MS tricks die-hard XP users into liking Vista

[kalniel]

Have to say I disagree. On modern computers modern OSen work fine with more than enough performance for the majority of modern tasks they are put to.

[dangel]

As much as I love my (several) Amigas - the only thing Windows doesn't do as well is handle CD/DVD insertion

[badass]

Looks like you both missed the point. Those are both over 10 year old OS's.
What were other OS's doing 10 years ago? Windows 98.
That was a piece of Macos 9?
That was also
In fact the last real Amiga and ST OS's were both written in 1992. The age of Windows 3.1
I said in my previous post:

OS's like STOS for the Atari ST (spit*) and Workbench for the Amiga were good desktop OS's (for the time)
Things have moved on now, however that doesn't mean that any current easily available OS is actually that good at what it is sold to you to do.

Before anyone starts pointing how these old OS's lacked things like multi user capability, file system security, process isolation etc, please re read my post. That is all irrelevant at that time due to hardware available and what people used to use their computers for.

Just to clarify further: Workbench 3.1 is rubbish compared to Vista. or XP, or OSX. However they have had another 15 years to get better. In fact Windows 2000 was far better than Workbench 3.1
NT4.0 was certainly not a better desktop OS, Nor Was Windows 98SE.
Has Windows or any other OS booted from pressing the power button in under 6 seconds
Thats what my Amiga used to do. Admittedly part of that is because it's version of BIOS was over and done with in less than a second, so lets say that leaves 5 seconds for loading.
A modern HDD can sustain anything from 60-120 MB/sec. That's enough for 300-600MB of data. Forget access time. It's possible for a properly designed OS to load all 600 MB to memory in one continuous lump, then use the RAM for random access.
Vista rearranges its boot files on the HDD every 3 days. It knows exactily what data was requested last boot and uses this to reorder the data. I have 8 GB RAM. Why can't it put all of the data needed to get me to the desktop in one contiguous block at the edge of my HDD? I have a quad core CPU.

I predict a whole load of excuses as to why this is impossible for a modern operating system to do, but all it requires is a little thinking out of the box.

[directhex]

BeOS had boot times around 6 seconds on my old p2-400

[TheAnimus]

Originally Posted by directhex

out of curiosity, how does mono on windows deal with your use-case? i've found major differences in the overall behaviour of threads between the platforms, but i suspect it's more OS-related than framework-related

Its strange. I didn't have time to fully test (as sticking with windows is just cheaper for us, my farm is only 8 nodes)

but.. http://www.go-mono.com/docs/index.as...ing.WaitHandle seamed to have great variancies in performance on win, but was consistant on the bsd build someone in infrastructure could lend me. Same hardware (desktop) but sometimes slow or fast on win, never as fast as the .Net framework version. Very odd as i'd of guessed it was all the same kernel object underneeth!

[dangel]

Originally Posted by badass

I predict a whole load of excuses as to why this is impossible for a modern operating system to do, but all it requires is a little thinking out of the box.

Well, two things came immediately to mind - first standby (default on Vista), and second hibernation. Then again, I don't really have an issues with boot time (thanks to superfetch) except on laptops which have ****-slow hd's. Of course, resume issues can occur thanks to duff drivers - and vista has facilities to help you locate the sluggish drivers on your system. Watch the hibernation loading bar - that's a fair indicator of how long it takes the kernel to page in the saved RAM image, the rest is just waiting for drivers/services to initialise.

My last Amiga, the A4000 - with a 68060 and a Picasso took a lot longer to startup than six seconds (from hard drive). Depends what you consider the OS - kickstart was in ROM, workbench etc wasn't.

[Steve]

Let's ignore the boot process and assume we're resuming from hibernation.

How many devices are there on the system? Not just peripherals, but devices... timers, DMAs, interfaces etc.

Now the idea of hibernation is that you dump your whole memory onto disk, then load it back up and pretend like nothing every happened. Except it's a lot more complicated than that.

Lots of these devices, that you've just woken up from 'cold' again, only expose certain parts of their registers and internal workings to the system through memory mapping. They may need some initialisation procedure to bring them back to the pre-hibernation state. You can't just write the registers back and hope for the best. So every driver needs to know what to do when the OS says "Oh hi, I'm coming out of hibernation, sort your device out plz".

And that's just one example of what complicates and slows down coming out of hibernation.

[badass]

Originally Posted by directhex

BeOS had boot times around 6 seconds on my old p2-400

And there we have evidence that the hardware is not what's causing modern OS's to take forever.
IIRC BeOS was a ground up new OS. I remember holding much hope for it before it flopped.

Originally Posted by dangel

Well, two things came immediately to mind - first standby (default on Vista), and second hibernation. Then again, I don't really have an issues with boot time (thanks to superfetch) except on laptops which have ****-slow hd's. Of course, resume issues can occur thanks to duff drivers - and vista has facilities to help you locate the sluggish drivers on your system. Watch the hibernation loading bar - that's a fair indicator of how long it takes the kernel to page in the saved RAM image, the rest is just waiting for drivers/services to initialise.

My last Amiga, the A4000 - with a 68060 and a Picasso took a lot longer to startup than six seconds (from hard drive). Depends what you consider the OS - kickstart was in ROM, workbench etc wasn't.

How long does your machine take to boot though? 40 seconds? Admittedly quick enough but it could be a lot quicker. For reference the machine that took 6 seconds to boot was an A1200 with a 170 MB HDD. I later put a 68060 board in it with 8MB - later upgraded to 32MB RAM and it did not affect boot times.

