Every little thing she does...

[cycloid]

1. my windows machine boots from power button to desktop in under 30 seconds.

2. dont ever ever ever use a "portal" ISP like compuserve/aol to get online. use a proper bloody net account where you *just* dial in!

3. dont install stuff... if you reformat your PC's HD every so often then copy all your old stuff to a backup drive/partition, lots more things than you would think (e.g. netscape 7.0, quicktime 5+) can be copied from your backup to anywhere you like and just run .. psudeo amiga style

4. have a big drive/partition and copy your drivers and install cds to it... that way when you do reformat everything is ready to rumble on F: (or wherever) and you dont need to find a single floppy or CD (including windows!)

5. drag and drop, it works 10 times better on a PC than on an amiga (but non-ex-amigans haven't noticed) try using windows explorer to select multiple image files and dropping them onto the photoshop icon... it works a treat! ... oh yeah, and use windows explorer , it's bloody fantastic and ive been polling the guys at dopus to make something similar for el nuevo dopus.

6. set your swap file to 512 mb *fixed* size, and then defrag ... if you use a norton defragger it'll even put your swap file at the start of the drive .. = much faster windows

7. have 512 mb of ram too

8. and when you've done all that, boot your amiga and play doom on it instead... that and octamed are pretty much all i use it for! hehe

9. oh yeah, things i like about the PC that the amiga SHOULD do (just to be contentious, why am i in this mood today?)

9.a. global windows meta copy buffer... copy and paste anything from one program to another and if you do it cunningly enough it will do a reasonable job of it (text formatting, or putting things into spreadsheets) .. you cant even copy between progs in amiga (yeah i know there's stuff on aminet)

9.b. global shortcuts ... CTRL+C = copy , CTRL+V = paste, CTRL+X = cut, CTRL+N = new, CTRL+S = save, CTRL+A = select all , CTRL+Z = undo ... when using windows at high speed keep one finger of your left hand on ctrl and the rest poised to do the above, you can move at lightning speed.. but on the amiga? i have to use both hands to use both amiga keys and they're differeent for every bloody program

9.c. drag and drop (see above)

9.d. program files, my documents, windows, control panel... if you do things properly (my my documents is mapped to a different partition for example) then these are the only things you usually need to know about... in amiga  you have prefs/ tools/ utils/ expansion/ workbench: sys: work: commodities/ etc/ etc/ etc/ argh! how am i supposed to find abything? and what does "work" mean wnyway? why not sys: programs: and data: (still its not as stupid as linux, anyone know what bin/ usr/ fck/ xbd/ bsd/ etc/ is supposed to mean? i have a degree in physics and linux still confuses me with its instistence on being convoluted)

9.e. "retrace"

9.f. the API (including direct x) ... yup ... i'm only just coming around to this but imagine it.. an API where you can say "play this sound a bit over to the left" and it does it... no configging every individual app for AHI/native/zorro/etc. it just goes , it just does.. but i do prefer opengl for 3d mind ... i'm currently doing 3d games coding on the PC for a laugh and by using API stuff i dont need to mess about creating a bloody
startup dialogue!

cycloid

original ZX81 games coder at the age of 4 and aint stopped since and still loves his miggy

(insert flame here)

[cycloid]

..is tragic? probably applies to the PC better :-)

my point about tools/utils/etc. was that when i first got my 1200 HD going with 3.1 (this was about 4 years ago) i had no idea where to find anything... it's probably a bit moot because that was before we all got used to start menus.

it IS a bit annoying that when you open a file requester there are a million Assigns thrown at you (before i run scripts for things like vbcc too!), some assumed tree logic might have been a little nicer, e.g. SYS:c/ SYS:libs/ SYS:devs/ etc. instead of assigning them all... so they'd still not suffer the c:/windows/bloat problem but at the same time it wouldnt be as scary when all tyou want to do is find something... ?

i just thought of something!!

how about a very clever file reqester that can not only hide system files but also has the option to hide system assigns (apart from SYS:)

assigns are the best thing in the universe never to be copied by the PC though... it's so nice to not have to make a distinction between a pointer, a folder or a volume! dontchathink?

cycloid

turbo amiga nutter:
www.cycloid.biz/junk/amiga3.jpg

[cycloid]

my point about the boot time was a PC thing, yeah that includes everything including me hitting the return key real quick when the network login box comes up. i was making a point though that PCs CAN work fast and efficiently if you just look after them and that getting amiga to be friendly is no easy task either (what with having to "install" all sorts of garbage like MUI Classact fulpallet etc!) ... e.g. theree's nothing in my systray but the clock and the volume control, ive seen people with hundreds of dodgy little programs running in there! eek!

[cycloid]

one thing (that i can do on the amiga and in SuSe linux but) i have never managed on windows is to have an active app window behind a non-active one! it's so ******* infuriating having to shift winodws around because the one you are using always always always is the one on top! bah bah bah!

i like windows explorer and 99 times out of 10 use detail view with sort-by-date... but on windows XP when you sort by date and have newest at the top the bloody list of folders dissapears to the bottom! how **************** infuriating is that!??


as for the games-that-boot-from-cd/dvd idea how about a compromise... you turn on your ng amiga and the cd/dvd is in the drive, it notices this and gives you 5 seconds to choose NOT to boot the disc... then it does a simul-boot, loading the OS and it's drivers and API without the GUI and other features and then plugs them into the game... cunning no? after all if it's a true and beautifully modular system...

cyc