I long for a decent OS.

[downward_s]

Tomas wrote:
These delays all add up during a day of usage and will in the end be wasted time... And dont get me started ono the process of shutting down a windows pc...

Yes, I think the definition of 'Realtime OS' has been stretched somewhat since the advent of Windows.

It is scary to think how much of my life has been wasted waiting for systems to boot. It's especially frustrating when you're fault finding. At least I get paid hourly for it..

David

[Tomas]

itix wrote:

Is not just boot times.. A windows/linux pc also seem to lag when you for example try to open something simple as a txt editor, simple mail application or similar. I expect the txt editor to open in a split second after pressing the button, but this just does not happen. Why should i use a modern pc for these tasks when my outdated amiga does the same task in less time?

If modern word processors are too bloat why not use old software? Something like Microsoft Word 95?

When i was talking about a txt editor, i meant something along the lines of notepad and a graphical equalent in the linux world. Even those has a noticable lag before they appear on the screen. Also things like opening a folder or similar seems to take too much time on both linux and windows. I want it to be so snappy that it gives the illusion of appearing right after pressing the button. Of course i cannot expect this with bigger office suites like word or openoffice, but i do expect it with simple and small applications. I guess it is just me who notice these things?  :-(

And yes, i have tried lightweight window managers like xfce and fluxbox before. Things seems a bit more reponsive, but is still not optimal to my eye. The only resposive OSes i have used on pc is BeOS and Aros but sadly neither of these are very usable today.

[downward_s]

MskoDestny wrote:
Try Syllable: http://www.syllable.org/

Brilliant. I'm downloading as I type. Thank you!

David

[downward_s]

hamtronix wrote:
Or use a non electric typewriter.... sounds like you want too much. reminds me of the millions spent to develop a pen that could write upside down with no gravity by nasa all the while the russians used a pencil...

LOL

I thoroughly agree. This isn't entirely my point though. I had the almost perfect solution with the A1200. Quick boot, simple interface, stable, friendly, and small. The perfect tool existed.

It's just not so perfect after all these years. It's not physically portable, it doesn't support a decent screen, and the old hardware has become inherently unstable because of its age.

It's also difficult to quickly transfer files from a base Amiga to the PC without much messing about, and unfortunately this transfer is a necessity nowadays.

I know this is such an old thing to say here, but give me an Amiga laptop with, USB, SVGA output and a decent keyboard and I'll be incredibly happy.

David

[downward_s]

jorkany wrote:
Get an Atari 400 and don't plug a cartridge into it. It literally takes about two seconds to boot into the "textpad". Storage can be an issue though, for that I recommend keeping a VCR hooked up to record the session.

lol! Well that is also my problem with the A1200 now. None of my PCs have floppy drives any more, and a couple of them don't even have a serial port. I used to use a SCSI Zip250, but that died a long time ago with the click of death.

You can do it if you expand the Amiga with a NIC or USB card or CDRW, but then you're quickly removing the simplicity, especially on a vanilla A1200, which will quickly need expanded to cope.

I really love the all-in-one hardware of a laptop with a good screen and good keyboard. Reminds me of the A1200, it's just that the OS and software is so damn inefficient.

David

[downward_s]

Starrunner wrote:
Simply put...I've seen Workbench take a while to load.  

Yes, it can do if you heavily expand it. However, if you strip the startup sequence to go straight into what you will be mainly using the machine for, it can be usable in the time it takes the monitor to warm up. For me this was just an incredible feature.

However, it never seemed to take nearly as much time as Windows.

On some motherboards the POST is longer than the bootup time on my heavily expanded 1200T, when I had one.

I've used every version of Windows since 95, and they just seem to keep getting worse each time.

To be fair I personally think XP was a huge improvement in boot time and stability. However, it's still crap, in the real world.

I have done an experiment.. if I do a clean install of XP SP2, disable everything except critical features, disable all extra hardware (parallel/serial/NIC), turn off all autodetection in the BIOS and skip the memory check, and make sure everything is defragged; the quickest I can boot my fastest machine into a blinking cursor is still over one minute after pressing the power button.

David

[Ral-Clan]

First, disable any RAM checking in the BIOS during powerup....that will shave a few seconds off boot time.

Next, use TWEAKUI and set it so that you get an early boot menu.  This way, you will see a boot menu before windows even begins to be loaded.  You can manually choose DOS from the menu, or you can set the timer for something short like 5 seconds.

Write a script in your DOS autoexec.bat file so that when MS-DOS starts WordPerfect for DOS or a text editor is automatically run.

This should all happen in under 20 seconds.

[downward_s]

Write a script in your DOS autoexec.bat file so that when MS-DOS starts WordPerfect for DOS or a text editor is automatically run.

Hmm, this is definitely an interesting idea. However, I presume I'd lose NTFS access?

I may try it if Syllable doesn't work out.

David

[Ral-Clan]

Hmm, this is definitely an interesting idea. However, I presume I'd lose NTFS access?

I don't know anything about that, but the whole idea of the early startup menu is that you're pre-empting Windows and running your modern computer as a bare-bones DOS box.  DOS (and Wordperfect for DOS) should be blazingly fast on a modern computer.

[giZmo350]

weirdami wrote:
@gizmo350

I'm still trying to find a HD for my A500! I may be a while on that one.

I have "SCSI external device boxes" for sale. $5 each plus shipping. Get them out of my house, please! :-) Pictures on the stuff for sale website in my sig. Grab one (or two!) and slap in some SCSI type hard drive or something. I probably have the right cables for them, too. Then post about how you got them to work because I don't know anything about them. :-D

----------------------------------------------------
LOL, I just got rid of a couple of those. Would still require an Amiga 500 SCSI interface. Nice try though!
 :-P

[downward_s]

MskoDestny wrote:
Try Syllable: http://www.syllable.org/

Now posting this from ABrowse in Syllable :-D

I like it. Unfortunately it doesn't like 3 of the PCs I tried it on, and simply hangs.. even on failsafe. Will see if I can sort that out..

