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Object Oriented Programming languages make developing programs to run on multiple operating systems much easier. All you need is a class library of common functions that has a separate version you can link in for each of the operating systems you want to support where the public interface to the multiple copies of those classes is the same for each platform. It is then a simple matter of linking in the appropriate verion of the library for each operating system.

Cross Platform Programming

Hidden files are much easier to reference in Linux than in other operating systems. It all comes down to a single character on the front of the name.

I have been using the free antivirus from AVG on my computers for a while now. Just recently they started displaying nag screens about buying their new version 8 security suite. A couple of days ago I found out that the paid version 8 wasn’t the only new release and decided to download the free version 8 to take a look.

All I can say is what a terrible job that they have done as I ended up wasting about 10 hours attempting to install this new program only to end up having trouble finding a copy of the old program (the one that actually works) to reinstall in place of the new mess.

I guess part of the problem is the range of operating systems that I run with some older versions as well as newer ones.

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If you allow your CD-ROM/DVD drive to take whatever drive letter your system assigns to it then any changes you make to your system such as adding an extra hard drive will result in the drive letters for your removable media drives changing. This will break any links to that media that you have saved as shortcuts on your computer. In order to avoid this happening you can easily change the drive letter to something further along the alphabet using a letter that makes sense to you and freeing up the earlier letters for the system to reallocate as needed.

In this article I show how to change the drive letter allocation in the now obsolete Windows 95/98/SE/ME range of operating systems. More modern windows operating systems also provide an option to do this but it is accessed a different way. I suppose I really ought to write a new version of this page for the operating systems that people are using now.

Assigning a Different Drive Letter to the CD ROM Drive

Star Office and Open Office (which is what the free version is now called) can easily process Microsoft Word documents almost as well as Word itself can. It also has the advantage of running on operating systems that Word itself doesn’t support. This makes Open Office the ideal choice of office suite software for anyone who doesn’t own a copy of Microsoft Office.

Updating MS Word Documents with Star Office

After mentioning yesterday about people buying computers with Vista and then reformatting to install XP, the relative difficulty of installing operating systems was the next thing that occurred to me.

The main reason why people run Windows rather than other operating systems is because Windows comes pre-installed on their new computer and so they do not have to go through the relatively complicated process of actually installing an operating system and getting it to work with their hardware. At least that applies to those who buy computers with XP installed,, those with Vista installed who decide to revert back to XP still have the problem of doing the Windows XP install themselves or getting someone to do it for them.

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• IBM 1981-1995 - 15 years
• Microsoft 1995-2009 - 15 years
• Google 2009-

To me it seems like Microsoft is currently in approximately the same position that IBM was in 1994. Back then IBM was top dog on the PC and had been since releasing their micro-computer which they called the PC in 1981. We still refer to PCs and IBM compatible even though our current computers are thousands of times more powerful than a PC and are not compatible with anything IBM produce. IBM actually outsourced their operating system supply to a small insignificant company called Microsoft because Digital Research who they wanted to supply the operating system refused to talk to them. DOS was actually a temporary measure as was the original PC as Intel hadn’t quite got their 32 bit chip working properly yet. The plan was to migrate everyone onto AT computers running OS/2 as soon as possible but the popularity of the PC and XT computers made that impossible.

Microsoft released the OS/2 operating system in 1987 but few were interested even though it could run multiple programs at the same time and had a graphical interface. Still there wasn’t much interest in graphical interfaces for DOS back then either and GEM, Deskview, Topview, Windows etc were basically ignored. Even combining Windows and Topview (IBM’s GUI) together and releasing them as Windows 2 was ignored.

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Windows XP and more recent operating systems all use TCP/IP as the protocol for networking computers together. Back in the days of Windows 95/98 the protocol used was NETBEUI. Now it doesn’t really matter what each of these two protocols are and how they work. The important thing is that the two are incompatible and so if you have computers running different operating systems on the same network you may not be able to get them to communicate unless you enable additional protocols on one or more computers.

In this article I wrote some time ago I discuss how to enable the NETBEUI protocol on Windows XP.

Installing the NetBEUI Protocol on Windows XP