A common attitude with Windows users here

[PPCRulez]

The fact is, it's AmigaOS that needs to mature. AmigaOS needs to add more services and to exploit the new resources available on today's hardware platforms. It's perfectly acceptable to use up three times the memory if that memory can help you speed up certain tasks. As a programmer I know that one can optimize for either execution speed or memory usage, but rarely both. with today's cheap memory it's quite acceptable for a system to be memory hungry if that's what it needs to perform a little faster.

I don't agree with AOS needing more builtin services. I prefer to have a choice of for example network stack. Look at how much better the Amiga TCP/IP stacks are just because you have a choice. It would be accepteble to trade of memory usage for speed. But speed isn't particular good in Windows and it has a large memory footprint. In fact Windows has speed issues. Sometimes you can click on something and it just takes a while before something happens. Multitasking isn't exactly Windows strongest point. ANd we shouldn't even mention the horrible Virtual Memory implementation.

And system caches is a solution to an unoptimized system in the first place. With an optimized system you wouldn't need that kind of caches.

I find the memory usage of Windows unaccepeble even when running a bare minimum system.

[Tomas]

Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE! When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.

This can often be the case yeah... But still it cant explain all problems.. I mean if it was just the hardwares fault, then home come it works perfectly on some other OS?

And you cant dismiss the fact that every user have a diffrent perception on what is stable/fast and so on.

I have heard many people saying how they can have their windows puter up for a whole week! Which i personally think is lousy! A decent os after my opinion should not need to be rebooted or crash in months of time. Take for example my dads pc running linux... It is at somewhere between 75-80 days now, and its being used every day... with winXP the exact same puter either crashed or had to be rebooted usually before a full week.. And yeah... was using ONLY microsoft certified drivers!

And btw why do you have to reboot windows still? Installing gfx drivers, soundcard drivers nearly allways leads to a forced reboot.. even in some cases installing a damn program... i really expect more from a modern OS.

I am not saying linux is even near perfect though, it has its flaws also... i think thought that beos was pretty damn near perfect, would have been an awesome OS if there had been more games/software and hw drivers.

And i again say... every OS has a flaw of some sort but some have more than others...

[B00tDisk]

Tomas wrote:

Regarding stability issues, I've gotta say just based on personal experience that 75% of it is HARDWARE HARDWARE HARDWARE! When I get calls from friends and family regarding flaky PCs, invariably I crack the hood on the system to find generic, no-name RAM, substandard (non mil-spec??? ) motherboards by wonderful companys like MSI and so forth, mismatched RAM (PC2100 + PC1700 etc.) and all sorts of Frankenconfigurations.

This can often be the case yeah... But still it cant explain all problems.. I mean if it was just the hardwares fault, then home come it works perfectly on some other OS?

That Linux puts up with more hardware weirdness is no secret; by that same token, ever try to squeeze all of the features out of, say, a given graphics card with Linux?  

And speaking of "other" Amiga OS's and hardware, have you looked at how tight the specs on RAM are for the forthcoming AOS4?

And you cant dismiss the fact that every user have a diffrent perception on what is stable/fast and so on.

Yet many "alternative" OS users seem to think that statement is a single edged sword.

I have heard many people saying how they can have their windows puter up for a whole week!

Not me.

Months, for my Win2k server.  I turn off my XP desktops just so the den won't be so damned hot every morning!

And btw why do you have to reboot windows still? Installing gfx drivers, soundcard drivers nearly allways leads to a forced reboot.. even in some cases installing a damn program... i really expect more from a modern OS.

I don't.  I installed a dialup modem recently (RIP cable access!  sobbing!) and as soon as XP powered on, it identified the "generic 56k softmodem" and that was that, period.  I had to install a driver for my wife's system, but no problem there.  XP comes with a fairly robust set of drivers for stuff.  As to reboots, the only thing that springs to mind that I've had to reboot for are Detonator updates (nVidia drivers - their driver install program won't "complete" without a reboot; ask them, not MS) and the aforementioned NIC - although an IPCONFIG /RENEW probably would've done what the reboot wanted to do (but reregistering the MAC address probably needed the reboot; I was so keen to see the system up and working I didn't do a postmortem on the whole issue).

I am not saying linux is even near perfect though, it has its flaws also... i think thought that beos was pretty damn near perfect, would have been an awesome OS if there had been more games/software and hw drivers.

And i again say... every OS has a flaw of some sort but some have more than others...

Yep.  Like how one bad program can kill any revision the the Amiga's OS, for example.  Catch it at the wrong time, and it's goodbye bootblock!