David

[kvasir]

@Tenacious

I have an old PalmOS Zire, would this spitfire thing work if I replace the USB cradle with a rs232 (or more likely a bdn9 w/ rs232 adapter) serial cradle? I've recently moved my Amiga into my main office in the  bedroom, and left the XP laptop in my daughters room, and moving from one to the other can be a hassle. (Especially after she gets older and needs a bit of privacy.. not an issue at 3 months, but I like the computer arrangment, eg. keep the Winblows XP POS out of site :-D)

[kvasir]

@downward

If you can get ahold of another 1200, you could use the super-72 driver to get it into  800x600 resolution, though some monitors are kinda picky about using the Amiga's scanrates, though there are a slew of super-72 monitor drivers on Aminet that might work. I found an old 20" monitor once, and I managed to get it to run on my Amiga, though gave it up because lots of my video games use NTSC, and while I could play them on the TV set next to my computer, the European video games that were hard coded to PAL wouldn't work. Though just firing up a text editor should be fine. You can also establish a null-modem connection to a windows pc and use Cloanto's Amiga Explorer to x-fer the text files, which will display properly on word, even with the peciliar end of line system the Amiga txt files use. Also, if space is an issue, an A600HD might work, which (I believe, correct if wrong, please) has ECS, and can use scan-doubled screen which should work with most VGA monitors,  though under ECS these modes are limited to 2 bitplanes (4 colors). I also recall somebody gutting an A600 case and putting it into a laptop, though that involves some good amount of hardware knowledge. (I've  considered it myself with my 600, though I need an old laptop with the PCMCIA port in the right spot, a coclinco mouse/keyboard adapter, a scandoubler, and the pinouts for the various aspects of the PC like the trackball/mouse, lcd display, and keyboard, plus a 4xeide adapter for cd-rom support, and probably an external HDD floppy drive, not to mention alot of free time, solder, and absence of anybody easily offended by profuse streams of verbal profanity) Anyway. getting a bit too chatty here, so I'll move on, hoping I've blabbed something helpful.

[Cymric]

Starrunner wrote:
Simply put...I've seen Workbench take a while to load.  However, it never seemed to take nearly as much time as Windows.  I've used every version of Windows since 95, and they just seem to keep getting worse each time.  I am going to be seeing XP64 soon, so we shall see.  I do not want to see Vista though...UGH!

My Windows 2000 machine is pretty much okay. It's the first stable Windows I've used, I can lock it down very well thanks to the clear access to all kinds of services and administration policies, and so forth. It's awaiting log on in about 20 seconds or so after a cold boot: that's really not too bad.

The beauty of the AmigaOS was something very simple.  It was fast, effecient AND not a bloody space/memory hog.  I can remember a time years ago, when NT4 came out.  I was running my A500 with 1.5 RAM total and a 50MB hard drive under Workbench 2.1.  I remember laughing at my friend with NT4 cause it required I forget how much space and RAM.  I could multitask better than he could, using far less space.  If I remember, the amount of space for NT4 would've been bigger than my A500 HD.

Granted, but NT4 was supposed to do much more than the humble Amiga too, so the comparison isn't very fair. Networking needed to be initialised, driver structures for any kind of graphics or sound or networking device installed, proper multi-threaded multi-tasking, some idea of multiuser capabilities, and so forth, und so weiter. If you don't need all of the above, and you run rock-solid software which doesn't try to be funny, yes, then the small footprint is definitely an advantage. But considering that running Amigas in a stable fashion proved near impossible for me (the machine always experienced unexpected lock ups, nearly always causing invalidated drives to boot) eventually forced me to go PC. First Windows 95, then 98, and with the advent of USB (which 98 never properly supported), Windows 2000. 2k is a souped-up NT4, and despite being a little rough around the edges in terms of user friendliness, quite good for you telling the machine what you want to do. With XP, I get the feeling I'm treated as a dumb user.

I'm not saying that Windows is the pinnacle of stability, but it has improved over the years to the point where crashes indicate something really wrong, like faulty memory chips or dodgy hardware. Software still does become unresponsive from time to time, but at least the rest of the machine keeps on going.

And for the moments when inspiration hits, I carry around a little notebook with an old-fashioned fountain pen. Now to remember to keep the reservoir filled up with ink, because that is of course the standard DOS you experience with those things...

[Homer]

Hmm, downward_s,
Your Amiga answer then is an A600 with an internal hard drive, and a PCMCIA card for transferring files to the pc
 :lol:
Good for sorting out your retro games needs too  :-D

[Crisisdog]

downward_s wrote:

The act of turning on the PC can sometimes take longer than the work I want to do. By the time I've got a blinking cursor, I've forgotten half of the inspiration.

...

I long for an OS that can boot up instantly, like switching on a TV or turning on a light.

My PowerMac G5 boots up just as quick as my Amiga 3000, about 15 seconds.  Even faster when waking up from "deep sleep".  And my XP x64 system isn't too bad either, about 30 seconds.

I enjoy the quickness of my home PCs compared to the 2000+ machines that I have to support on a daily basis with my job.  I'd say the average load time for any desktop PC in my company is about four minutes.  Laptops are worse, nearly doubling that time.

Beware of the future as we become more reliant on high end technology.  HD DVD players are basically fancy media computers now, and actually do take 20 to 60 seconds to "boot" up before playing a movie.  I can't wait until computers do become integrated into stoves and microwaves, it may very well take half a minute to boot your kitchen to cook your meal before you know it.

 :-D