Computer Chess Club Archives


Search

Terms

Messages

Subject: Re: OT: Operating systems and chips

Author: David Blackman

Date: 23:56:26 08/20/01

Go up one level in this thread


I run MS-Win2000 on Athlon (actually a Duron-800) at work sometimes. I works
very well, much better than any other MS OS i have ever seen. I have never tried
chess on it though. You can adjust the priority of foreground/background tasks
somewhere in a control panel. I guess if your friends give high priority to
background, that would explain what they see. Apparently MS-Win-2000 needs lots
of RAM. Mine has 256M which seems enough. 1GB should be plenty. Make sure you
are protected by a good third party firewall and virus protection if you connect
to the internet. MS-Win2000 has lousy security (although better than 98).

My brief experience of NT is that it is worse to use than 2000. Some sysadmins
at large installations prefer NT, probably because it has been around long
enough that they know what the bugs are. It will be very hard to buy a legal
copy of NT now.

I also use Linux and like it a lot. It has the advantage of being cheap or even
free, and is very nice if you have the patience and skill to configure it and
get in the (mostly free) software you need. It is not all that great as
installed straight out of the box, and might be a bit intimidating to newcomers.
MySQL is good and very fast but a little quirky. PostgresSQL (not sure of
spelling) has a reputation for being a bit more standard, and is also free. Out
of the box, Linux security is not very good. Most distributions contain all the
stuff you need to be much more secure than MS-Windows will ever be, but you have
to configure it yourself. Be careful.

There is not much (or any?) commercial chess software for Linux. There is a fair
bit of freeware if you look around.



This page took 0 seconds to execute

Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700

Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.