varigb707 From United States of America, joined May 2006, 1222 posts, RR: 1 Posted (1 year 1 month 2 weeks 14 hours ago) and read 1936 times:
Microsoft is at it again...
" Clock is Ticking on XP--Time to Start OS Migration
By Tony Bradley, PCWorld
Tick, tick, tick, tick. That sound you hear is the clock winding down on the life of the Windows XP operating system. As of today, you have less than two years left until Microsoft will no longer support the OS. Two years may sound like a long time, but if you haven’t even begun to consider migrating from Windows XP to Windows 7, the pressure is on."
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 3, posted (1 year 1 month 2 weeks 2 hours ago) and read 1668 times:
Quoting ajd1992 (Reply 2): Here's to them moaning about the cost of buying Windows 7 for 1100 computers
Chances are very good that they will need to buy 1100 new computers too.
Both my home and my work Win7 computers have 8GB memory in them.
Lord knows what M$ does with all the memory but they do something...
I doubt the systems they bought WinXP will be up for the task.
And if they run Office, chances are the old Office won't run on Windows 7.
They should really think about looking at using Linux instead.
moo From Falkland Islands, joined May 2007, 3600 posts, RR: 4 Reply 5, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 23 hours ago) and read 1596 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): And if they run Office, chances are the old Office won't run on Windows 7.
I've tried Office all the way back to 2000 and they all work fine on Windows 7.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): Both my home and my work Win7 computers have 8GB memory in them.
Hopefully it would be using it, as thats what you bought it for...
In use memory is *not* a bad thing.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): Chances are very good that they will need to buy 1100 new computers too.
...
I doubt the systems they bought WinXP will be up for the task.
It entirely depends on just how old those computers are - up until recently I was running on a 2008 Dell laptop, Core2Duo 4GB RAM.
This is what I ran on it every day I used it:
Windows 7
SQL Server 2008 Express
SQL Server 2008 R2 (full edition)
SQL Server Management Studio (usually I have four or five of these open)
VisualStudio 2008
VisualStudio 2010
MongoDB
CouchDB
IIS
SharePoint
DynamicsCRM
Adobe Fireworks
Office 2007
All of those would be running at the same time - and I had no performance issues at all. And you have to admit, most of those are fairly hefty products.
And I would fairly regularly drop into a session of Portal or Fallout 3, with the above still running in the background, and have no performance issues in the game either.
So it depends on how old they have let their computers get - by now my above laptop would have been depreciated off of any companies books as an asset with value, so a university should definitely be in a position where they should be looking to replace or upgrade anything older than that.
Plus they have another two years to carry out any upgrade.
My latest computer was an upgrade mainly for the screen (I've gone to a 1920x1200 17" Macbook Pro), and really the only other thing that changed was the amount of RAM I had in the system.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 6, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 20 hours ago) and read 1545 times:
Quoting moo (Reply 5): All of those would be running at the same time - and I had no performance issues at all. And you have to admit, most of those are fairly hefty products.
It only takes one app to bring Win7 to its knees on my system, and that's Firefox, especially the way I use it (I'm a tab fiend, so I have windows and tabs galore). I try to update it frequently, but its update frequently tells me that a few extensions I depend on aren't available, so I don't upgrade.
moo From Falkland Islands, joined May 2007, 3600 posts, RR: 4 Reply 8, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 19 hours ago) and read 1520 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 6): It only takes one app to bring Win7 to its knees on my system, and that's Firefox, especially the way I use it (I'm a tab fiend, so I have windows and tabs galore). I try to update it frequently, but its update frequently tells me that a few extensions I depend on aren't available, so I don't upgrade.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 9, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 16 hours ago) and read 1473 times:
Quoting moo (Reply 8): Yup, thats Firefox Its a pig on any platform.
My own complaining led me to save some things into bookmarks and close some windows and tabs and finally upgrade Firefox despite losing a few extensions that are no longer being maintained.
So far, so good. At least it isn't lagging behind my typing any more and my CPU fan isn't kicking in every few seconds.
Kinda nice to not hear that fan going on and off and on and off!
We'll see how long it takes for it to sludge up again and need to be restarted, but I'm willing to be pleasantly surprised.
