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My wifes school district just moved everyone to Windows 7. It takes 20 minutes for her computer to start in the morning and about five minutes to shut down in t
by ktsmith 14y ago
My wifes school district just moved everyone to Windows 7. It takes 20 minutes for her computer to start in the morning and about five minutes to shut down in the evening. The computer just barely meets the minimum specifications of Windows 7 and so the district isn't going to upgrade the hardware due to budget constraints. Given tight budgets in schools I would be surprised if Windows 7 upgrades are actually feasible for some of them when Windows XP does everything they need on the hardware they already have.
- JoshTriplett 14y agoHow much of that 20 minutes consists of booting Windows, and how much of it consists of running the myriad policies, scripts, and startup software that "enterprise" environments push out to all their systems and run on every boot? Not exactly a fan of Windows, and newer versions often do boot slower due to added bloat, but you can't chalk 20 minutes up to Windows alone.
- ktsmith 14y agoHard to say, the last time I was there it was about half of the time to get to the login prompt and the other half to get to the desktop.
- 27182818284 14y agoIt shouldn't be that bad. I've seen university machines running windows 7 with less than current hardware and a whole bunch of scripts, antivirus, etc, and they still boot and shutdown in a very reasonable amount of times. Definitely sounds like the hardware rather than the myriad of scripts to me. Shrug.
- ktsmith 14y ago1.6GHz AMD cpu with 1GB RAM with a 5400RPM 40GB HDD. It's really pathetic.
- DiabloD3 14y agoMy God, people's cell phones are more powerful than that.
- untog 14y agoBut conversely, there's nothing wrong with a computer of that spec, if you're doing web browsing, word processing and the like. It's just not being used efficiently.
- goldfeld 14y agoAnd it was just yesterday when I stopped being a hardcore gamer and knowing about computer specs, and that spec wasn't half bad. Am I locked forever thinking that would be a decent computer? I'm having the hardest time believing you said that with a straight face.
- Locke1689 14y agoMy phone has a 1.2GHz cortex a9 processor with 1 GB of ram and 32 GB of flash memory.
- Karunamon 14y agoSomething is very, very wrong with their environment, then. I've seen Win7 come up faster on HD netbooks with worse system specs than what you posted downthread.
- ktsmith 14y agoI've not seen Windows 7 perform well on anything with less than about 2GB of RAM. I certainly don't doubt that district configuration has compounded what are mostly hardware issues. The point was more about what type of hardware some organizations are still using. In this case the machine handled Windows XP combined with the district configuration, slowly, but tolerably and after the upgrade has lost a significant amount of its utility.
- drblast 14y agoYeah, Win7 runs acceptably on my daughter's circa 2008 Asus EEE netbook with 1 Ghz proc. Don't know how much RAM it has though.
- ladzoppelin 14y agoWindows 7 makes most hardware run better then XP unless it's really old. Really old means older then 2003. For example I have a horrible 2006 Compaq laptop that runs better with Windows 7 then it did with XP. I would have someone look at her setup because it could just be a faulty disk causing the problems.
- ktsmith 14y agoThey won't look at it unless it's completely dead. That is a side effect of budget constraints as well. It is usable, though painful, once it's up.
- richbradshaw 14y agoThe school I worked at also upgraded to Windows 7, and it was completely fine. Things are quick and great. Remember that a school is meant to be teaching kids things that have at least some hope of relevance, so teaching children how to use XP is not exactly useful.
- ktsmith 14y agoI'm talking about staff computers, not computers for childrens use.
- buster 14y agoSo time to move to Linux! :)