5 ms·

...mostly because newer versions of Windows are so absurdly bloated, and just as slow as a decades old machine on ever more powerful hardware, that there is alm

...mostly because newer versions of Windows are so absurdly bloated, and just as slow as a decades old machine on ever more powerful hardware, that there is almost zero benefit to upgrading beyond XP. Seriously. A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB or RAM. Notepad still chokes on 500KB of plain text wrapped to the window, Paint still struggles with images above 5000 pixels square, MS Office still takes eons to load, and one large document created by any particularly incompetant user will destroy 15 minutes of your day. One bad tab in a browser (any browser), and your entire system might grind to a halt for minutes on end. Starting and stopping windows services takes ages. Hard drives are still just as noisy as fuck, and god knows what the fuck is even being paged to disk anymore. Network traffic is relatively opaque, despite prettied up WYSIWYG spikes on logarithmic line graphs of monitors that provide meaningless information. And then Windows 8 comes along and tries to disenfrachise the common layman end user even further by covering everything up with a touch-based interface even for machines that have no touchscreen, and follows Ubuntu's lead of serving up ads in a local file search. If you want a version of Windows that doesn't embody this nightmare, call Microsoft directly and provision an Enterprise account with one of their helpful sales reps. What's the price tag? Why, the sales rep will inform you of that once you answer some simple questions. Gee, I wonder why "enterprises" refuse to budge off of XP.

dubfan 13y ago
Have you ever tried running a modern browser on a machine with less than 2GB of RAM? It's not pretty.
- becauseBloat 13y ago
  But that sort of plays into my point. With a 64 bit version of XP, and 8GB of RAM, you could fit the entirety of the operating system in memory, paging file and all. A clean install of XP, with nothing else included, occupies about 3GB of disk space. You'd still have 4GB of RAM free to run the system. But as of Vista, the mandatory minimum RAM was escalated (from 64MB) to 1GB, and all to support a hideous UI, and not much else. The operating system sprawls across 64GB of disk space. With every new version, it feels just as shitty as before. Despite umpteen quadruplings of hardware resources, shit still feels like it's Windows 95, fucking again. Nothing gets faster. Drop $3,000 a year, just to swim against the tide, with incremental changes in the appearance of progress bars, so that ugly animations can actually flash periodically as they steal your youth from you, rather than inflicting anxiety whilst freezing intermittently. Every subsequent version of Windows fails to improve, continues to suck, and in some areas it actually gets worse than it already is. But christ almighty. After 20 god damned years. Why?
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Your parent's point is that at least some of the bloat is not actually Windows. There was a time when Firefox occupied tens of megabytes in RAM. Today it occupies at least 500MB at all times, for me. So good luck with your 512MB Windows XP machine of yore- and that one isn't the fault of Windows.
    - becauseBloat 13y ago
      An application installed at the option of the end user is not subject to the same rigorous requirements that an, oftentimes, compulsory operating system is subject to. Especially when the operating system costs money, and lots of it.
      - sliverstorm 13y ago
        I still don't see how Firefox bloating proves your point about Windows.
        becauseBloat 13y ago
        Maybe it has something to do with the background service Firefox has to bundle with their Windows installer now. You know, because Windows registries and Windows user policies are borderline retarded. But I agree, I'm really not sure why you decided bring Firefox into this discussion either.
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        dubfan was the one who brought up browsers.
        kuschku 13y ago
        Firefox with 30 tabs and several Youtube videos uses about 334MB So, while surfing just 5-8 websites at a time you'd have enough memory. Sometimes I'm even using a computer from 1996 which struggles even with xp – it's good enough as a compile server (Pentium II).
- ams6110 13y ago
  I run Firefox 24 (TenFourFox) on a 1 GHz G4 PowerBook with 1.25 GB RAM. It's pretty OK. Runs Gmail, Google Docs, most non-video sites fine (MacTubes to the rescue there). It's definitely usable.
  - 72deluxe 13y ago
    I am impressed by the fact that you're running such an old machine and have managed to avoid the rabid upgrade habits that apparently infect Mac users! (I myself have to sedate myself to overcome this). I suppose the "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" adage comes in here, and I am mighty impressed that you are continuing to live with such an old old machine. Is OSX usable on that? I recall 10.5 (and older) being horribly "crashy"; 10.6 was far better for me, but it was probably the desktop software I was using that was causing system instability. What's the battery life like?
    - ams6110 13y ago
      It's running OSX 10.4 (Tiger). It's stable at least under my usage scenarios. Apple hasn't provided updates for this version in years. It's not my primary computer anymore, but it still works, is fairly rugged, has a nice form factor and keyboard feel, so I do keep using it fairly regularly for routine stuff like email, remote access to systems at work (ssh), etc.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- becauseBloat 13y ago
  I'm saying there's not much difference at all. Paying to upgrade delivers the same shit in a different package, even with more than ten times the hardware resources. It's a shitty upgrade treadmill that promises much and delivers little.
  - kuschku 13y ago
    To cite ENCOM: "What's different this time?" – "We've put a 12 on the box". — From "Tron: Legacy"
anonymfus 13y ago
>Paint still struggles with images above 5000 pixels square Really? Just checked, created 6000x6000, painted some lines, made transformations to selection, resized actual big photo to this size. Everything is responsive.
xmodem 13y ago
> A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB or RAM. A Pentium 2 running at 300MHZ, with 64MB of RAM, running Windows NT 4, delivers all of the same features that Windows XP delivers with a beefy 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM. At some point old technology will be refreshed. How far do you want to go with this?

