P4 2.2GHz and D845BG Review

nihilist_1137 writes "GreenJifa.Com has gotten their hands on the new Intel P4 2.2GHz/Intel D845BG DDR Motherboard for review. This is the new P4 that has the 0.13m die and the new "Northwood" core. Check out the review." This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)

Comments

first post

[Anonymous Coward]

fp

Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM.

For what it's worth, XP doesn't run all that slowly. It's merely average -- comparable to your typical decked-out Gnome desktop on X...

Man!

Re:Taco's XP comment

[garcia]

ahh, but see... When OS's get older they should get faster. GNOME and KDE have the age advantage. They are too young yet to have increased their speed. XP on the other hand has come from a long line of slow OS's.

You get what you pay for (or at least that's what should be the case). If you are going to pay $200 for something you should at least have a decent speed at which to work at.

I hear everyday, "I really need to upgrade my computer, it's only 500mhz". No, what you need to do is have an OS that is actually decent and runs well on a slower CPU.

Well that's just my opinion.

I really don't think that we should have to have a 2.2ghz machine just to open a couple of applications.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[trentfoley]

I agree totally. I use a Thinkpad A21p which isn't exactly the fastest thing around anymore! It contains a P3/850, 256MB RAM, and a 16MB ATI Mobility 128. WindowsXP performance is just fine on this machine. For what it is worth, I also have Mandrake 8.1 on this box using kde and it doesn't seem to be any faster than WindowsXP . I have linux (Redhat 7.1) running on an old Pentium 200 with 64MB RAM -- a perfect little router/firewall box -- it even runs apache just fine. But, when I try to run X (with either gnome or kde) on this machine, it feels like an HP150 running Windows 1.0

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I run XP pro on a PII 300MHz laptop (Armada 1700) with 160 MB RAM and an ancient 2MB C&T graphics chipset and it runs great. I regularly have outlook, word, excell and about 10 MSIE windows and 3 or 4 putty ssh sessions going, all with no trouble. It's much better than windows 2000 was with office 2000.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

2.2 ghz for word processing -> people are stupid

Re:Taco's XP comment

[_xeno_]

Since this was posted by an AC, I'd like to reiterate this point with an actual datapoint.

Windows XP ran fine on a PII 400 with 256MB RAM and 5GB hard drive space. With all the pretty and useless GUI options enabled. Now it was a little slow, but no worse than GNOME on X on my nVidia GeForce2 on my 800MHz Athlon. The only thing that really killed the usability was excessive use of alpha fade effects in certain scenarios (namely, selecting a rectangle of files Windows Explorer) that weren't hardware accellerated due to an older graphics card.

For most "every day" tasks, the PII 400 was fine - you could browse the web, listen to MP3s, and play older XP-compatible games (which, in most cases, is the same as a Win2K compatible game).

Bottom line is that XP is no worse than any other "modern" graphical OS - it's just made by Microsoft. Accept the fact that Windows XP is a decent operating system and far superior to the Win9x line and get back to using your Linux PC. To each their own, but bashing XP without actually using it is pretty foolish, especially because it does run at without noticable slowdown on any new PC and on most older PCs as well.

Unless your desktop is still a Pentium class machine, assuming that your computer has enough disk space and RAM, Windows XP is a decent operating system. If you're going to bash it, bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation, or on any other Microsoft expansionist move. Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[MattRog]

I run Win2K on my laptop (PIII850, 256MB RAM, etc.) and it runs fine. It runs everything I want it to just fine.

I also run Win2K on my 1.333GHz Athlon (which has 512MB PC2100 DDR). Runs great there as well.

However, I noticed that, either psycologically or actually, XP on the computer I use at work (PIII1GHz, 256MB RAM) seems to boot up far faster than Win2K. I can't quite figure it out - I understand it's a brand-new install so perhaps it hasn't had time to accumulate software bloat, but it's not like my systems have a ton of system services starting. As a matter of fact I make it a rule that nothing starts up aside from what Windows needs to run (e.g. no WinAmp agent, AIM, etc.). But XP will beat Win2K to the login screen every time and be 'up and running' faster than 2000. XP seems like a decent OS but there's no real reason (other than the startup/login speed) for me to upgrade from 2000. 2000 does everything I want and I don't have the time, money, or inclination to upgrade 2 boxes to XP (and yes, you can turn off all the fou-fou WinXP eye candy and make it look a whole lot like 2000. The one really neat thing is that it stylizes (aka 3D shading) all the web form elements (like submit buttons, checkboxes, etc.) which is really neat).

Re:Taco's XP comment

[zsmooth]

XP *DOES* boot faster. Microsoft spent tons of time optimizing the boot sequence, and it definitely shows. I have XP installed now for several months with tons of programs installed and it still takes ~20 seconds between "Restart" and usable state. (Helluva lot faster than my Linux partition, I might add.)

Re:Taco's XP comment

[MattRog]

Ok -- I was amazed at the difference. If I had the money, I'd be tempted to buy two copies of XP to upgrade my two systems just for that feature!

Re:Taco's XP comment

[VAXman]

In my experience, XP is much faster than 2000. When I upgraded my computers form 2000->XP, I defnitely noticed a speed increase. Not just bootup time, but overall performance. I still have one computer with 2000 (necessary because my employer's VPN software only works with 2000), and I just upgraded to 512MB, but it's still slow as a dog. My Celeron 433 Laptop with 256MB RAM is faster with XP, than my Celeron 800 Desktop with 512MB of RAM is with 2000. (But my P4 with XP blows them both away :-)

Re:Taco's XP comment

[yoshi_mon]

I hear everyday, "I really need to upgrade my computer, it's only 500mhz".

Who are you hearing this from? I expect that it's either a) gamers or b) ppl who want every damn bell and whisle turned on.

My AMD 300 with it's measly 128M of RAM has been running XP for a while now. I am able to have more than, "a couple of applications" at one time and it does it well actually.

I will upgrade soon, but my current computer will go to another family member who I will probaly setup with XP. If they decide to turn on all the eyecandy that I will tell them not to do, they can live with the slowdown, but as my box is setup right now, it's way better than Win9x ever was.

Yes, I do run a 2.4.x kernel on here and it smokes. Yes, by running a light window manager in X it runs way faster than XP. However, as it stands, when I do use windows I would much rather run XP than Win9x. And by tweaking it, it runs better than 9x ever could.

Microsoft markets it's products to the MASSES, and they love pretty things. When ppl see my desktop they think its sterial and plain, but to me all the crap that they put on their desktops only annoys me. However, that is why they have their computers and I have mine. They will go out and spend $2000 on a new computer that will do what they need it to do, while I will go out and spend $200 on a bare bones upgrade and it will do what I need it to do.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

When OS's get older they should get faster.

what is that supposed to mean? maybe if you want to run windows 3.11 on your shiny new athlon xp, sure. but OS's will add more features and other stuff to take advantage of faster hardware. That's just progess. XP is descended from NT, I would really call it a long line, and while it is a resource hog isn't really that slow.

Maybe you should actually try XP or NT before running your mouth.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[peripatetic_bum]

Bottom line is that XP is no worse than any other "modern" graphical OS - it's just made by Microsoft. Accept the fact that Windows XP is a decent operating system and far superior to the Win9x line and get back to using your Linux PC.

I will have to respectfully disagree (unlike some of the replies ive seen to you)

We decided to set XP in my families new XP1800 computer. I wil be the first to admit that when it runs, it runs smoothly and the family likes it, but It certainly is much worse in terms of stability to say Mandrak or MacOSx. There is not a day that does not go by the computer iwll up and reboot for no reason or simply crash.

As for being a decent OS being made by Microsoft, all i can say is that we must remember that Microsoft KNEW about a HUGH REMOTE HOLE for almost a month before deciding to let the rest of us know about. That in my opinion makes it a very much worse OS than the others. At the moment, i am trying to get hem used to a linux desktop and will simply replace it all with Linux in a few months.

Thankx!

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell happened to the parent post? Looks like message pointers are getting hosed again.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

What in the hell is a ppl?

Learn how to talk, you uneducated moron.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Pussy Is Money]

This is not true. Software may become faster as it evolves to exploit more powerful hardware. It may also become faster because of increased efficiency in the code.

But this does not mean that software gets faster with age. Because with age also come features and increased expectations. Imagine you had written a strcmp() routine ten years ago. You have had a decade to tweak your code and by now it is almost twice as fast as then.

However, now people expect Unicode support. If nothing else, this means your strcmp() has to compare twice as much data (not even counting character set translations and the like). So did your strcmp() actually become faster? Well, yes, it did -- but for any actual workload, no, it didn't.

I agree with your statement that we do not need a 2.2 GHz machine just to open a couple of applications. But people might require the ease of use (in the sense that the system has comprehensive knowledge about real world things such as character sets, physical dimensions, monetary values, etcetera) that a 2.2 GHz machine affords.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I just upgraded my girlfriend's gateway 350 MHz machine from 98 to XP. I spent 15 dollars on 128MB of more ram, and XP is so much faster than 98. now we can do video over instant messaging.

XP slow? NO WAY!

Re:Taco's XP comment

[FlyingDragon]

We decided to set XP in my families new XP1800 computer. I wil be the first to admit that when it runs, it runs smoothly and the family likes it, but It certainly is much worse in terms of stability to say Mandrak or MacOSx. There is not a day that does not go by the computer iwll up and reboot for no reason or simply crash.

