/

[zipper]

 I need a 4GB USB stick to make it faster?!  is that what you're telling me??

It's not fast enough to give more speed.

[stefcep2]

Tron2k2 wrote:
Wait..  What?  I am going to buy this OS on a modern dual core or more CPU with two gigs minimum of RAM and then..  I need a 4GB USB stick to make it faster?!  is that what you're telling me??

My god, what kind of piggy OS is this?  And the advantage of this versus XP is exactly what now..?

I'm sorry but this is just the most absurd thing I've ever heard of-needing a USB stick to make your OS faster!  I thought that's what efficient coding, plentiful RAM and 8MB hard drive caches behind modern IDE interfaces were for?

My next x86 box will have Linux on it for sure!  Or maybe AROS if it gets a tight web browser.

its ridiculous isn't it.  We now have hardware which 3-4 years ago would be considered a super computer, yet the OS still gives us wait cursors when all you want to do is open the start menu.  No vista says, I'll listen to you when I'm good and ready.. Or try and drag a solid window and watch it tear up as the OS struggles to redraw it even though its running on 4 cores and 3 gig ram 512 mb graphics card with super fast ram, but then you see it work smoother in Winuae.  Put two Vista windows next to one another.  How easy is it to tell which is the active one?- oh yeah its the one with the little red close window gadget in the corner.  Really intuitive, isn't it?  

[Trev]

Some facts:

The maximum path is limited to 260 chars for compatibility with legacy software. Paths beginning with \\?\C\... have a practical limit of about 32000 wchars.

32-bit Windows can use more than 4 GB RAM via PAE and AWE, but it's up to the application to use it. The "3 GB" limit is used in marketing materials by third parties, so users that install two 512 MB display adapters aren't surprised when they're mapped below the 4 GB boundary to make the accessible to 32-bit drivers.

Most delays in the shell can be attributed to waits in kernel code or deadlocks and race conditions in user code.

[stefcep2]

Trev wrote:
Some facts:

The maximum path is limited to 260 chars for compatibility with legacy software. Paths beginning with \\?\C\... have a practical limit of about 32000 wchars.

32-bit Windows can use more than 4 GB RAM via PAE and AWE, but it's up to the application to use it. The "3 GB" limit is used in marketing materials by third parties, so users that install two 512 MB display adapters aren't surprised when they're mapped below the 4 GB boundary to make the accessible to 32-bit drivers.

Most delays in the shell can be attributed to waits in kernel code or deadlocks and race conditions in user code.

whats PAE and AWE

[JLF65]

PAE = Physical Address Extension. This means the CPU really has 36 address bits instead of 32. How do you get those extra four bits? You use the MMU. The addresses you use in your program are VIRTUAL addresses - they are translated into physical addresses by the MMU. The problem is that the CPU is still using a 32 bit pointer, so you get a max of 4 GB of space to address. Even worse, normally a program is only allowed to use 2 GB out of that 4 GB of space. The rest is reserved to the Windows kernel. Using something called 4GT (4 Gig Tuning), you can access up to 3 GB out of the 4 GB.

Suppose you need more than 3 GB. That's where AWE comes in. AWE = Application Windowing Extensions. This is a throw-back to the old EMS days on 16 bit PCs. This is good old-fashioned BANK SELECTING. You tell Windows to make a bank inside your 3 GB of space, then tell Windows to switch in and out banks of memory in that bank of space. With AWE, you can access that full 36 bits of addressable RAM (64 GB), but only a piece at a time inside that smaller bank.

[Hammer]

Calde wrote:
OK look,
for a bunch of geeks you all are overlooking the obvious.
Windows Vista comes on a DVD, and the whole OS takes up about
10 GB to install on your hard drive, way way to much room for
me. Then to run with any speed at all, no lags or stutters, you'll need
at least 2 GB of ram, preferably pc6400 dual channel. I'm either running win xppro
or amikit or af. Oh and don't forget the dual core or even better
upgrade to a quad core. I have to deal with windows for my customers
but have started to migrate a select few to a linux based os.
They love it and since I build the servers and file systems
theres very little surprises. only problem will be going from
linux to xls docs or word docs, that comes next year. I'm thinking
about doing everything in adobe format. hmmm
down with windows!
LOL
Calde

For general MS Windows Vista usage, it doesn’t need a quad core CPU since slowest device in the system is the hard disk.

[stefcep2]

Hammer wrote:

Calde wrote:
OK look,
for a bunch of geeks you all are overlooking the obvious.
Windows Vista comes on a DVD, and the whole OS takes up about
10 GB to install on your hard drive, way way to much room for
me. Then to run with any speed at all, no lags or stutters, you'll need
at least 2 GB of ram, preferably pc6400 dual channel. I'm either running win xppro
or amikit or af. Oh and don't forget the dual core or even better
upgrade to a quad core. I have to deal with windows for my customers
but have started to migrate a select few to a linux based os.
They love it and since I build the servers and file systems
theres very little surprises. only problem will be going from
linux to xls docs or word docs, that comes next year. I'm thinking
about doing everything in adobe format. hmmm
down with windows!
LOL
Calde

For general MS Windows Vista usage, it doesn’t need a quad core CPU since slowest device in the system is the hard disk.