Personally I think Firefox shows some degenerate behavior in Windows 7. Task Manager reported that it was using 1.2G and that I had lots of physical memory left over even when I had 4G installed instead of 8G and that it was not using more than a few percent of CPU, yet it still could not keep up with my typing. The only way that makes sense is if Windows Task Manager is straight out lying.
So, Windows still isn't a real operating system 20 years after its birth. It's gotten better with time, and still covers a huge swath of hardware and applications, but it isn't hard to find its weak spots.
The real brilliance all along has been the business model. It's amazing that you still pay for Windows even if the first thing you do to the machine is install something other than Windows. I'm pretty concerned about the various stories of how M$ is going to abuse the secure boot mechanism to force you to have a copy of Windows on the box for it to boot.
fridgmus From United States of America, joined Oct 2006, 1383 posts, RR: 11 Reply 10, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 16 hours ago) and read 1468 times:
OK, how's this: Switch to a Mac!
The Lockheed Super Constellation, the REAL Queen of the Skies!
elbandgeek From United States of America, joined Jun 2008, 735 posts, RR: 0 Reply 11, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 16 hours ago) and read 1456 times:
I can't begin to comprehend why anyone would stil be using XP at this point. Later this year when 8 launches we will be be 12 years and THREE versions ahead. The same people who cling to XP "because it works so why should I bother" are probably the same people who claim that any given aspect of Windows is crap or broken. What most fail to realize was Vista was the version that made the most advancements in improving security, and aside from the performance issues that were mostly on the hands of hardware makers, it was way more stable than XP. I used it for 2 years and never had an issue before upgrading to 7 and it got even better. Now I'm running the 8 Consumer Preview and wouldn't think of going back to a previous version. Even if you don't like Metro (I do, btw) the performance improvements alone are worth upgrading.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 9): I'm pretty concerned about the various stories of how M$ is going to abuse the secure boot mechanism to force you to have a copy of Windows on the box for it to boot.
Using "M$" autmatically loses any credibility in an argument
They're using the secure boot to *gasp* increase security, not some vendetta against linux because the fact is less than 1% of the world cares about linux on their computers....and those are the people who are most vocal about how "insecure" windows is. It's up to the OEM to decide whether or not the secure boot can be disabled except on ARM devices where it's there for good, but there wouldn't be a point to installing an alternate OS on those anyway.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 12, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 12 hours ago) and read 1393 times:
Quoting elbandgeek (Reply 11): Using "M$" autmatically loses any credibility in an argument
So be it. I think my posts here and elsewhere in general are pretty accepting of M$, certainly relative to others and relative to my own feelings in the past. On the other hand, I've watched M$ use their bundling practices to force all kinds of companies out of business, and use other ways to screw over partners, like refusing to turn on the optimizer for the retail builds of a much earlier 64 bit Windows OS, NT 4 on the DEC Alpha. M$ wanted DEC's customer base, and DEC was stupid enough to let the fox in the hen house, but it takes two to tango, and M$ screwed DEC royally by this trick and several others.
Quoting elbandgeek (Reply 11): They're using the secure boot to *gasp* increase security, not some vendetta against linux because the fact is less than 1% of the world cares about linux on their computers....and those are the people who are most vocal about how "insecure" windows is. It's up to the OEM to decide whether or not the secure boot can be disabled except on ARM devices where it's there for good, but there wouldn't be a point to installing an alternate OS on those anyway.
Yes, it is up to the OEM. Hopefully this will let vendors sell machines that can't boot windows, and thus won't have to pay the M$ tax to support something it can't run. In any case, it won't matter to me. My current employer sells systems to the 1% you sneer at, and it keeps me up to my armpits in high-end linux servers, and I'm sure whomever I work for next will be a similar firm.
mham001 From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 3001 posts, RR: 3 Reply 13, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 12 hours ago) and read 1375 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 6): It only takes one app to bring Win7 to its knees on my system, and that's Firefox, especially the way I use it (I'm a tab fiend, so I have windows and tabs galore). I try to update it frequently, but its update frequently tells me that a few extensions I depend on aren't available, so I don't upgrade.