Not to defend Windows XP, but "up and reboot" reminds me a lot of flaky PCI devices, especially video cards, and overheating. Your description implies you have not run XP on any other systems and have not run another OS on this system. Perhaps you should eliminate a few variables before you condemn XP.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[abombss]

I would have to agree. I have been running a PII 333 288 MB of ram Asus F7400 laptop. XP seems faster than my old Win 98SE OS. I did turn off all the fancy eye candy and I am only running at 16 bit color, but it crusises. I use netbeans java ide and it starts and runs very fast, compared to 98. And the stability for a M$ product is pretty good. I have crashed it once and was due to driver updates. No problem just did an easy rollback and things work great! peace, abombss

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazing how uninformed /. readers are. XP boots so quickly because people at Microsoft are actually INNOVATING and working to improve things, not just copying what other OSes are doing (like Linux).

Linux zealots like Mr. Malda spend an incredible amount time dismissing an "enemy" that they just barely know. - presuming XP to be not much more than Windows 3.0 with some extra color added. I guess it's the THEMEZ mentality of Linux users that can't see an OS beyond the window frame.

Print off some material from the following links and have a read the next time you're waiting for your non-journaling filesystem to finish fscking after the cat trips over the power cord:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/appendix/hh/appendix/enhancements5_ 0qhx.asp

http://www.microsoft.com/hwdev/platform/performanc e/fastboot/default.asp

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /nhp/Default.asp?contentid=28000524

Re:Taco's XP comment

[peripatetic_bum]

good point.

But I ran linux on it using kernel 2.4.16 and ran unstable on it for about 2 weeks before converting it to XP and never had one problem with.

it was doing seti@home calculations for 2 solid weeks.

Thanks

Re:Taco's XP comment

[analog_line]

I wholeheartedly agree with this. I loaded XP on this machine to give it a shot, and I didn't notice any speed problems. Of course, I have 384MB RAM on this machine and a 1Ghz Athlon with a 64MB graphics card (geForce 2 MX at the time). And the bootup speed was faster than Win98. Gods, did it boot up fast. Seductively fast.

However, I've issues with alot of the stuff that's in XP and the whole activation situation, so I wiped it. Running 98 now for games, but probably will move to 2000 as my Windows partition. More stable than 98 and doesn't have all the nasty crap MS is foisting on the world with XP. And most of my games will run on it.

But it did go fast...that much I'll give it.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[cristofer8]

The only reason I can see that happening would be a faulty driver that you knowingly installed (XP warns you A LOT before letting you install one). I've been running XP since Beta2, and have only had it crash on me about 6 or 7 times, at least five of which were due to bad drivers, mostly nVidia ones.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Thatman311]

Microsoft's goal with WindowsXP is of course on the surface to get you to run WindowsXP on all of your systems. Can't deny that as it is an increase in revenue for them. But the major goal was to get people off of Win9x so there is a single plateform people can develope for. Anyhow I am glad you enjoy the faster boot time. There were several optimizations done to make that occur. Took some time to get it right though.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

splain yourself.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Pinball Wizard]

If you're going to bash it, bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation.

OK! I, for one, like many people here, enjoy tearing down my machines and putting them back together again. That precludes me from using XP, unless I want to activate Windows every time(no, thanks).

Furthermore, you can't take MP3's created on a Windows XP machine and play them on another machine. They did build DRM into it, and its the dumbest thing I've ever seen. I'm sure its easy to get around, but frankly its much easier to just not go there.

I use Windows 2000 primarily on my desktops and as far as I'm concerned, thats the last Microsoft OS I'll ever buy.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[sheldon]

I don't know, I used to have a 386SX16 running Windows 3.1 with 5 Megs of RAM and I'm fairly certain my 850Mhz PIII with 768 Megs of RAM not only cost less than the 386, but also runs Windows XP considerably faster.

BTW, the key to WinXP speed is a relatively fast hardware accelerated video card. i.e. a Tseng ET4000 isn't going to cut it, I'd recommend a Riva TNT at the very least. And also RAM, I bought my 768 Megs when it only cost $30 per 256Meg DIMM. I realize they are not like $60, but it's still worth putting in at least 512 Megs.

Honestly for the first time in my experience with computers, I see no reason to buy the absolute latest greatest computer and two year old technology is more than adequate.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[MoneyT]

Bah! Just because you add more features, doesn't mean it should be slower. Just look at the relative speed of other OS's as they've gotten older. Mac OS, muchos improved from good ol 7.5.5. OS X, muchos improved just between version X and X.1. BeOS, muchos improved. And even linux, good god, anyone remember trying to run RedHat 5 + GNOME with any real speed. Didn't work out all that well. Now it's at least usable by someone with a deadline.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, if you use any of the ripping/encoding software you were using on 9x, NT, 2k...... those mp3s are the same as any mp3s. The only copy-protection thing that's going on is if you encode using windows media player.... and even then I think you need to use the windows media audio format.

So it's kind of a myth to say that the mp3s you rip on an XP machine can only be played on that machine.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Krilomir]

Windows XP doesn't need to be reactivated just because you tear down your computer and put it back together again. You can even smack a new graphics card or sound card into the motherboard, and it'll still run just fine without reactivation. You only need to activate it again if you make major changes to your setup (new motherboard and stuff like that).

Also, don't tell me you're using microsoft tools to create MP3s. Ever heard of lame? I'm not even sure you can create MP3s with XP. I've used lame just fine with XP, and the MP3s can be played both with Windows Media Player and Winamp.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

" I guess it's the THEMEZ mentality of Linux users that can't see an OS beyond the window frame. "

I'd just like to point out something I've noticed...

Windows 95 introduced this concept of Themes. It was kind of cool, I guess. There were even add-on packs for NT 4.0 to use these themes and so forth.

But themes have pretty much completely died out in the Windows world. It's boring and people don't care any more.

But for some reason the Linux world still thinks they are the coolest thing since sliced bread. It's rather bizarre really.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Krilomir]

Maybe you should check your hardware setup.

I'm running Windows XP just fine on a few computers around here - most of them are turned on most of the day. They never crash, and they never did with Windows 2000 either. Most people I know don't have problems with XP.

Not buying a OS because it had a HUGH REMOTE HOLE for almost a month, well ... your choice. I, for one, don't think it makes XP a worse OS today. Hope you didn't suffer too much from the fact that they didn't let you know. Good luck with linux though.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Pinball Wizard]

Actually I've never used XP. The product activation scheme was just too much for me to take. Incidentally, can you use XP without getting a Passport? My guess is no, but maybe I'm wrong. I have seen people create MP3's, not with MS tools, but with Real Jukebox, and be unable to play them on other PC's.

Are you sure that you can tear your machine down and put it back together again? What if I back up my data, reinstall all the software, then restore my data? I typically do that from time to time.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmmmmmmmmmm

that is not a bad thought

thanks

Re:Taco's XP comment

[PeeOnYou2]

I also had the same problem. We put it on our family Athlon 600, 256 megs ram, geforce 2.. and not a single day went by when it would completely freeze up or just reboot for no reason. But everyone thought it was much nicer, and it was pretty smooth. But the crashes, I just couldn't live with, so back to 98 we go. Nice waste of money for now...

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

wrong wrong wrong.
XP does not have built in mp3 ripping and ripping with tools like LAME or MusicMatch you can copy then whereever you want. If you use that Real Jukebox crap you deserve what you get because those songs ripped unless you turn it off are mp3s wrapped in DRM by REAL not Microsoft.
You also do not need a Passport account to use Windows XP.
God the FUD in here is pretty thick.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[throx]

Even using WMA format there's no DRM unless you choose to turn it on. I've ripped my entire CD collection into WMA format and am able to play them on any machine I want (though not any OS I want obviously).

As for activation, it's required whenever you make major changes to your PC (change more than 4 major components between reboots) or reinstall the OS. In any case it's rather painless...

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Jace of Fuse!]

XP runs absolutely beautifully on my Pentium 3 800 and 256 megabytes of ram.

Stable. Fast. Relatively secure (as opposed to other Microsoft offerings). And compatible with most Windows software from either the 9x or 2K line.

XP is actually pretty good. Sorry, Linux people, you're going to have to bash XP for reasons other than technical, now. Call it ugly. Call it Expensive. Call it the work of satan. Call it Fred if you want. But you can't call it slow or unstable anymore without basically being full of crap.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

This is true, on ly 4 processor 866P-III it runs fine... 1 processor for rights management services, 1 processor for pretty-things services, 1 processor for running the bloat-up services, and 1 processor left to run the desktop.... although it was still slow until I installed the Geforce 3Ti and upped it to 1GB ram.

On a $5000.00 machine XP rocks.... you guys just arent running it on the proper hardware.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[clinko]

Thank you so much for being realistic on slashdot. And thank the moderators for being fucking retards that automatically bash anything that says microsoft. (i'm a moderator too)

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

I get by with 4.66 mHz & 640 kb RAM for
wordprocessing!

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, according to rules you can't say you moderator unless you anonimous.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[_pi-away]

I have XP running on a p3 1000/133 w/512mb, and it runs very fast and very smooth. Combined with the intel rabid boot bios; i go from hitting the power button to the login screen in about 10 - 12 seconds or less, pretty tasty imo.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[ewithrow]

That precludes me from using XP, unless I want to activate Windows every time(no, thanks).

