How did Amiga influence you?

[stefcep2]

..maybe if all you do is boot the machine, look at the wallpaper, and shut it down..  Try editing video or encoding large batches of media on a PIII running Windows XP and then again on an i7 machine running Windows 7.  I guarantee you'll appreciate those extra resources.

And how, exactly is Windows 7 responsible for any of that?  Its a function of the faster/ more cores CPU.

Oh BTW, most encoding and decoding benchmarks I've seen in reputable PC magazines, XP is the fastest.  So the point that every new version of Windows steals some of your resources and slows your machine (for even things like encoding/decoding which is just number crunching and should just depend on the CPU) is very real.

[stefcep2]

That was exactly my argument, which was in response to "you never get to use any of the additional resources of your computer because Windows steals it all," which is obviously incorrect.



Remove "new" from your above sentence and you've got it.  Every OS has overhead.  Overhead goes up as the OS becomes larger and wants to do more things at once, as they all seem to be doing.  A faster computer with a newer OS is still going to be faster at number crunching than an older computer with an older OS, unless your application has been coded horribly wrong.  If your older hardware is capable of running the newer OS, obviously more of your machine's resources will be taken up with basic OS tasks, but with fine tuning and staying within some limits (don't work in swap!) you'll notice a marginal difference in number crunching tasks.

These are very basic principles, and it sounds like you've almost got a handle on it.

"Seem to be", except that in terms of functionality, Win 7 offers nothing much for the user in addition to what XP can do, 'cept for a faster search tool (which you can get for free from third parties for XP anyway), and security (which still requires a third party security suite on Win 7, and can mostly be avoided if people stopped logging in as admins in XP).

For all the Win 7 hoopla, XP is still the most used OS in the world, by a long shot.

The windows-pc upgrade world has always felt like two step forward, one step back.  The Amiga never felt like that.