There is a fundamental problem here and it has nothing to do with the hardware or software. Ok, Firefox is to blame but the operator loses all credibility when he blames his woes on Windows for this. And Windows runs great on 4 gigs ram.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 9): Personally I think Firefox shows some degenerate behavior in Windows 7.
It's not just Windows. They totally scewed up Firefox for Ubuntu, enough so I dumped it last year for Chrome.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 14, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 12 hours ago) and read 1361 times:
Quoting mham001 (Reply 13): Ok, Firefox is to blame but the operator loses all credibility when he blames his woes on Windows for this.
The stuff I fault M$ for is:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 9): Task Manager reported that it was using 1.2G and that I had lots of physical memory left over even when I had 4G installed instead of 8G and that it was not using more than a few percent of CPU, yet it still could not keep up with my typing. The only way that makes sense is if Windows Task Manager is straight out lying.
Operator? Geez that's ancient lingo. I thought I was the resident greybeard on this thread...
In any case, Windows is terrible about identifying what its bottlenecks are. According to Task Manager, it had plenty of memory and CPU yet the system response was terrible. Linux commands such as top and its graphical equivalents work better: when it says things are fine, they are fine, and when it says you are short of CPU or memory, you are short of CPU or memory.
zckls04 From United States of America, joined Dec 2011, 778 posts, RR: 3 Reply 15, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 11 hours ago) and read 1344 times:
This is hardly a shock- why should MS continue providing support for a 12-year-old product? Their support cycles are pretty generous and certainly predictable. If there's a sysadmin to whom this is a surprise he's in the wrong job.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): Chances are very good that they will need to buy 1100 new computers too.
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): I doubt the systems they bought WinXP will be up for the task.
I've had pretty good luck with most of the WinXP systems I've upgraded. The only ones which haven't worked are those which originally had Win2k on them, and were already reaching EOL when WinXP was put on them!
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): Both my home and my work Win7 computers have 8GB memory in them.
RAM is cheap these days. 40 bucks buys you 8 gig. Not like the bad old days when 512k extra RAM cost $200. Of course if you have to do it for a thousand computers that's another matter! But 4 Gb is more than enough for Win7 unless you want to watch HiDef video or things like that (which wasn't even born when WinXP was a baby).
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): And if they run Office, chances are the old Office won't run on Windows 7.
Depends how old. The last five or six versions should be OK. If you want to run Office 98 you might have some fun though! Maybe I'll try it tonight and see if compatibility mode will do the job...
If you're not sure whether to use a piece of punctuation, it's best not to.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 16, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 7 hours ago) and read 1266 times:
Quoting zckls04 (Reply 15): RAM is cheap these days. 40 bucks buys you 8 gig. Not like the bad old days when 512k extra RAM cost $200. Of course if you have to do it for a thousand computers that's another matter!
Depends also that the mobo is new enough to be able to deal with modern RAM. The older the RAM, the more it costs per byte, and the slower it is. Depending on exactly when the machine was purchased, it might be a royal pain to get enough RAM into it to make it go fast enough to run well.
D L X From United States of America, joined exactly 14 years ago today! , 10561 posts, RR: 53 Reply 17, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 7 hours ago) and read 1264 times:
kngkyle From United States of America, joined Dec 2006, 354 posts, RR: 1 Reply 19, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 6 hours ago) and read 1250 times:
I like Windows 7 and have had very few problems with it. Vista worked alright for me too, since I had enough power to run it, but 7 is definitely an improvement. I couldn't imagine still using XP, it just seems so ancient now. Although my laptop still has XP and it runs fine, I hardly use it.
TLG From United States of America, joined Jul 2005, 324 posts, RR: 0 Reply 20, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 5 hours ago) and read 1243 times:
Quoting kngkyle (Reply 19): I couldn't imagine still using XP, it just seems so ancient now.
Agreed. XP was great in it's day, but it's now rather outdated. FWIW, Vista has actually become pretty decent with the service packs Microsoft released. But, I can't imagine using either of those rather than Windows 7 for daily use.
moo From Falkland Islands, joined May 2007, 3600 posts, RR: 4 Reply 21, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 3 hours ago) and read 1196 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 14): In any case, Windows is terrible about identifying what its bottlenecks are. According to Task Manager, it had plenty of memory and CPU yet the system response was terrible. Linux commands such as top and its graphical equivalents work better: when it says things are fine, they are fine, and when it says you are short of CPU or memory, you are short of CPU or memory.