A poll was recently conducted at a large computer site in which 67% of participants admitted that they use an illegal version of XP, which means that the majority of people are bypassing windows activation. Looks like that idea worked well for M$.

http://www.neowin.net/bboard/showthread.php?s=&t hr eadid=10069

Re:Taco's XP comment

[tage]

Oh, come on! Shouldn't you try to get just a few facts right before posting? Of course you are wrong! XP does NOT require you to have a Passport. And why (WHY?!?) should Real Jukebox be any better than XP with regards to DRM?

Another thing: when you shut down your computer, the OS stops running. It cannot sense that you take your PC apart. The WPA insanity doesn't start unless you change components in your PC, and several of them.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Surely they should get slower with age?

But seriously Win98SE, NT, Win2k and XP are all fast and all run perfectly well on older hardware, even a Pentium 133. What the NT range needs is RAM, which is quite reasonable.

XP's interface is brand new so I guess by your logic it is entitled to be slower than Gnome, yet not only is it faster than the latest, greatest garden ornament, but when that GUI first appeared it was an absolute dog.

And let's not forget that XP is a completely rewritten system even though it uses the same kernel as Win2k. So again by your logic it is entitled to be slow.

Extra speed is needed not for the OS, but to run high-end applications at a decent speed. I don't think you should need a 2.2GHz CPU just to open a couple of applications either and you don't.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Richard_at_work]

object orientated insults :)

Re:Taco's XP comment

[ThatComputerGuy]

"intel rabid boot bios"

Where did you get this bios? Where, where, tell me! Damnit, tell me, or I'll bite you!

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Bert64]

Well, remote holes should be notified of IMMEDIATELY that they are discovered, and fixed or otherwise secured in the fastest possible time.
If a bug hunter can find the problems, then so could someone malicious who is searching for holes for other purposes... ie: to exploit them. The month that ms sat on that last hole, any number of people could have discovered it and been abusing it, and these people who discover vulnerabilities like this.. don`t write highly visible worms, they keep it to themselves and use it against a few select targets, and always try to hide their tracks.
Just think, microsoft and scriptkiddies could already know about another hole in xp.. but when will we know? a month`s time? a scriptkid could already have stolen your confidential data by then.

Re:Taco's XP comment

[Bert64]

Hook a pc upto an isolated lan, configure a linux box to log traffic, and install XP on the other pc.. Define the linux box as the router and dns server, and watch the traffic xp is trying to send home.. And that`s just during installation. Who knows what other data it might send once it`s actually running? If you have an illegal copy, what`s to stop them tracking you down via this system?

You're a bigot, CmdrTaco!

[Anonymous Coward]

I first ran Linux on a 386SX/16 with 4 Mb of RAM, and let me tell you, 10 hour kernel compiles were a fact of life, and running X was a fucking nightmare.

So spare us the bullshit about how bad Windows 3.0 on a 386SX was, okay fuckface? And by the way, FUCK YOU for never accepting my story submissions.

fag

[The Turd Report]

fag

retarded

[Anonymous Coward]

taco - you're retarded

What's the Hurry?!?

[The Gardener]

Four comments, none above zero, and its already Slashdotted

The Gardener

Re:What's the Hurry?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's good -- people are actually reading the article ;)

Re:What's the Hurry?!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wait a minute... are you *sure* this is the real Slashdot? ;)

Nothing can run XP that fast.

[mrseigen]

It's physically impossible to run XP that fast. Especially once you start running programs.

boot times

[Gavitron_zero]

Why the heck are people so interested in boot times on windows PC's? If you are running Win2K or higher, you don't need to reboot very often...

In the last month, I've had to reboot twice, and that was booting when i got the lan party, and when i got back...

Re:boot times

[garcia]

a good majority of people don't leave their computers on all the time, that's why.

Also a lot of people are still running ME or 98. Booting takes up to 5-6 mins on some machines. That's why they are so interested in boot times.

Re:boot times

[Nameles]

Even in XP, I've seen the fastest bootup times of ANY OS (Win9x's, ME, 2k, Linux, Win 3.x, old old old OS's that I can't remember the names of) I've used.

Re:boot times

[trentfoley]

I use a laptop and am rather mobile with it. Boot times are very important when you just need to check that one little thing that some pesky client "needs". There is nothing more frustrating than having the conversation with the client go on to something entirely different while still waiting for a login prompt to appear.

Re:boot times

[me0]

Atheos is fast boot contender too you know...

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

DOS boots pretty damn fast....

Re:boot times

[Gavitron_zero]

Also a lot of people are still running ME or 98. Booting takes up to 5-6 mins on some machines. That's why they are so interested in boot times.

I wasn't talking about Me or 98 though...i was talking about win2k. On any 9X type, you shouldn't be leaving it on, but Win2K is built to stay running...

Re:boot times

[garcia]

that's not my point.

You asked "why are people so interested in boot times." I explained why.

A good majority of people don't see the need of leaving their computer on when they aren't using it. *gasp*

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

well if their precious boot time is an issue, maybe they SHOULD leave the fucking thing on then....cake and eating it too?

Re:boot times

[hoyosa]

Are you joking me? I recently set-up a little LAN in my house, with six computers running Linux and one for the family running Win2K. Everytime I would check a box or change something in the network properties, I would have to reboot. It was rather disappointing the number of times I had to reboot (not only reboot, but wait 5 minutes each time) to get my configuration working correctly. I would much rather be using Linux, where you really don't have to reboot!

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I got a machine with XP on it, and it takes flipping forever to boot. Checks the RAM, and then sits there forever scanning the secondary IDE channel cause there's nothing hooked there, then does some scsi stuff. Sheesh. I thought XP was going to be the be-all-end-all, but it's got a ways to go still.

Re:boot times

[smagoun]

System 7 on a 10+ year old mac will boot damn fast...like 15 seconds from power on, if that. I don't know how fast it will boot on my G4/7600, but I bet it's faster than XP. (Yup, 7.5/7.6 will run on that box)

Re:boot times

[tftp]

A good majority of people don't see the need of leaving their computer on when they aren't using it.

There are many reasons why they turn the thing off:

• To save energy (these fast boxen draw 300W/h)
• To save fans (they break first!)
• To prevent fires (who knows what may happen)
• To protect little children (and the computer from them)
• To reduce the noise (fans are noisy)
• To do something else at the desk
• and many more...

Re:boot times

[dinivin]

BeOS still wins hands down in terms of bootup times. :-) But XP is still pretty close.

Dinivin

Re:boot times

[rant-mode-on]

I had a ZX spectrum once, took about a second to boot.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, unless its running CHKDSK

Re:boot times

[RussGarrett]

On the same hardware, I've had BeOS, QNX, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, and Linux. Excluding BeOS and QNX, which I haven't done much testing on (although I don't doubt they're quick to boot), WinXP and Linux take about the same time to load, possibly Linux is a tad quicker, because I've got a pretty stripped-down kernel. But WinXP takes a good half the time of it's predecessor.

(note: it's a SMP celeron system, so that may have something to do with it)

Re:boot times

[ivarneli]

The operating system is not the only factor that decides system uptime. Many people do not leave their computer on all the time for one reason or another. For example, I turn mine off every night because I can't sleep with the noise. But boot times are important for many other reasons. Boot times are very important for people who dual boot and have to switch operating systems often. My work forces me to switch between Windows and Linux about 6 times per day. If Windows takes 5 minutes to boot, that's a half hour of time that has been lost. It's even more important when doing service work on computers. I used to work at a local tech shop, and the reboot times add up when you have to install a number of different applications or drivers. Also, we used to test parts, so if I had 50 video cards to test, that meant booting Windows 50 times. A great deal of time is wasted depending on how long it takes to load.

BeOS is probably the fastest-booting full-featured operating system, taking about 7 seconds to boot. DOS is of course much faster, although there isn't a whole lot for it to do. MS-DOS 5.0 with no autoexec.bat/config.sys presents a command prompt pretty much instantly after POST, even on a 486. I once got an extremely minimal Linux to boot in 3 seconds on a Pentium 90 when I was designing a car mp3 stereo. However, that was without any daemons running, no unnecessary drivers, etc... so it was not really a usable general-purpose operating system. In the Windows world, I would consider Win95 to be the fastest (contrary to every review and ad for Win98+ that claimed faster boot and shutdown times). A fresh install of Win95 on my Athlon 800 loads in under 10 seconds, although this starts going up when you install a real video driver, Internet Explorer 5, etc. Still, if you carefully monitor what gets loaded on startup, you can keep Win95's boot time under 30 seconds, which helps immensely when rebooting many times daily is necessary. Even in cases of normal use, a short boot time is a great convenience.

But maybe that's just me.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

Not when it's loading CDRom drivers - takes several bloody minutes!

Re:boot times

[nomis80]

The thing is with Windows XP that it doesn't load ANYTHING at bootup. On my Athlon 800, it takes about 1 minute to log into my user once I've clicked it in the login screen. And I can forget about tweaking or disabling things.

But you might be interested in knowing what is the fastest OS I've ever seen at booting: Linux From Scratch. The BIOS took longer than the booting itself. 10 seconds after I had pressed the power button, I was ready to log in and every daemon was loaded. And the best part was that I knew what was going on.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, those 5-6 minutes boots are down to having networking components installed when not on a network...