Originally Posted by Steve

Let's ignore the boot process and assume we're resuming from hibernation.

How many devices are there on the system? Not just peripherals, but devices... timers, DMAs, interfaces etc.

Now the idea of hibernation is that you dump your whole memory onto disk, then load it back up and pretend like nothing every happened. Except it's a lot more complicated than that.

Lots of these devices, that you've just woken up from 'cold' again, only expose certain parts of their registers and internal workings to the system through memory mapping. They may need some initialisation procedure to bring them back to the pre-hibernation state. You can't just write the registers back and hope for the best. So every driver needs to know what to do when the OS says "Oh hi, I'm coming out of hibernation, sort your device out plz".

And that's just one example of what complicates and slows down coming out of hibernation.

On the whole hibernation front - to speed boot up times it is a bodge. From a keeping various apps open in the same state as you left them it is good.

I suppose when I'm saying that all "modern" OS's aren't as good - reletively speaking - for home users compared to what they once were is down to a few things:
1. They take excessively long to boot
2. They are too resource hungry
3. They over complicate things

I'l add that thats obviously not all down to their makers. The companies that provide the hardware and drivers are just as responsible.
It comes down to the lazy short termism that was introduced to the market by Microsoft and IBM all of those years ago.
Did you know that until around 2002 - around 4 years after Windows update was rolled out, it was still completely stupid? If you didn't reboot the computer aftter each update was applied, you simply cound not guarentee they had installed properly. Then they finally worked out that before queuing a file to be changed on next reboot, the updates should check to see if another update had also queued the change and was in fact going to install a newer version of the file already.
Lazy and dumb. For 4 years.

[dangel]

Originally Posted by badass

How long does your machine take to boot though? 40 seconds?

Not long enough for it to be an issue for me

Originally Posted by badass

On the whole hibernation front - to speed boot up times it is a bodge. From a keeping various apps open in the same state as you left them it is good.

...which is why it's there. Bloody handy for laptops as it uses zero battery. Hardly a bodge!

Originally Posted by badass

I suppose when I'm saying that all "modern" OS's aren't as good - reletively speaking - for home users compared to what they once were is down to a few things:
1. They take excessively long to boot

...because users want to use lots of hardware, and lots of software (with lots of features). You can't have it all (yet).

Originally Posted by badass

2. They are too resource hungry

Well users will want silly things like a GUI or 3D graphics support. Bastards.

Originally Posted by badass

3. They over complicate things

They changed to serve different needs thought - they got out of the bedroom and became a utilty for all the family. In other words, they got easier to use. And not just a "bit" either.

Originally Posted by badass

It comes down to the lazy short termism that was introduced to the market by Microsoft and IBM all of those years ago.

Windows (now) has very little relation to Windows >then<
(thankfully because it really did suck)

Originally Posted by badass

Did you know that until around 2002 - around 4 years after Windows update was rolled out, it was still completely stupid? If you didn't reboot the computer aftter each update was applied, you simply cound not guarentee they had installed properly. Then they finally worked out that before queuing a file to be changed on next reboot, the updates should check to see if another update had also queued the change and was in fact going to install a newer version of the file already.
Lazy and dumb. For 4 years.

...and yes they don't get things right. Personally I hate Windows Installer with a passion for example - because it's flipping daft and flawed (witness: the cleanup tool MS produce for people stuck in the "can't install it, can't uninstall it" loop). I also hated guru meditations, or being stuck with a buggered startup-sequence.

That said, for all the evil, there's a heck of a lot of good - my folks took to XP remarkably well. I don't think they'd have faired well with 16bit home computers.

Build yourself a top-end SSD array

Reality 1: Currently, my nVidia drivers take (up to) 15 seconds to 'wake up' on this PC. That's pathetic!
Reality 2: Nothings perfect, at the time the Amiga was pretty close though

[badass]

Originally Posted by dangel

Reality 1: Currently, my nVidia drivers take (up to) 15 seconds to 'wake up' on this PC. That's pathetic!
Reality 2: Nothings perfect, at the time the Amiga was pretty close though

Closer than Vista is now or about the same? IMHO I'd say closer.
That said, I do like Vista. Its complexity is for a reason. Its unbelieveably flexible.
There's a lot of enterprise type stuff that Vista supports thats very powerful.

[aidanjt]

The biggest factor slowing down boot time is the antiquated BIOS, Linux for e.g. can bootstrap all the hardware attached to a PC in a handful of seconds, coreboot, a F/OSS project which uses a stripped down Linux embedded in the flash rom where the BIOS resides can get to the bootloader in about a second on solid state media, a bit longer for HDDs since you have to wait for them to spin up. There's also initialisation systems for Linux that only takes a few more seconds to load all the base system services to get a desktop display manager up.

Perhaps the only thing slowing the abandonment of the PC-BIOS is the people who also wont let Windows XP go.

[tsj]

I'm still running XP x64/Ubuntu on my desktop... and have no intention of switching over.

[dangel]

Originally Posted by badass

Closer than Vista is now or about the same? IMHO I'd say closer.

If you were technically adept the Amiga was very powerful, otherwise you just slung the game disk in the drive

[kalniel]

Originally Posted by badass

Looks like you both missed the point. Those are both over 10 year old OS's.
What were other OS's doing 10 years ago? Windows 98.
.
.
I predict a whole