The problem however is that a threads performance doesn't simply increase until you hit the upper limits of one of the systems resources, there are thousands of other reasons why you are experiencing the behaviour you are.
A thread can become CPU bound, disk bound, IO bound or it could just become lock bound or timeout bound - where the thread is waiting on internal events rather than external events. No amount of system resources is going to solve a timeout or lock blocking problem.
If Firefox is blocking on a thread, waiting for something internal to time out or happen (and as I've looked at the code, not recently but about a year ago, there is ample scope for things like this in Firefox), no amount of spare RAM or CPU time will solve the delays.
Firefox does lots of things as you type into the box, it gets suggestions from its bookmarks and cached website history, it checks whatever you are typing against the Google database for risky sites, it continually checks for the protocol and special urls etc etc etc. Any one of those can get hung up on a thread blocking for something and cause a pause - thats a problem with the architecture of the application, not the OS in this case.
And Mozilla treat Microsoft Windows as the primary development target, Linux and OSX are secondary targets - Firefox *really* sucks on those, so if you think it sucks on Windows then you have a whole new experience ahead of you...
Silver1SWA From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 4538 posts, RR: 28 Reply 23, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 2 hours ago) and read 1181 times:
When I had Windows XP, I did a reinstall every 6 months or so because for whatever reason Windows would decide to take a dump routinely. Then I bought a brand new machine with Windows 7. 2.5 years later, I did my first reinstall because I just started having stability issues. After the reinstall, still having issues so it appears to be a hardware problem, not software.
Windows 7 has been quite impressive to say the least.
ALL views, opinions expressed are mine ONLY and are NOT representative of those shared by Southwest Airlines Co.
CrimsonNL From Netherlands, joined Dec 2007, 1620 posts, RR: 42 Reply 24, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 6 days 1 hour ago) and read 1175 times:
AIRLINERS.NET CREW CHAT OPERATOR
Quoting elbandgeek (Reply 11): I can't begin to comprehend why anyone would stil be using XP at this point. Later this year when 8 launches we will be be 12 years and THREE versions ahead.
Well, as you stated yourself, it works, so why should I bother? Don't get me wrong, I run WIN 7 on my laptop and I think it's a fine operating system, but I just don't want to go through all the trouble of reinstalling my OS on my desktop, and XP is by now so stable that it has never given me a reason to do so either. One of these days my old HDD will probably die and then I will make the switch to WIN 7 (or 8 for that matter). Until then, I'm perfectly happy with my WIN XP.
ajd1992 From UK - England, joined Jul 2006, 2645 posts, RR: 6 Reply 25, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 5 days 20 hours ago) and read 1143 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 3): hances are very good that they will need to buy 1100 new computers too.
Both my home and my work Win7 computers have 8GB memory in them.
Lord knows what M$ does with all the memory but they do something...
I doubt the systems they bought WinXP will be up for the task.
And if they run Office, chances are the old Office won't run on Windows 7.
They should really think about looking at using Linux instead.
Indeed, they probably will, but I can tell you that they won't. They use Dell something or other things with a single core processor and 1GB of RAM. Some (but mostly not all of them) have dual core processors, but still only 1GB of RAM.
We run Office 2007 on XP and it works great. I have Office 2007 on my Windows 7 netbook, but I can't really complain if it doesn't work, I didn't pay for it
They would use Linux (and we have been told this in the past) but apart from the fact none of the staff (apart from the IT staff) can use it, we're a Microsoft Exam Centre, Adobe too. The world would end before they switched over - and they know how much it would save them in licensing.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 26, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 5 days 14 hours ago) and read 1068 times:
Quoting moo (Reply 21): If Firefox is blocking on a thread, waiting for something internal to time out or happen (and as I've looked at the code, not recently but about a year ago, there is ample scope for things like this in Firefox), no amount of spare RAM or CPU time will solve the delays.