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

QNX Neutrino is both the fastest install (3-5 Minutes!) and boot I have ever seen. The only thing close for boot speed is BeOS. Try it sometime, the GUI is nice and clean too.

Re:boot times

[Drakino]

Then people need to look into sleep or hibernation. Everyone assumes it's for laptops, but it works just fine on desktops. I hibernate my media system all the time to have a middle of the road between power usage and boot times.

Macs should be using sleep mode if running OS X.

Re:boot times

[Emil Brink]

Um, either they draw 300 W, or they don't. They most certainly won't draw 300 W/h, since that just doesn't make sense. 1 W = 1 J/s, dividing by time again is simply crazy. This has been a heads-up from your friendly elementary physics and units consistency police, now please go back to the regular programming. Thank you. ;^)

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

To prevent fires (who knows what may happen)

Do you also unplug the refrigerator when you're not using it? who knows what may happen. And the hot water heater, too!! And don't set the VCR to record while you're away from home (I won't even go into the risks of owning a TiVo!!) How many fires are you personally aware of that were started by a computer?

Freak.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a pentium pro 200, 64meg ram machine dual booting windows 95 and nt 4.0 (I guess server version). NT was a bit less loaded (I installed it to use C++B without crashes after every compile) and 95 had all the useless stuff. Well, NT could boot at least twice as fast.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

For you, perhaps.

Re:boot times

[LinuxInDallas]

I have to agree with this. It actually takes longer for my Adaptec 2940U2W to initialize with two hard drives than it takes Windows XP to get to the login screen.

Re:boot times

[Clowning]

My machine has been the happy host of a LFS build for several months now. You're right about the boot time. BIOS takes about twice as much time to post as the actual OS loading does.

Re:boot times

[Peyna]

A default XP install on my box boots in about 1/3 the time than the default Redhat 7.2 workstation install (booting into X Windows to make it fair, even though without going into X it is still about 1/2 as slow.).

Re:boot times

[Howie]

It's worth mentioning that since at least NT4, the NT-based OSes 'cheat' about boot times compared to many Unixes... The typical unix will go through it's rc files (or rc.d/nnn dirs) and run the scripts in turn and wait for them to finish. NT plops it's login screen up long before it's finished loading Services (the rough equivalent of things like Sendmail and BIND on your *nix box). Wait and see how much time you need until both systems stop accessing the disk after reboot - the NT system will clatter away running IIS, DNS, DHCPd, whatever you have configured, for quite a while after the login screen has appeared.

Re:boot times

[Howie]

As someone pointed out to me the other day here, and has changed the way I use my laptop - if it's a Win2K try Standby next time. As long as the battery holds out, my Toshiba now 'boots' in 3 seconds, and shuts down in about the same. I don't know why I never tried it before.

Which reminds me - anyone know if I can do the same with Linux? I'd like to be able to suspend (mostly-power down) or suspend-to-disk (complete power-down) RH7.2 too...

Re:boot times

[Peyna]

I was referring to after all services were loaded. I will note that I am not running IIS or DNS, however, I'm not running Apache or DNS in Linux either. (I am running DHCPD in both.)

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

XP sucks. 98 boots faster. Or do you call the login screen finished. XP takes 17 seconds longer on average then 98. It is the slowest booting os on earth. Because it boots in stages and the booting is not done untill after you log on.Or do you not read MS whitepapers.

Re:boot times

[BlackEmperor]

5/6 minutes?! if thats the case then your pc is very badly configured.

if you dont leave your pc on all the time then you should - they are designed for that. if your booting into another os then i suggest you use an os that allows you to do all you want to do on it.

isnt it strange how linux users claim linux is the most stable os, but at the same time are forever booting into windows? linux may be stable but its users arent.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

I've NEVER had any power management work correctly, not on laptops, notebooks or desktops. Not Hibernate, not HDD-shutdown and not Sleep/Resume. Not on Win98, NT or Win2k.

Maybe, just MAYBE turning off monitor doesn't freeze the monitor permanently... If Hibernate in W2k didn't freeze after a Resume, it could be great.

In short: Powermanagement is a fucking piece of crap that we should never have had to pay the development for. I have no illusions that XP fixes any of it. There's just too much buggy/different hardware, drivers and programs. The x86 architecture is not suitable for doing it. Macs are probably a totally different story.

Re:boot times

[Anonymous Coward]

Really depends what you're loading, but that's no longer than I typically see for linux machines and even on my old P166 with numerous bits being loaded at boot the total time was under 2 minutes, generally less than 90 seconds.

And ME boots even faster than that.

Slashdotted already..

[Vegeta99]

It says he needs to upgrade to a "higher service level" or something, cool! So, with .NET you have to pay for eveyrone who views your webpage
(SARCASM)

A treat!

[alexmogil]

We finally had the chance to hear 'I hate Microsoft and Intel' in *one sentence*! How rare!

I could be wrong...

[CptNoSkill]

O Tomshardware, they also have a comparison, it's pretty good. From what I read it doesn't seem like this chip is really anything special. I guess I'll just wait until 3GHz before really getting exited ;).

oh yeah

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok Mr. "2000+", quantispeed architecture, prepare to get whupped Intel style!

hardocp has had this done for over a week

[SafeMode]

http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/cpus/intel/p4nw/

does anything beat hardocp when it comes to testing new hardware?
The athlon XP tromples the P4 once again.

Re:hardocp has had this done for over a week

[Anonymous Coward]

hardocp:

"Also, instead of reviewing the 2.2GHz CPU, we decided on using the 2.0GHz. I figured that most of our brothers out there that would be purchasing one of these would most likely go with the cheaper of the two. If you can afford the 2.2GHz part, consider yourself lucky."

I will wait for the AMD

[da_Den_man]

This is nothing "New". Oh boy, Intel put out a 2.2 Ghz chip. The tests showed on the site have it losing to an AMD 1600+. So you can be almost assured that AMD will have a FASTER and CHEAPER chip on the market very soon. Why pay the R&D for Intel, when AMD has one out there already.
Plus, I have to say on the Win XP comment, I run it on a 900mhz chip, and it runs pretty damn fast. I know what running on a 386/16 was all about....and this is NOTHING compared to that slowness.

Re:I will wait for the AMD

[TikkaMassala]

Why pay more for Intel? Because Intel chips are made to a higher specification than AMD chips (see that video where they took the heatsinks off an Athlon, a P3 and a P4? Guess which one actually burst into flames.).

Go buy AMD if you don't have the cash for a CPU that'll actually survive if the heatsink falls off, or if a fan fails.

It's your funeral. And if the heatsink falls off, quite literally.

Well Thought Out?

[The Gardener]

This was the system I benchmarked the P4 on. I used 128MB of Micron PC1600 (200MHz) ECC DDR Memory.

The latest, preproduction, Intel CPU, and he only springs for 128 MB of ram? Why bottleneck the thing? No one is going to production ship it like that. I will likely go out the door with 512 or so.

The Gardener

Re:Well Thought Out?

[VAXman]

Additionally, why are they using such slow memory? Why not PC2100, PC2400, or PC2700?

Re:Well Thought Out?

[spacefrog]

If it comes from Dell, it will have 128 RAM and 20GB hard disk. That's the P4 config they have been pushing the hell out of for quite some time. They will do any bastardization to meet their price sweet spots.

"Dude, your gettin a Dell" seems more of a warning than anything.

Re:Well Thought Out?

[Peyna]

I thought that PC2100 was mostly standard for DDR. Isn't it? I know that's what most places sell, and probably what most packaged computers come with.

Re:Well Thought Out?

[DeeKayWon]

Because the system bus is 100MHz (albeit quad-pumped), and therefore PC2100/2400/2700 memory would still be running at 200MHz (the speed of PC1600 memory).

I am sick of all this anti ms crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sick of all the anti ms zealots here. They hear each other repeat it enough they actully *almost* believe it. But then along comes reality and all they end up proving is how silly they are.

Here is some truth these posters don't want you to hear:

Microsoft will continue to dominate the Desktop.

Microsoft is and will continue to gain momemtum in the corporate server side.

Microsoft will become "the" major player in CRM. (White Plains)

Microsoft is taking on the task of developing home based computing in ways no OEM has even thought about.

Dot Net isn't a buzz word, it's the future of the Internet. (Like it or not, learn to deal with it.)

Re:I am sick of all this anti ms crap!

[me0]

I have to put up with w2k, solaris and linux on a daily basis and there's no doubt in my mind what I prefer. I don't care if linux never conquers the desktop cause it allready conquered mine and I'm not particulary interested in what you are running to get your work done. It's no big mystery that we who happen to prefer the unix layout to the windows one tend to see the windows operating system in it's different incarnations for what it really is - one huge pile of shit.

Repeat: "Microsoft Windows is not userfriendly"
Repeat: "Microsoft Windows is not secure"
Repeat: "Microsoft Windows was never a good server os"
Repeat: "Linux is not the answer to everything"
Repeat: "I am not a zealot for telling the truth"

Re:I am sick of all this anti ms crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dot Net isn't a buzz word, it's the future of the Internet. (Like it or not, learn to deal with it.)

Wow, you're funny. Do you work at MS?

Re:I am sick of all this anti ms crap!