[Jagabot]

B00tDisk,

I especially like that you can shove just about any USB device under the sun into your already on and working XP machine and it magically knows what it is, magically configures it, magically installs any drivers required for it (and if it doesnt have it it can get the latest ones automatically from the MS update site without any user input) and doesn't have to reboot: 20 seconds later you're using your new USB device and no questions asked. It reminds me quite a bit of an Amiga at times. It actually is plug and play only 10 years after the fact!

It does the exact same thing for 99% of pc hardware out there (including printers on your parallel port for gosh sake).

AND if, heaven forbid, you install some new card and the drivers you installed manually for it causes your XP machine to puke, you just RESTORE your XP configuration to the last working restore point and voilla, working machine again! (Most people don't seem to know XP does that, there's no reason to have to reformat an XP runnin machine just because of new (or old) hardware problems or bad drivers).

But don't even get me started on how much I've bitched about 95/98/ME(gasp) being crash-happy POSes... :-D

[B00tDisk]

Jagabot wrote:
B00tDisk,

I especially like that you can shove just about any USB device under the sun into your already on and working XP machine and it magically knows what it is, magically configures it, magically installs any drivers required for it (and if it doesnt have it it can get the latest ones automatically from the MS update site without any user input) and doesn't have to reboot: 20 seconds later you're using your new USB device and no questions asked. It reminds me quite a bit of an Amiga at times. It actually is plug and play only 10 years after the fact!

Heh, yeah.  USB is great.  Firewire is good too, but in general it's marketshare isn't up to USB's.  'sides, USB2.0 gives firewire a run for it's money...

It does the exact same thing for 99% of pc hardware out there (including printers on your parallel port for gosh sake).

Yep.  The aforementioned Celeron433 I put together for my folks I just plugged the printer in to (paralell) and bang, XP said "Aha.  HP Deskjet 720.  Right, then.  Test page?  No?  Okay."  All of about three painless seconds.

AND if, heaven forbid, you install some new card and the drivers you installed manually for it causes your XP machine to puke, you just RESTORE your XP configuration to the last working restore point and voilla, working machine again! (Most people don't seem to know XP does that, there's no reason to have to reformat an XP runnin machine just because of new (or old) hardware problems or bad drivers).

And it's not even that severe; driver rollback is your friend!

But don't even get me started on how much I've bitched about 95/98/ME(gasp) being crash-happy POSes... :-D

XP/2000 were the first MS operating systems I actually "championed".  If NT5 nee "2000" had come out in, say 1997, the computing world would be a far better place.

Bring me the heads of the "engineers" who "designed" Win98, 98SE* and WinME!

*SE actually fixed a lot of the things '98 broke, but it's still Windows98 for chrissake.

[Tomas]

I especially like that you can shove just about any USB device under the sun into your already on and working XP machine and it magically knows what it is, magically configures it, magically installs any drivers required for it (and if it doesnt have it it can get the latest ones automatically from the MS update site without any user input) and doesn't have to reboot: 20 seconds later you're using your new USB device and no questions asked.

If the device has support for it in the linux kernel, the usb device will actually be fully working as soon as you plug it in... no questions asked  :-P

But still why most usb devices causes trouble on other oses is because of lack of drivers, which again is microsofts monopolys fault.. no hardware manufactors makes drivers for other oses... All the drivers on linux, beos and such is made by hobby programmers who do it for free.....  You CANNOT blame lack of drivers on the OS

[Tomas]

Months, for my Win2k server. I turn off my XP desktops just so the den won't be so damned hot every morning!

There is a big difference on a server and a workstation.. The computer is much more vurnable to unstability when you sit on it and play games, surf the web and so on.. My dads linux pc is infact used daily with games, surfing web, chatting, mp3/video and so on.. And btw.. my debian linux server did somewhere between 260-270 days until lighting hit the electrical system, which killed of one tv, hub, monitor and one pc... luckily the server survived with just a reboot

[Jagabot]

@Tomas

You're absolutely right, quite a lot of stuff works instantly on my linux box (RedHat) as well, but it's again the same sort of problem the Amiga had. Everyone doing "business" used PC's, so that's where the lions share of developers went. Everyone uses Windows (or so everyone in big business thinks) so that's where the large corporate money goes... and that's where the drivers get written for.

I don't mean to go off on a rant here, but...

If Commodore management had any brains at the time, they would have been selling Amiga 1000's for $3,500 to dealers with a suggested retail of $4,995.00 and touting it as the most powerful business computer on the planet. IT WAS. Instead they brought it to all the big PC dealers and said, look how much stuff this thing does compared to your PC!! The dealers all said "Holy crap that is amazing, how much can I sell it for?! Ten grand !?!" Commodore said "A mere $1500 and they only cost you $1300" To which all the dealers said, "Let me get this straight, I make $1,000 selling a $3,000 8Mhz 8086 PC, and you want me to steer my business customers to this machine that I get a whopping $200 from? It's cool, but not THAT cool... let me show you to the door."