And why, may i ask does the damned thing need to access the hard drive soooo much?  4 gig of super fast ram and several megabytes of sup super fast cpu cache not enough?  to do what, exactly? i am sitting here typing away in a web browser and other than punching the keys there is nothing else I'm doing yet the hard drive is ticking away and I've turned off indexing, defrag..so what the hell is it doing?

The text of the  Encyclopeadia Brittanica fits on one CD ie 650 meg.  An OS needs about 10,000 meg?  Absurd.

[LoadWB]

I'm using XP x64 Edition, and I have little complaint.  With more 64-bit Server 2003 drivers out there now that it's become more mainstream, I'm in good shape and do not have a single device missing drivers.

I hear Vista 64 is really good, but I'm not willing to make that leap just yet.

I do have some "legacy" applications (read that as some apps using an ancient SDK to avoid purchasing a new one, and others for $_DEITY knows why) which do not work in x64, so I run 32-bit XP in VirtualPC or VirtualBox for these apps.

XP x64, 8GB RAM, and it all works well.  Were it not for Vista's phuqd up way of navigating the system, I'd move up to Vista 64. Feh.

[LoadWB]

Trev wrote:
Some facts:

The maximum path is limited to 260 chars for compatibility with legacy software. Paths beginning with \\?\C\... have a practical limit of about 32000 wchars.

I've not used this syntax.  Is that accessible from Explorer?

[Trev]

@LoadWB

Yes, but I typoed the syntax. It's actually \\?\C:\... (or \\?\D:\..., etc.).

For anyone interested in Windows memory limits, check these out:

http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/07/21/3092070.aspx
http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx

I'll concede that the consumer SKUs of 32-bit Windows XP can be limited to 3GB. It's unfortunate. Anyhow, run 32-bit Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition or a 64-bit Windows instead. ;-)

[zipper]

 am sitting here typing away in a web browser and other than punching the keys there is nothing else I'm doing yet the hard drive is ticking away and I've turned off indexing, defrag..so what the hell is it doing?

That's what taskmgr is for - check what's happening.
I've turned everything extraneous off and just my antivirus software does those slowdowns every now and then, mostly when joining new drives to the system or downloading something.

[Lorraine]

/

[Trev]

You'll probably just need to streamline your setup in the same way, particularly if you're running one of the business SKUs and don't use the features designed for enterprise management. Windows XP Service Pack 3 added some of the additional management features available in Vista, so you might want to look into disabling those on Windows XP if you haven't already.

[stefcep2]

zipper wrote:

 am sitting here typing away in a web browser and other than punching the keys there is nothing else I'm doing yet the hard drive is ticking away and I've turned off indexing, defrag..so what the hell is it doing?

That's what taskmgr is for - check what's happening.
I've turned everything extraneous off and just my antivirus software does those slowdowns every now and then, mostly when joining new drives to the system or downloading something.

I know its running stuff in the background but what is it doing, in the sense that its not achieving anything tangible to the user.  Why doe sit need so much crap to run just so that i can get a window displayed on screen, make a TCP connection and move the mouse pointer and use the keyboard to type?  As this is a rant thread, I'll rant some more..

I think we've lost perspective on the hardware specs that this OS is running on: hard drives  are still 3.5 inch but store terabytes of data, that's unimaginable data density, hard drives rpm at 7200 and 10000, so data should be packed in and accessible very very quickly, we have GIGABYTES of RAM ( some are talking 8 GB !!!), 3000 mhz CPU's with on board caches bigger than system RAM of past machines, display cards capable of pushing pixels on screen at insane speeds, all communicating with multiple CPU's via super fast data buses, but I've still gotta wait for the start menu to pop up and draw itself on screen, or stay half drawn for a few seconds after i close it?  

Overall hardware specs have increased by factors of 10, 100, or 1000, inj recent years, yet the user experience is just as frustrating as ever.  What is the point of the hardware getting better if the OS just negates it all?

[zipper]

Progress...

[bloodline]

stefcep2 wrote:

zipper wrote:

 am sitting here typing away in a web browser and other than punching the keys there is nothing else I'm doing yet the hard drive is ticking away and I've turned off indexing, defrag..so what the hell is it doing?

That's what taskmgr is for - check what's happening.
I've turned everything extraneous off and just my antivirus software does those slowdowns every now and then, mostly when joining new drives to the system or downloading something.

I know its running stuff in the background but what is it doing, in the sense that its not achieving anything tangible to the user.  Why doe sit need so much crap to run just so that i can get a window displayed on screen, make a TCP connection and move the mouse pointer and use the keyboard to type?  As this is a rant thread, I'll rant some more..

I think we've lost perspective on the hardware specs that this OS is running on: hard drives  are still 3.5 inch but store terabytes of data, that's unimaginable data density, hard drives rpm at 7200 and 10000, so data should be packed in and accessible very very quickly, we have GIGABYTES of RAM ( some are talking 8 GB !!!), 3000 mhz CPU's with on board caches bigger than system RAM of past machines, display cards capable of pushing pixels on screen at insane speeds, all communicating with multiple CPU's via super fast data buses, but I've still gotta wait for the start menu to pop up and draw itself on screen, or stay half drawn for a few seconds after i close it?  

Overall hardware specs have increased by factors of 10, 100, or 1000, inj recent years, yet the user experience is just as frustrating as ever.  What is the point of the hardware getting better if the OS just negates it all?

Or you could use a Mac... :-)