[Pussy Is Money]

No, he's probably serious, and really thinks that all of the Internet's troubles can be solved by ditching the abject hippie Unix text protocols in favor of FuzzWuzz XML with Component Technology or something.

Re:I am sick of all this anti ms crap!

[cb0y]

Using a linux router, who cares.

2. linux yes for server
3. windows I use 100% for desktop
try doing linux encoding vob to divx and other cool shit.... it sucks.

I use both daily, and a bit of solaris, which btw sucks dogs ass!!! PUKE SHIT

Stephen King, author, dead at 55

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some upsetting news on talk radio - Horror/Sci Fi writer Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home this morning. They gave no more details. I'm sure everyone on Slashdot will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon. God bless.

Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 55

[Anonymous Coward]

You should get a new username -- "The Death Report"

Re:Stephen King, author, dead at 55

[Anonymous Coward]

This is completely bogus. The one who was found dead is the DRIVER who struck Stephen King. This was over 1yr ago.

Bah...

[Nameles]

With my current setup (1.2ghz and 640mb ram) and my last one (800mhz and 256mb ram), XP still runs pretty damn smooth, even while running 20 some odd windows, running a server, playing music, etc, with both configs. Last time I was in Linux (Bah to Windows installs formating the MBR) with 800 and 256megs of ram, XP was still faster with those stats than GNOME was (I don't care much for KDE).

Re:Bah...

[BobSoros]

beh, please moderate that post down, and put me on your Foe list while you're at it, Thanks for your time.

Re:Bah...

[Anonymous Coward]

lmfao.

Re:Bah...

[tswinzig]

Sir, how dare you bring reality into the picture!

By the way, why the hell does CmdrTaco care how fast it runs Windows XP? He only runs Linux, right?

Re:Bah...

[Anonymous Coward]

"He only runs Linux, right?"

No, he's a pretty typical Linux troll. Goes on and on about how great it is, but then he does all his real work in Windows.

Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

You lie.

I installed XP on a 400 MHz Celeron with 128 MB of RAM and it was fucking slow.

I use Linux with Gnome on the same machine and it runs really well.

Re:Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

Lose that Celeron man, it's junk.A PII is much faster than the equivilent Celeron which is what the poster was describing. I have a 500MHz Athlon with 256MB of RAM and XP flies for me. Of course I disabled all that eye-candy crap (for asthetic reasons, not speed reasons) so that probably speed things up a bit.

Re:Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of the Celeron being junk or not -- Linux flies for me on this machine and XP is extremely slow.

Re:Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

naha I run xp on a 433mhz celeron and it's very responsive, although I do have triple the ram of what you got... but ximian gnome is still slow as an ass

Re:Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

It's probably the RAM, then. All of you have much more than 128 MB.

No OS should _EVER_ need more than 128 MB, unless you're doing some serious image manipulation or editing audio/video.

Re:Liar

[trentfoley]

No OS should _EVER_ need more than 128 MB

The additional memory (you should have at least 1GB) is necessary for many things. First, and foremost, we must leave room on our systems to allow the U.S. Government to install their goodies -- you know, to make sure we aren't terrorists. Also, we need the extra space so that corporations can install spyware to monitor our usage of their side of the internet. After all, .com is theirs, isn't it? 128MB is just not enough for all of that, and running an innovative OS that we have all been clamoring for. We know this because Microsoft has told us this.

I wish I was a cool, moron spammer

Re:Liar

[Anonymous Coward]

You lunix dolts are such liars. Nothing you run on X will run faster than its equivalent on XP. Aside from the fact that Lunix desktops have miserable functionality compared to XP -- they do less -- XP blows away Lunix.

You know, it's perfectly possible to replace the explorer shell with bash if you want an even fairer comparison. You wont like the results.

Features at a glance:

[bryan1945]

Features (D845BG Motherboard)

Support for Intel mPGA478 Pentium-4 400MHz FSB Processors up to 2.2GHz+.
Onboard AC'97 Audio with SoundMAX with SPX Technology and Microphone Pre-Amplifiers.
Two 184-pin memory slots with support for up to 2GB PC2100 (DDR266) SDRAM Memory.
4 External USB 1.1 Connections for added peripherals, with support for an additional 3 USB 1.1 connections.
Intel Active Monitor for monitoring of system temperatures, fan speeds, and power supply voltages.
1 1.5V AGP 4X/2X Port for Accelerated 3D Graphics.
6 32-Bit PCI Ports for added components.
Ultra ATA/100 Disk Support.
Onboard 82562ET Intel Pro/100 LAN

Features (Pentium-4 2.2GHz Processor)

Intel Net-Burst Micro-Architecture.
512KB Advanced Transfer Cache (L2) with 8-way associativity and Error Correcting Code (ECC).
System Bus Frequency at 400MHz.
Rapid Execution Engine: Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) run at twice the processor core frequency.
Hyper Pipelined Technology.
Advanced Floating-Point and Multimedia Unit (FPU) for enhanced video, audio, encryption and 3D performance.
144 enhanced Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) instructions.
Advanced Dynamic Execution
Power Management Capabilities
8KB Level 1 Data Cache
Optimized for 32-Bit applications running on advanced 32-Bit operating systems.

Overall it seems like an evolutionary step.

Re:Features at a glance:

[wik]

You'd think that with the process shrink, they'd at least make the L1 data cache a little bit larger. 8kB is surprisingly small.

Re:Features at a glance:

[bryan1945]

I'm even surprised at the L2 cache size. Pretty much a given that a 1MB of L2 can really help performance wise.

And the 8k is ridiculously small.

Amazing

[Anonymous Coward]

They're getting an Athlon XP to run on a P4? I don't understand why that would seem slow?

Re:Amazing

[VAXman]

Hmm, well, if you ran a fullchip RTL simulation of an Athlon XP on a P4 your speed you be somewhere on the order of 10Hz-100Hz (depending on your simulation software). That's pretty slow.

Re:Amazing

[jelle]

10-100 clocks per second on a double digit million transistor chip? That's some efficient simulation software, and/or cheating by using simple RAM models for the cache.

Have you used XP, Taco?

[Anonymous Coward]

> This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16
> running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)

Have you actually USED XP, Taco? It's actually quite nippy imho.

Re:Have you used XP, Taco?

[ProfanityHead]

Nippy? Its cold?

Fan hole needed soon

[imrdkl]

Soon CPU fans will require a separate hole in the opposite side of the case. Mounting one will require at least two spare chips, or replaceable cores, since I'll inevitably drop the fan on the core at least once during the mounting process.

Yo Taco!

[j0nkatz]

This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)

Yes you turd burgular! It does run fine. I own a P4 1.5 Socket 478 CPU running on an ASUS P4B266 Intel based mobo with DDR ram.XP runs just as fast as Lunix does, or at least there is no noticable difference.

You get what you pay for?

[glrotate]

An odd statement of fact coming from this crowd. So since linux is free it must not be that good.

Re:You get what you pay for?

[Xavier Shirin]

You don't pay with money, you pay with your time. You dedicate many hours of your life to Linux, and it becomes a VERY good OS.

My WinXP

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running WinXP on a P3-450 w/ 256mb PC133 RAM and a GeForce2 MX200, and it runs perfectly fine, faster than 98 did actually. Everything I run, sans photoshop 6.0, loads up in a matter of seconds. And contrary to popular belief, video games didn't take a noticeable hit (as in a 5-10fps difference) going from 98, either.

The transparencies and shadows no longer did anything speedwise after the 23.11 Detonators, since they gave me full hardware support for those effects. I don't use them anyways, but I could if I wanted to.

And trust me, I've seen Linux crawl before on the same system under a GUI... Certain Gnome applications are loaded up with all kinds of thumbnails and things that kill performance, though everything else goes rather smoothly.

IE 6.0

[nusuth]

sucks. Rest of XP runs pretty fast though, a bit faster than w2k on my dual XP and much faster than 2k on a friend's dual celeron. I haven't tested it on any single processor machine, and microsoft says there are plenty of improvements in MP side of things, so I can't say how it actually compares to older usable windows versions (NT4 & 2k that is) on single machines. You should definetly check it out if you have a dual system and insist on using windows. Check out the memory size though, memory load is about 100megs without any running applications.

BTW, it boots much faster. I guess that is because it boots without negotiating network connections.

Re:IE 6.0

[Anonymous Coward]

I currently dual boot between QNX RTOS 6.1 and Windows XP Professional 2600. IE6 (supposedly slow) in XP (supposedly slow) is noticably faster than Opera (supposedly fastest browser on planet) on QNX (very fast and efficient realtime platform.) I agree with you about boottimes. Windows XP boots faster than any OS I've ever seen. I am up and running from POST to fully logged in with all services (2 instances of SQL Server, IIS 5.1, and a user-mode native debugger) within 15 seconds. QNX will clock in around 25 seconds. FreeBSD used to take about 45 seconds, and Mandrake 8.1 similarly as long.

Re:IE 6.0

[nusuth]

I don't know about opera on qnx, but I can say with confidence that my copy of ie6 on XP, is slower than:

- ie5 on w2k

- konqueror on mdk 8.1

- opera 5 on w2k

- opera 5 on mdk 8.0

- Galeon ? on mdk 8.1

and faster than mozilla 0.95 and 0.96 on mdk 8.1. Page rendering speed is horrible, I wait for it on a dual 1.53 AXP system! Especially annoying if you open a new page while one is rendered.

