How did Amiga influence you?

[tone007]

Naturally, as everyone knows, in the Windows world, Windows updates as the hardware updates, making sure you never get any use out of those extra resources.

..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.

[tone007]

There are too many of my old programs that 7 absolutely refuses to run. :/

Can't hold up progress for a few legacy apps, unfortunately.

Here's the fix, though, XP mode.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx

Hint: virtualization is awesome, and will help you get every last bit of performance out of your machines.

[tone007]

Yes but try encoding video on the same i7 machine running XP Sp3. And I bet (once in the app) you won't notice a difference..

Good point, futher proves the newer OS isn't "holding back" your hardware.  We wouldn't expect it to run faster on Windows 7, would we?

edit: enough off-topic from me, couldn't leave that issue alone though..

[tone007]

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

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.

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.

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.

[tone007]

..dont forget far better 64-bit support, which is increasingly important with 4GB seeming to be the starting point for RAM these days.

I don't disagree that XP is the most widely used OS, nor do I suggest that 7 is a good choice for older hardware.  We're still using XP at the office, our clients are still using it, and it's been around nearly 10 years.  Win7 is making the rounds though, very difficult to buy a new PC with XP anymore, most home users seem happy to go with 7.  I'm waiting for the day they ask me to install 7 in the test lab.

..and in all fairness, Amiga really only did take a couple of steps...