dubfan 13y ago

Have you ever tried running a modern browser on a machine with less than 2GB of RAM? It's not pretty.

becauseBloat 13y ago
But that sort of plays into my point. With a 64 bit version of XP, and 8GB of RAM, you could fit the entirety of the operating system in memory, paging file and all. A clean install of XP, with nothing else included, occupies about 3GB of disk space. You'd still have 4GB of RAM free to run the system. But as of Vista, the mandatory minimum RAM was escalated (from 64MB) to 1GB, and all to support a hideous UI, and not much else. The operating system sprawls across 64GB of disk space. With every new version, it feels just as shitty as before. Despite umpteen quadruplings of hardware resources, shit still feels like it's Windows 95, fucking again. Nothing gets faster. Drop $3,000 a year, just to swim against the tide, with incremental changes in the appearance of progress bars, so that ugly animations can actually flash periodically as they steal your youth from you, rather than inflicting anxiety whilst freezing intermittently. Every subsequent version of Windows fails to improve, continues to suck, and in some areas it actually gets worse than it already is. But christ almighty. After 20 god damned years. Why?
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Your parent's point is that at least some of the bloat is not actually Windows. There was a time when Firefox occupied tens of megabytes in RAM. Today it occupies at least 500MB at all times, for me. So good luck with your 512MB Windows XP machine of yore- and that one isn't the fault of Windows.
  - becauseBloat 13y ago
    An application installed at the option of the end user is not subject to the same rigorous requirements that an, oftentimes, compulsory operating system is subject to. Especially when the operating system costs money, and lots of it.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      I still don't see how Firefox bloating proves your point about Windows.
      - becauseBloat 13y ago
        Maybe it has something to do with the background service Firefox has to bundle with their Windows installer now. You know, because Windows registries and Windows user policies are borderline retarded. But I agree, I'm really not sure why you decided bring Firefox into this discussion either.
        sliverstorm 13y ago
        dubfan was the one who brought up browsers.
      - kuschku 13y ago
        Firefox with 30 tabs and several Youtube videos uses about 334MB So, while surfing just 5-8 websites at a time you'd have enough memory. Sometimes I'm even using a computer from 1996 which struggles even with xp – it's good enough as a compile server (Pentium II).
ams6110 13y ago
I run Firefox 24 (TenFourFox) on a 1 GHz G4 PowerBook with 1.25 GB RAM. It's pretty OK. Runs Gmail, Google Docs, most non-video sites fine (MacTubes to the rescue there). It's definitely usable.
- 72deluxe 13y ago
  I am impressed by the fact that you're running such an old machine and have managed to avoid the rabid upgrade habits that apparently infect Mac users! (I myself have to sedate myself to overcome this). I suppose the "if it isn't broke, don't fix it" adage comes in here, and I am mighty impressed that you are continuing to live with such an old old machine. Is OSX usable on that? I recall 10.5 (and older) being horribly "crashy"; 10.6 was far better for me, but it was probably the desktop software I was using that was causing system instability. What's the battery life like?
  - ams6110 13y ago
    It's running OSX 10.4 (Tiger). It's stable at least under my usage scenarios. Apple hasn't provided updates for this version in years. It's not my primary computer anymore, but it still works, is fairly rugged, has a nice form factor and keyboard feel, so I do keep using it fairly regularly for routine stuff like email, remote access to systems at work (ssh), etc.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

becauseBloat 13y ago
I'm saying there's not much difference at all. Paying to upgrade delivers the same shit in a different package, even with more than ten times the hardware resources. It's a shitty upgrade treadmill that promises much and delivers little.
- kuschku 13y ago
  To cite ENCOM: "What's different this time?" – "We've put a 12 on the box". — From "Tron: Legacy"

anonymfus 13y ago

>Paint still struggles with images above 5000 pixels square Really? Just checked, created 6000x6000, painted some lines, made transformations to selection, resized actual big photo to this size. Everything is responsive.

xmodem 13y ago

> A single core 1.5GHz Pentium 4, with 512MB of RAM, running XP delivers all of the same features that Windows 7 delivers with a quad-core 3GHz iCore7 and 8GB or RAM. A Pentium 2 running at 300MHZ, with 64MB of RAM, running Windows NT 4, delivers all of the same features that Windows XP delivers with a beefy 1.5Ghz Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM. At some point old technology will be refreshed. How far do you want to go with this?