Photos are very bad!

[tftp]

The guy needs some photography courses, badly. Or maybe glasses :-) Look at this, for example! What a sloppy job!

Re:Photos are very bad!

[Anonymous Coward]

I totaly agree. Distance, subjection, FOCUS?

BOFH

[AnimeFreak]

"Ah Simon, thank you for coming, please sit down"

The promotions committee is strangely quiet today. Normally they're far more boisterous and sure of themselves. This has to be good news.

"Now Simon, as you know there's a vacancy for a Senior Operator in the Computer Centre following the tragic accident in the staff showers."

"Yes" I utter, "tragic"

"How the hell a toaster got in there in the first place is beyond the scope of this committee, as our main interest is to find a replacement as soon as possible. Ordinarily, we would appoint such a senior position externally, but following that awful business with the lift controller failure and the shortlisted candidates.."

"Awful" I sigh, my heart pity at the tragedy of three Senior Operator applicants plunging down a lift shaft to their deaths... Completely accidental you understand...

"..It still seems very strange; apparently the accident inspector stated that the lift appeared to be accelerating *faster* than the speed of gravity when it fell. But I guess we'll never know now that the lift control room had that big electrical fire..."

I could be oversensitive on this issue, but I'm feeling a little bit of dissent in the room around me. Some members of the promotions committee appear to be having problems making the decision of whether they should support the University's interests by appointing me senior operator or becoming involved in the next fatal campus accident. I decide to cut through the red tape and get to the point.

"So essentially, all supposition aside, you wish me to take over the role of Senior Operator.."

"Ah..." the chairman utters, looking around the room for backup, "..Yes"

"Ok, fine. I'll need a couple of K extra for the increased responsibility, say another K for relocation.."

"BUT YOU'RE ONLY TWO OFFICES AWAY!!"

"Good point - another *TWO* K for relocation, and new office furniture. Leather Armchairs would be good. Oh, and an expresso machine."

I get up.

"Well, that should be all I think, so I'll just get off back to work"

While they mutter amongst themselves, I make my exit back to the control room. As it's getting towards the end of my working day (3pm) I write protect the userdisk and start a shutdown for 1 minute. The phone rings.

"I can't save my work" a voice sobs from the phone

"You really should try.."

"But the system won't let me" he wimpers, "can you halt the shutdown?"

"Well, I'd like to, but it's irrevocably committed to shutdown - there's no telling what might happen - we could lose all your work, there's no telling...."

"Um..." - You can almost hear the wheels turning - "...Uh.."

I hang up - they're obviously not committed.

The shutdown completes and I reboot, then decide to introduce a little fun to the network by pulling out random staff terminal lines and repatching them to the student areas and vice versa. Just like the big breakin of '91.

Next I choose a letter at random from the complaints box to use as this week's "External Penetration" victim, then delete all their files.

I decide to get into something new. I break out the telephone serviceman's handset and wander into the comms room and start eavesdropping on people's conversations.

Most of it is crap, but it gives me an idea. Pipe it all through voice recognition and look for words including my name (for security purposes), a sexual encounter, or live chickens. Definite possibilities...

A user rings.

"Oh, Hi - can you tell me what my password is please?" they ask

"I'm sorry" I say for the 1 billionth time "passwords are encrypted on the system, and it's far easier for me to change your password than to find out what it is." (Which is crap; I know what it is, the password changing routine does have a slight in-house modification which the implementers probably weren't counting on.)

"Oh, ok - could you change it to 'desert' please - that was my old password"

"I'm sorry, but we can't change user's passwords to ones that they supply - that would compromise site security"

"Oh, then could you just give me a new password?"

"Sure. What about desert?"

"Huh? .. .. Oh, Ok, that would be fine"

I hang up, they hang up. 10 minutes later they call back.

"Have you changed that password yet?" they ask

"CHANGED the password?" I say "You just asked me to give you a new password, you said nothing about changing it"

"But... Oh. Well, could you change it to desert for me please?"

"I'm sorry, but I can't do that, because of the security compromise, as I told you before. If I knew your password, I could possibly log into your account without you knowing, couldn't I?"

"Well yes..."

"And if that happened, your data would be compromised, wouldn't it?"

"Uhh, yes, I suppose it would"

"So in other words, if two people have the password to an account, the security of it is at least halved, isn't it?"

"Yes, I suppose you're right"

"Of course I am, I'm the *OPERATOR*. I'm not only right, I'm wrong if I want to be as well.."

"Uh.."

He doesn't know whether to agree or not. Wimp.

"Now," I say, breaking the tension "I'll change your password for you"

"Ok, thanks"

"No worries. Bye now"

"B. >click"

They ring back

"You didn't tell me my password!"

"Of course I didn't. We already agreed that two people knowing the password is less secure than one, didn't we?"

"Well, yes, but..."

"No buts, security is security, off you go..."

That's the problem with this job, it doesn't come naturally - you have to *WORK* on it.

She's hosed captain

[0xA]

Hmmm, maybe they should chuck that board into their web server....

2.2 Ghzs? Whoa!

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

windows 3.0 on a 386

[Restil]

Windows 3.0 on a 386 ran rather decently. 4 megs of ram? I could only have dreamed of having 4 megs of ram on my 386. I DID upgrade to 3 megs at one point. Back then I did it with an add-on isa card.

Windows 3.0 even ran decently on a 286. And you didn't really need much more than 640K of ram, and it didn't complain much about it or spend too much time thrashing.

However, thats not to say it was useful. In fact, I don't quite remember WHAT I did with win 3.0 except maybe something like paintbrush and the scanner software. Everything else back then still used Dos, and so did I. Windows was something that got loaded into a desqview window, along with all the other dos programs. :)

-Restil

Re:windows 3.0 on a 386

[chrysalis]

Actually, Word and Excel were running pretty well on Windows 3.x and a 386.

I was really amazed by Excel. For everything else, my Atari ST was way better :)

CmdrTaco's "XP Slow" Comment

[Anonymous Coward]

Who else thinks CmdrTaco should win the "Troll of the year" award? I mean really, I have no problem when people call Microsoft when they fuck up, but to make up stuff is reprehensible, especially for a respected (HA!) media outlet (HA!) like Slashdot. This is no longer "his baby." AFAIK the copyright on the code is owned by OSDN, which is owned by VA*, a publicly traded company. In any case, OSDN is footing the bill for this operation, and I would think they would like to hire someone with a bit of integrity to at least read over the news. I know this isn't in CmdrTaco's contract, and he's allowed to say whatever he likes, but when drivel like this is posted it detracts from Slashdot's credibility (HA!) and makes the entire readership look like absolute idiots for continuing to read this feces.

XP doesn't seem to be in demand here

[CatherineCornelius]

If you're going to bash [XP], bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation, or on any other Microsoft expansionist move. Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.

Fair point. I'd also like to bash it for being rather insecure, but I suppose I'll just have to stand in line behind all the other /.ers who want to bash it for being a Microsoft product.

But what interests me about XP is that so far there's no sign that the people at our office who use 98, NT or 2K want to upgrade. There seems to be a curious lack of keenness about this product. Perhaps it's the digital rights stuff. We developers run partly Microsoft, mostly Linux, so the people I'm talking about are the CEO, sales, marketing, legal, administrative and whatnot. They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems. Or perhaps they're just scared to move in case they end up having to pay out for "upgrades" in the future.

I guess we'll get an XP machine eventually because we are an ISP and we will have to support our users, just as we run tests on Mac (9 and X). But somehow our people don't seem to see XP yet as a gotta-have, the way 95 was.

Re:XP doesn't seem to be in demand here

[Tony-A]

Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.
Mostly the eye-candy that makes it slow. But it's that same eye-candy that is used to promote it. Probably the main thing is to find what can be easily turned off that will bring performance up to at least sub-par.

Re:XP doesn't seem to be in demand here

[4of12]

They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems...

They ought to be. AFAICT, there is no good reason to upgrade to XP if you already have 2K. The latter finally gives Windows users some reasonable semblance of stability and security with which to run the Office applications that are "must have".

If it weren't for home users getting XP with their new PC (as if there were any choice), the newly released XP would be getting scant real sales.

That's probably why there's been all the strong arm tactics applied to Enterprise Licensing Agreements: there is otherwise absolutely no good technical reason for corporate IT to upgrade from 2K at this point. Sheesh, most corporate users are still trying to figure out how best to bite the bullet on upgrading their servers to 2K because of the viral cascade effects to contend with Active Directory (an "all or nothing" proposition).

Along the same lines, there is little good reason for anyone with something like a 800 MHz PIII with 256 MB RAM to upgrade to this 2.2 GHz machine for the usual corporate office applications. Until more demanding applications become more commonplace, I wouldn't waste my money on either XP or 2.2 GHz.

Get the slower versions

[Oscarfish]

1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz Northwood chips are going to be available soon; these will likely be reaching some nice overclocks (maybe up to even 2.4) and these are the chips to get. They're also the only ones most of us will be able to afford, given the way Intel prices their chips (see here).

I'm using an Athlon 1 GHz now and getting nearly a 40% overclock out of it, on an Iwill KK266-R board (KT133A SDRAM), at 155*9; it's not worth it to me to upgrade to an Athlon XP or a DDR chipset.