Yes, you are 100% correct. In performance work, it's very hard to track down event-driven issues, because most times you are trying to figure out why something the programmer expected to happen isn't happening, and it's hard to search for something that isn't happening...
Quoting moo (Reply 21): And Mozilla treat Microsoft Windows as the primary development target, Linux and OSX are secondary targets - Firefox *really* sucks on those, so if you think it sucks on Windows then you have a whole new experience ahead of you...
I haven't looked into how Mozilla works at all, but indeed it's an amazingly complicated piece of software. IIRC, Netscape lost tons of ground to Microsoft back in the days of the browser wars by going away for a year or more and rewriting the app so that it could deal with different windowing systems and OSes in a way that made the Netscape wizz kids happy, and that Mozilla et al inherited that code.
Quoting moo (Reply 22): If you really want a better Task Manager, go grab the SysInternals suite from Microsoft -
Yes, I've played around with that, and perfmon as well.
Quoting Silver1SWA (Reply 23): When I had Windows XP, I did a reinstall every 6 months or so because for whatever reason Windows would decide to take a dump routinely.
People have to un-learn the idea of reinstalling to fix problems. As you note, in current times it usually doesn't help things, and it almost always breaks tons of things.
Aloha717200 From United States of America, joined Aug 2003, 4397 posts, RR: 17 Reply 27, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 5 days 13 hours ago) and read 1087 times:
I switched to Windows 7 a week ago. I like it better, actually. Once you get used to the weird layouts of some of the menus. It also utilizes my processor and RAM much better than XP ever did. My system built in 2007 has never been faster.
Unfortunately, the Netscape code was so bad, all of it was dumped before the Mozilla codebase took form. Mozilla gained nothing of value from Netscape, other than the impetus to form in the first place.
Silver1SWA From United States of America, joined Mar 2004, 4538 posts, RR: 28 Reply 29, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 5 days 13 hours ago) and read 1075 times:
Quoting Revelation (Reply 26): People have to un-learn the idea of reinstalling to fix problems. As you note, in current times it usually doesn't help things, and it almost always breaks tons of things.
Well, I just knew it was time. I like the idea of starting fresh sometimes.
How does formatting and reinstalling break things? If it's a hardware problem, a reinstall wont help. That's what I suspect my issue is.
Other than that, after 2.5 years my OS drive was getting cluttered and things just werent running as smooth. I felt it was time.
ALL views, opinions expressed are mine ONLY and are NOT representative of those shared by Southwest Airlines Co.
Revelation From United States of America, joined Feb 2005, 10494 posts, RR: 20 Reply 30, posted (1 year 1 month 1 week 5 days 12 hours ago) and read 1039 times:
Quoting Silver1SWA (Reply 29): Well, I just knew it was time. I like the idea of starting fresh sometimes.
How does formatting and reinstalling break things?
It makes you rely on having a perfect backup, and being able to reinstall your data and programs and redo their settings without any breakage at all, no?
Usually that's a tall ask on a Windows box, in my experience.
Quoting Silver1SWA (Reply 29): If it's a hardware problem, a reinstall wont help. That's what I suspect my issue is.
Or you happen to be re-installing buggy software, like a driver that causes data to be corrupted from time to time.
Quoting Silver1SWA (Reply 29): Other than that, after 2.5 years my OS drive was getting cluttered and things just werent running as smooth. I felt it was time.
The file systems on the current M$ OSes should be self-de-cluttering and shouldn't display less smoothness with time.
I know I haven't noticed any such issues ever since I left the Windows 95/98/ME systems behind.
francoflier From France, joined Oct 2001, 3196 posts, RR: 10 Reply 32, posted (1 year 1 month 3 days 22 hours ago) and read 676 times:
Quoting Aloha717200 (Reply 27): Once you get used to the weird layouts of some of the menus.
Have you tried ClassicShell for Win7?
It brings back an XP style useable start menu, a proper toolbar to windows explorer with a 'parent folder' button (Why in heavens would I use a computer browser like a web browser???) and a few other things.
Shortly before this thread started I switched over. Really starting to wonder why I waited so long. Every time I turned around I was having so type of issue or virus with Windows.
"It's not the size of the dog in the fight, but the size of the fight in the dog"
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