I'm off.

yours

douglas