Overclockers.com, probably my favorite site, has daily bits of news and a lot of information lately on Northwoods. Apparently Intel is working on a dual-channel DDR chipset which should be a treat.

Re:Get the slower versions

[Hunsvotti]

Shouldn't be too hard for them to get dual-channel DDR SDRAM working... after all, RAMBUS already runs dual-channel, and P4s ran on that well before they ran on SDRAM.

Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate...

[Myriad]

Ever notice how it seems that the newer and faster your computer gets, the longer the sucker takes to boot?

Hence, I believe that (Myriad's law?):

Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate to Computing Power - The more power you've got, the longer it's going to take.

Ie, my old 486DX50 took longer to bring up DOS than my 386. (The 386 behind my 286, 8086. Hell, the C64 kicked all their asses!) Primarily because of added TSRs, memory managers etc.

Then my P100 took longer to fire up... Good 'ol Windows.

Now the Athlon takes ages... init bloody RAID arrays, UTA100 controllers, SCSI devices, Windows...let windows initialize all the above plus more. Wait wait wait. Go for coffee. Wait some more.

Kind of sick really.

Re:Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate...

[MoneyT]

Ya know, with how dirt cheap memory is, maybe we should go back the the old C64 way of doing things and have our OS stored in memory chips instead of on the harddrive, maybe then our boot speeds will be within reasonable limmits.

Re:Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate...

[Anonymous Coward]

We use a similar law at my place of employment: The more expensive a system is, the longer it takes to boot. Notice how long high-end UNIX machines take to boot (Sun, HP, IBM). Anything over 15 minutes is really expensive.

Re:Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate...

[Sycraft-fu]

Well a lot of that has to do with what is in your system. My PIII 700 with XP certianly boots slower than my 486 50 of yester year, however most of that is hardware. IT takes longer for the system to POST than for XP to load. IT has to scan 768MB ram, several HDs, 3 CD-ROMs, a SCSI card, etc, etc. It takes about 40 seconds to post and then around 20-25 for XP to load.

Now back when I had 2000, that took longet to load, it took like a minute or so, but now it's the POST not the OS that is the slower part. I tell you what, if you take a board with a celeron, 64 MB ram, a 4MB VESA card, SB16 and a single HD and boot to DOS, you're up and running in like 15 seconds flat :).

The end of interpreters!

[chrysalis]

Hardware is still getting faster and faster for the same price.

This is neat for developpers. Soon, source code will be recompiled in real time at every key stroke.

No more need for interpreters :)

Re:The end of interpreters!

[Anonymous Coward]

What smack are you on? Do you wright in machine code? If you don't you still need an interpriter.

Re:The end of interpreters!

[image]

Actually, no need for compilers. Just interpret every line of code that much faster. Why compile to native code if you can build high-level engines that can do more at run-time than you can at compile-time? This is part of the theory behind virtual machines like the JVM or Microsoft's EE. Their biggest disadvantage is speed -- and you're right, if the trend continues (and it will) then we won't bother (manually) compiling code at all.

But you do need to add type safety and type checking to more interpreted languages. That is the second biggest compile time win after performance. Of course, that is more of a flaw in the languages as they are currently designed, not of the interpreter itself.

Gates Law

[Myriad]

Ah, I see that in a way Mr.Gates got there first:

From the Jargon Dictionary

Gates's Law: "The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware caopacity per dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.

BeOS

[tswinzig]

Apparantly you've never booted BeOS.

Re:BeOS

[jo42]

Apparently (note spelling), BeOS is dead.

Operation Northwoods

[XbainX]

Northwood is very similar to the name Northwoods.

Operation Northwoods was the plan the U.S. government came up with to frame terrorist attacks against both Americans and Cubans on the Cuban government.

Coincidence? Or, does Intel have a secret plan to take out AMD? ;)

Re:Operation Northwoods

[Fred2]

ooh...ooh... and I live on North Woods Trail

My 386/16 ran better than that

[Nemith]

utill I installed Windows 95 on it. Right when Win95 first came out I tryed it out on my 386/16 /w 4megs. Talk about slow boot times. I could turn on my computer and take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for my day before I would even get close to being able to use my comptuer. But with windows 3.1 on it, it ran like a dream. Well maybe not a dream, but better than 95!

Re:My 386/16 ran better than that

[Howie]

when Win95 first came out I tryed it out on my 386/16 /w 4megs.

That's not that surprising, since the minimum RAM requirement for Win95 was 8M. I'm pretty sure it flat-out refused to install with less RAM, actually - it was a while ago, but I remember seeing a screen telling me my PC was too crap at one point installing 95. Maybe that was for OSR2.

Re:My 386/16 ran better than that

[Anonymous Coward]

The minimum spec for W95 was actually 4MB, and it would certain install and boot with that amount. 8MB was the realistic minimum, and 16MB (hundreds of dollars in those days) was virtually swap free. Then the 'Active Desktop' shipped....

Re:My 386/16 ran better than that

[Anonymous Coward]

R U some kind of moron? You tried to put 95 on a 386? Yea, and I'm running Gnome on a 486 and it seems slow.

Re:My 386/16 ran better than that

[wik]

I did actually run Win95 with 4MB of RAM on a machine that I was playing around with. The machine did not run very well, but it did boot. I remember trying to play solitare on it, but the machine would have to swap to even load in the mouse driver. :-)

CmdrTaco is a GAY TROLL

[Anonymous Coward]

CmdrTaco's posts are all trolls to cater to the insane linux fringe. Give it a rest already taco and go back to coding yourself into a hole. You loser.

XP on slow machines

[DaEvOsH]

This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)

This kind of comments are, sadly, not making /. the best image in the eyes of the public, and not gaining a reputation for clear, objective content it should (could?) have. I know that, after all, this is CmdrTaco's personal journal, but it has millions of visitors and could be one of the showcases to the world of the linux/open source/it community.

Back to the topic, to those who have used XP little, this is my experience.

The OS is great, I did not expect something as good from MS. It is stable, plug and play really works and reboots are very ocassional. Uptimes are long. And it is quite easy to administer. Performancewise (the real reason for my comment) it needs lots of memory, but I have been running it on slooow machines, with very satisfactory results.

For example, it runs very well on my old Sony Vaio laptop, 266Mhz Pentium (not II) with 192Mbs of Ram. It had Win98 before, and I was tired of that. It runs at very good speed, not blazingly fast but acceptable, browses internet faster, boots in shorter time and is totally stable. Also, contrary to Win2k, I get the power management stuff I really need.

Also, I got some old PCs here at home and it runs pretty well, a 400 Celeron for my mother, 256Mb ram and a 333P2 with 128 Mbs ram. It is a RAM hog, and 128Mb is the minimun acceptable.

Also, as a recommendation for anyone running it, turn off the blue theme and run it in 'classic' time. Not drawing all those bitmaps will make it more responsive. Also turn off system restore, it slows the system down quite a bit.

I know this is a place where linux is the ultimate OS. For me, it is, but for some (critical and important) applications. I use it at work. For end users, XP is great, and we (the linux/opensource community) should appreciate how well it works, learn from it the good things and realize that MS just got a better we have to compete against.

Too bad that (like at work) MS has no way to compete with the pricing of linux :)

Re:XP on slow machines

[DaEvOsH]

Something else.. as other post say, it is amazing how well it works. On my 1.4Ghz Athlon, 1Gig ram, I run also a server, gaming (mostly lineage this days), music (mp3's, including server for all the other pc's in the house), development (c++) and debugging, browsing, etc, many, many stuff at the same time. And I have lots of hardware, 8 hard drives, 2 scsi controllers, 1 cd, 2 cd-r, 1 dvd, capture card, 2 monitors, etc, all on this pc. And it is very stable, uptimes are, in my case, as long as I want. I reset to change OS, or to try something in another XP installation.

By the way, a GREAT app for those who run so many junk on their Windows PC is minimizer http://thebluescreens.8m.com/, so you dont have your taskbar all cluttered by background running apps.

Re:XP on slow machines

[larien]

I have XP on my machine here, and it runs fine. But then, this is a 1533MHz Athlon and 768MB RAM, so it had damn well better run fine! I will also say that this is the first version of windows which has allowed me to install graphics drivers without requiring a reboot (or, in the case of Win3.1, restarting windows).

That was a major shock to me and a sign of how things have improved.

Course, it screwed up on me (in my case, failing to read system files; I can't remember which) within a week requiring a reinstall. It's been fine since, however.

Re:XP on slow machines

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude your at the wrong place. Both you and I know XP is great but you'll never get anyone here to try it. I have written about it here a ton of times and always get a -1. I continue to point out XP is a better desktop and linux should stick to servers where it has a future. But of course no one listens, and yes it is too late. Well 2 years from now when everyone lumps linux desktop users in with Amiga and OS/2 users we'll see who was right then.

Re:XP on slow machines

[Perdo]

Don't like the pro-linux, anti-ms bent to stories on slashdot? Go get your news at msn.

Ever packet sniff a msn/xp dialup? Have you ever tried to shut down the connection and have the modem spend another two minutes sending msn encrypted data?

Look, brain washed boy, MS has stolen the software market, Steals your data every chance they get, stole half the jobs in IT, and you have given them your mind.

Maybe you should buy another opinion.

MS: "if we want your opinion we'll sell it to you"

MS memo fron last year: "PLEASE STOP AND TROLL SLASHDOT!"