And that is the history of Commodore in a single paragraph. It had nothing to do with users, nothing to do with software availability, nothing to do with software piracy, it was entirely due to Commodore's retarded pricing policies and the inability of the average PC/Apple dealer to make a significant margin on Commodore products so they'd steer customers towards them. Only the true Amiga lovers who were retailing them did that, and look where they are today...

If dealers had been able to make a larger margin selling Amigas, they would have shoved them down the throats of corporate America and you'd have seen WordPerfect for Amiga in every office right beside Lotus 1-2-3 for Amiga (they both existed at the time you know). But nope, no margins meant no Amigas being sold which meant no software being developed for businesses thereafter.

Woah, I went on there for a while didn't I? ;-)

[Glaucus]

And system caches is a solution to an unoptimized system in the first place. With an optimized system you wouldn't need that kind of caches.

Yes and no. Often caches compensate for a sub-systems latency. The CPU's instruction/data cache for example. Sure we could build computers with memory as fast as registers (other architectural issues aside), but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars per PC. So for reasons of cost we decide to make cheaper memory so that we can have more of it, and to get around it's slow access time we use some cache, which isn't as fast as a register but way better then main memory. Same goes with hard drive access. There's lots of sub systems that benefit from a cache simply because optimizing for both speed and memory (if at all possible) often means you take a huge hit in cost.

And btw, you can replace the standard WindowsXP services, but rarely does one really need to. And yes, AOS does need more built in services, that is after all what an OS is for. I mean, it really wasn't that long ago before even the GUI was an optional "service", we've just taken it for granted. Someone who's first computer was an Amiga would expect an OS to provide them with multitasking, a file system, a GUI with windows, buttons, menus and icons, audio support, etc. However things have changed and today's users demand more things, like memory protection, virtual memory, built-in TCP support with DHCP, firewall and other advanced features, built-in OpenGL (or other similar system), built-in media player with plug-in support for more codecs, etc. Expectations have gone up and it's up to the current Amiga care takers to meet those expectations.

  - Mike

[smerf]

Hi,

Just wanted to clarify a few things I said in my past statement.

It just seems as computers get faster and do more micro sloth builds bigger OS's that just eat up all the head room that the new machines give, actually making them slower by our standards of clocking a device called a stop watch or real time (minutes & seconds or in some cases hours).

Lets look at some facts Mandrake Linux loads up on my 500 mhz compaq in just over 15 minutes, Lindows loads up in just over 7 minutes, Windows 2000 in just over 45 minutes.

Mandrake linux gives me an OS and lots of applications like internet programs, an office suite (like micro slot office) and some games. (over 15 minutes install)

Lindows gives me an operating system and internet browser and 4 games (wonder where they got that idea from) (just over 7 minutes install)

Windows 2000 an OS and internet browser with 4 games.
(over 45 minutes install)

Mandrake and Lindows no crashy yet, Windows 2000 crashy at least once a month)

Now lets look at Windows 2000 startup, I turn on computer, i get windows 2000 screen --------------- and still look at windows 2000 screen ------------ then it gives me the OS screen but don't try to use any apps yet it is loading other thingys like volume control, anti virus, this and that, now after about 3 minutes I can use it.

Now lets look at Mandrake, i turn it on, I look at start up choose my OS system, look at hardware found screens, look at software start up screens (drivers) and then after 3 minutes can use system, pretty even start up and shut down with windows 2000

Lindows starts up nice after about 30 secs in OS screen with icons, thing I don't like is that Lindows made screen look like windows screen and operate like windows, but does not run windows programs.

So for speed don't look at 2.2 ghz, or 400 mhz buss speed ask the retailer how long does it take to actually do work.
Is it faster than my machine now in real time.

If you don't like that than ask yourself, self how fast can I type, can I out type a 2.2 ghz machine.

Will that 2.2 ghz speed out distance my printer?

or am I just going to play games.

smerf

[A4000Bear]

Well, I never found out why XP took forever to boot, however, there was nothing else installed on the machine - just XP. I even formatted and reinstalled three times in an attempt to clear the problem. It never went away. The PC, by the way was an Athlon XP1800. No unusual hardware, just the usual things like a Radeon 7000 video card, 512MB RAM etc...

Having said that, XP was quite reliable - almost as good as my A4000T which (seriously) very rarely crashes (It has crashed once in the last month of heavy usage)

[PPCRulez]

Glaucus wrote:
Yes and no. Often caches compensate for a sub-systems latency. The CPU's instruction/data cache for example. Sure we could build computers with memory as fast as registers (other architectural issues aside), but that would cost tens of thousands of dollars per PC. So for reasons of cost we decide to make cheaper memory so that we can have more of it, and to get around it's slow access time we use some cache, which isn't as fast as a register but way better then main memory. Same goes with hard drive access. There's lots of sub systems that benefit from a cache simply because optimizing for both speed and memory (if at all possible) often means you take a huge hit in cost.

