Windows fudges it again

[psxphill]

This article suggests you create a ram disk and tell Windows to use that as a swap file. Faster than a hard drive, but slower than regular memory access.

This is a solution looking for a problem, Microsoft already have a solution. Install a 64 bit version of Windows that will happily use more than 4gb of ram, no fudging required.
 
If you're using software that needs alot of ram then it's probably already available as a 64 bit application itself.
 
I only run a 32bit OS on my netbook because it doesn't have an x64 compatible chip and the chipset only supports 2gb max.

[psxphill]

AAh the motto upon which the PC market is built on:"If it doesn't run fast enough, buy new hardware", which really means "make it run slow, so you HAVE to". And the only reason why people accept it is because its cheap to upgrade so people just shrug and do it.
 
Except there is a looming shortage of rare earth metals, so unless they find another way to make the circuitry, it aint gonna be so cheap to upgrade forever.

Obviously most people will take the cheapest route to better performance. I don't buy into the conspiracy theories that anyone is trying to force you to upgrade by making their software slow. It is impossible to write software that does more, without requiring more processor power.
 
Some software is poorly written, but writing it better would take more time and money. If you're trying to get software to market, then you have to ship it sometime. Nobody has unlimited pots of money, not even microsoft. You can't solve the time problem with money either. Even if you don't run out of money, is anyone going to pay your extortionate prices for software if you spend ten times longer to write the software by making it run slightly quicker?
 
There is a huge difference between modern hardware and 1992 amigas, but there is a huge difference between what you can do with them. My 50mhz 68030 struggled to play mp3's, I dread to think what it would make of a bluray. No matter how much you tried to optimise it, you'd get nowhere. AGA can't even output 1080p60.
 
I still get enjoyment out of my C128, so I can see why 8gb of ram would seem outrageous in comparison. However I don't try to import 2gb of price matrixes on it either.

[psxphill]

I don't think I'd even want to play MP3s on an Amiga. Stick a modern HDD in one and you could have a sizeable collection of uncompressed music that requires very little computational power to play.

Isn't it hypocritical to put a modern huge hard drive in an amiga to allow you store audio in an inefficient format? If using modern hardware in a PC is so bad.
 

Also with the virtual memory turned off it crashed in some tests. Unacceptable and kludgy.
 
I'm sticking with 32-bit for at least two more years, I shouldn't have to mess around with virtual machines to run old software,

Yeah, I wouldn't disable virtual memory or limit it to a ram disk, no computer handles resource exhaustion well. The reason of course is that it's very expensive to write software that copes, when the easier solution is to make sure you have a large enough margin that you don't need to worry.
 
Windows handles low memory situations better than AmigaOS ever did. I don't use virtual machines for compatibility, because there isn't any old software that I would want to use. If a company doesn't think it's worth making a windows 7 64 bit compatible version then the software probably isn't very useful.
 
Windows 7 64 is generally more stable than 32 bit. Device drivers must be signed & they seem to get tested better. It's also more resistant to virus'
 
Going from kickstart 1.2 to 1.3 affected compatiblity, so did going from 1.3 to 2 & 3. The solution to that was a kickstart switcher, or softkicking/loading via mmu. I don't see how this would be different to a dual boot or virtual machine.
 
The main difference between windows and amigaos, is that windows is under active development to keep it modern. For amigaos we have 4.0, which needs to use a virutal machine to run old software.
 
Windows 7 64 bit ultimate/enterprise comes with xp mode, which pretty seemlessly runs software in a VM (like MacOS does for old software). You can have 32 bit applications in windows on your desktop, 32bit tray icons even appear in the system tray.

[psxphill]

Storage is so cheap now that I can't understand why anyone would bother with compressed music on anything other than portable devices.

Fast processors are so cheap that nobody bothers to write highly optimised code these days.