Yes, but that is a bit different. Now we are talking about hardware caches. With extremly fast small memory. Harddrive cahces in memory can also increase speed of the harddrive.

But talking about system caches is another thing. Windows seems to cacge all kinds of wierd stuff like GUI elements and stuff. Try freeing up memory (with some tool that allows this) and you'll see Windows reduced to a crawl for a while until it has cached GUI elements again. This is bad... using memory for caching GUI shouldn't be necessary if it were optimized.

And btw, you can replace the standard WindowsXP services, but rarely does one really need to. And yes, AOS does need more built in services, that is after all what an OS is for. I mean, it really wasn't that long ago before even the GUI was an optional "service", we've just taken it for granted. Someone who's first computer was an Amiga would expect an OS to provide them with multitasking, a file system, a GUI with windows, buttons, menus and icons, audio support, etc. However things have changed and today's users demand more things, like memory protection, virtual memory, built-in TCP support with DHCP, firewall and other advanced features, built-in OpenGL (or other similar system), built-in media player with plug-in support for more codecs, etc. Expectations have gone up and it's up to the current Amiga care takers to meet those expectations.

Depends on what you mean with built in services. I agree that the OS should include the things you stated above. But they should be optional during install,a nd not just thrown in when you install the OS.

[Hammer]

Well, I never found out why XP took forever to boot, however, there was nothing else installed on the machine - just XP.

Define "forever"? I have an old Athlon XP 1800+ with an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe**** mobo and 512MB PC2700 for reference. Boot time from BIOS is about 31 seconds for WinXP-SP1/IE6-SP1.  

****nForce II with SPP/MCP-T, BIOS 1007 for 400FSB support.

Other reference/test boxes;
+ Athlon XP 2800**+, Gigabyte GA-7N400Pro2 (nForce II 400 Ultra), 1GB PC3200, CL Audigy 2 ZS. **Multiplier unlocked i.e. 500Mhz(100x5X) to 2200Mhz (200x11X).
+ Athlon XP 1800+, MSI-6330 V3.6 (and MSI-6330 V5)(VIA KT133A), 512MB PC133, CL SBLive 5.1 DE.
And several Pentium II classes…

Please include the brand (or make) who made your motherboard and the chipset in any Windows OS issues.

[Hammer]

vortexau wrote:
From I hate MS
"If you look in the executables in the Windows (XP) directory,  you find internal labels like 'ProductName: Microsoft Windows (TM)  operating system;  ProductVersion:  3.10'.  There's even DOS 5.0 code with a 1981-1991 copyright date.  What a great new product!"

98/ME contains partial 16bit support making things like VXDs (Virtual device drivers) necessary. There is such a performance jump because 2000 and above is completely 32bit.

Define this "executables".

Sure?
" . . . to find the bulk of Windows 3.10 and DOS 5 (all of it 16-bit code) under the hood of Windows XP makes you wonder about the design princibles that have gone into each 'new' version of Windows."
 

Such statement would be very stupid in the light of MS Windows XP AMD64 and AMD K8 architecture i.e. in AMD64 mode, 16bit modes is virtually non-existent.

One should remember the Pentium Pro's relatively poor performance with X86-16 code (e.g. MS-DOS/Windows 9x). To solve the problem one should install Windows NT 4.0 this is due to it's 32bit'ness.

[kolla]

Ummm...waste of time? Open your eyes and look around you, more than 90% of the world rely on it, whether you like it or not, its a part of life. Microshaft isn't going anywhere for a while, so you might as well take the time to at least understand it.

Exactly - 90% of the world relies on it - suckers.
If 90% of the world ends up having problems due to windows, I'm just glad I can say I dont know jack about it. I rather flip burgers than waste my time cleaning up after windows disasters.There are just too many windows "knowers" so why compete with them? I have no need of knowing windows, I dont use it myself, we dont use it at work, and everyone I know that does use it seems to struggle with all kinds of problems these days - why should I involve myself in all that crap? :-D

Much better to learn something slightly more sofisticated that can be interresting and fun as well.

[Arst]

Well well 2k is the most stable OS ms ever made ..and probally will be . XPs memory handling is a nightmare 9x/ME? dont get me started.
I usually say to ppl installing after all the updates to
install XP/2k lite and ripp out WMP/IE/MS java and some other usless crap cluttering the system , and geting a register tool,install the Org Java (by sun) . and sadly the win structure makes to VERY hard to dunderstand what the hell its doing i mean i can figure out alot but im only human after all and like
any other logical human i prefere an Amiga  :-D