P3 500mhz + Win98 runs like a champ!

[simetra]

Really, if you know what you're doing, there's nothing wrong with Windows, except the moral issues of supporting a monopoly.

Crashes? Lockups? Maybe once every few months, after installing some crappy shareware.

I'm considering switching to a higher speed processor, but mostly just for the coolness factor. There's really nothing at all wrong with 500mhz.

What gets my goat is that my company gives out 900+ mhz machines to morons who will never appreciate it, because they've got every tsr known to man running. Meanwhile, I do all my developing on a 733mhz. Which is okay, but the coolness factor dictates that I should have the fastest processor, as a power user. Oh well. I sleep at night because I know it's all so much silliness.

Re:P3 500mhz + Win98 runs like a champ!

[CodingFiend]

Hehe, but if you dev apps on your "underpowered" machine and are satisfied with its performance, then you know the app'll blow away the admin staff with their dual xeon towers with 1gb ram, lol.

Lame review

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen such a lame review, but oh well. He is testing the system but not comparing it to anything, not making any real world measurements, using DDR1600 instead of DDR2100, overall it's the lamest excuse for a review i've ever seen...

Don't forget

[Pinball Wizard]

Any media you create on a Windows box(MP3, movies, etc) will only be playable on that box. Virus hosed your system and you have to reinstall? Say goodbye to all your MP3's.

If you are a hobbyist and like to change hardware frequently, plan on having an intimate relationship with Microsofts activation dept.

If you run Windows at work, better make damn sure you know where your licenses are and make sure the average user can't install applications on any machine(a disgruntled employee can easily install applications and then turn you into the BSA, at a cost of up to $150,000 per unlicensed app)

At some time in the near future(will expire. Microsoft has already dropped support for Windows 95 and will drop support for Windows 98 next year. If you use Office, your software becomes useless as soon as the next version comes out because you will no longer be able to read Office documents created by the latest versions.

I could go on and on. But I better stop, since I'm being "silly" and obviously ungrounded in reality.

Re:Don't forget

[Ageless Stranger]

What the hell are you talking about? I've made hundreds of mp3s with EAC + Lame on my windows box, and those mp3s are playable on ANY machine. The same goes for DIVX movies that I've made.

You only have to reactivate windows for a very major upgrade, such as a new motherboard. Its a quick and painless process to do so.

Office XP documents can be read just fine by Office 2000. At least in my experience, YMMV.

I'm no lover of Microsoft, and I have the upmost respect for all you guys working on alternative OSs, but sometimes I think some of you guys are a little "ungrounded in reality" when it comes to Microsoft.

Re:Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

7 years after MS came out with 95 they drop official support. Yea those bastards, now you'll have to go to one of the 500 companies within 10 miles for support.

Your media arguement is just flat out wrong. Would you like me to mail you an MP3 I ripped with WM8??

I have changed and added then removed, then added hardware and have not been prompted to reactivate. FYI activation is painless and takes a few seconds.

You are being silly and simply do not no what your talking about. Please install XP and Office use it for a while and then find out how wrong you are.

Re:Don't forget

[Anonymous Coward]

> Any media you create on a Windows box(MP3,
> movies, etc) will only be playable on that box.
> Virus hosed your system and you have to
> reinstall? Say goodbye to all your MP3's.

Lies, again. You are obviously referring to the content signing / encryption thing. You are explicitly offered an option to turn that on or off when you start ripping with WMP. It explains about fair use / backup provisions, and tells you that if you don't want to activate this feature, that's fine, but you're on your own if the copyright lawyers put your ass in a sling.

This encryption facility is a positive thing in my opinion - several businesses which would not allow employees to have Mp3's on their desktops for fear of piracy and p2p mayhem *will* allow such signed media.

RRrr,
A.C.

Re:Don't forget

[Dahan]

But I better stop, since I'm being "silly" and obviously ungrounded in reality.

Yup, better stop, since you're being "a troll" and obviously a loser...

[Mr. "Pinball Wizard" admits that he's never actually used XP, and didn't know whether the statements he was making were true. Of course, they're not.]

Re:Don't forget

[cb0y]

Your a fucking fuck nut looser.

1. all my mp3s i make using CDEX on windows via LAME and they work EVERYWHERE. LAMER

2. btw pinball wizard the old amiga game was made by SUPPLEX CREW

3. win2k is fine. else i have a XP corporate edition ahahahaha

4. unlicenced shit can go on CDR, BSA wont know.

Linux still basicly is sucky on desktop.

Re:Don't forget

[Pinball Wizard]

All my comments were based on my observations. I watched two people try to move MP3s to another machine and have that other machine tell them it couldn't play their files. I know you can use encoders that will work, it was the fact that this happened at all that raised by eyebrow.

My observation with Office came from watching an Access database get hosed becaused two people were using Office 2000 and one was using Office XP on the same database.

Most people will buy a computer with the OS preloaded and never need to bother with activation. I am not one of those people. I frequently install multiple OS's on separate computers, and I frequently move data off machines so that I can reinstall the OS or install other OS's. Therefore, XP would not be a good fit for me, although I'm sure its great for the people who do use it.

I don't need to use XP to know that its not for me. I have good reasons for not wanting to use it and I stick by them.

Lack of XP demand dooms Linux on desktop

[sheldon]

We've encountered the same type of hold back from our business segments. They say that they are perfectly happy running Windows NT 4.0.

Of course part of it is that they just don't realize many of the benefits they could see. We do a piss poor job of marketing our IT services internally.

But I don't think it has anything to do with DRM or the other things mentioned here. These users are no more aware of those features than they are of the alpha blending GUI coolness.

It's mostly just a fear of the unknown. Things work fine now don't try to fix them... that sort of thing.

But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.

Ohwell, the technical people in our company have been using WinXP for several months now and the more they use it, the more they like it. The changes are subtle, but very likeable.

Re:Lack of XP demand dooms Linux on desktop

[CatherineCornelius]

It's mostly just a fear of the unknown. Things work fine now don't try to fix them... that sort of thing.

But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.

I agree wholeheartedly on this. I've never really seen Linux as a general purpose platform for desktop productivity software. In fact it surprised me to see how far Ximian and whatnot have taken this. But the killer is interoperability. As long as Microsoft is permitted to keep its file formats secret, no competitor stands a chance because people will always need to keep a copy of a Microsoft product lying around in order to read and convert legacy files and files from third parties who have not switched.

Even if Linux were a boon to the desktop user (it isn't, it has its own foibles and it can be a pig to learn them), the inertia that pertains to use of any non-mainstream (which translates to non-MS, in most cases) software would apply.

Re:Lack of XP demand dooms Linux on desktop

[Howie]

they just don't realize many of the benefits they could see.

I found the most benefit in moving from NT4 to Win2000 though. Windows 2000 really is a very nice desktop OS compared to NT Workstation. From Win2000 to XP doesn't seem so amazing (I haven't seriously used XP for long), although I can see how the Home edition would be a really nice change from WinME.

Re:Lack of XP demand dooms Linux on desktop

[sheldon]

Yes, the move from NT4 to Win2k was pretty big. The move from Win2k to WinXP is also a good step, but it's far more subtle. It's just more useable than 2k, whereas 2k over NT was more stable. Stability is noticeable right away, where usability takes some time to notice.

Commentary on XP Stability

[Rareul]

I've used XP on my laptop for the past 2 months (3M, 1.1GHz processor, 0.5 GB Ram). I use Access and Excel extensively, 2 Gig databases, big queries, etc. I crash the son-of-a-bitch 5-10 times a day. ?sp

Re:Commentary on XP Stability

[Ageless Stranger]

I think 2 gig Access databases are your problem, not WindowsXP. Or does it crash when you are doing other things besides Access? If it does, I'd recomend looking at your hardware cause WinXP doesn't crash 5-10 times a day on its own. BTW, I love your email address :)

Re:Commentary on XP Stability

[cooldev]

This is not normal behavior, there is something wrong on your machine. Make sure you turn on the option to see the "bluescreen" and you may be able to tell from the module list which one is faulty.

Why use XP over w2k?

[gmarceau]

Ok people, can we do a run down of reasons why people would use XP instead of w2k?

For XP :
- Remote desktop sharing which actually works
- Super fast reboots

For w2k :
- No useless memory-pig alphableading interface
- No monopolistic digital right management
- No monopolistic centralized driver signing
- No monopolistic integration with .NET (?)

Can you add to the list?

Re:Why use XP over w2k?

[Howie]

I can see in certain situations the 'multiple users' aspect of XP being handy. You can 'park' your session without logging out, have someone else log in, use the PC then switch back to your workspace as you left it. I believe the Terminal Services client will let the other person reconnect to their session from a RDP client too.

I never though I'd say it, but the fisher-price UI grew on me, too.

Re:Why use XP over w2k?

[Anonymous Coward]

- No monopolistic digital right management
- No monopolistic centralized driver signing

Sorry, Windows 2000 has those features, though they may not be as in-your-face about it.

Re:Why use XP over w2k?

[throx]

For XP:

- Best power management for laptops
- Best "legacy" compatibility for Win9x games
- Nicer UI than other Windows products (after you use it for week it's better)

For W2k:
- Less memory intensive than XP
- Older and so behavior is better known.

Your errors:
DRM and driver signing exist in Win2k in exactly the same way that they do in XP.

I don't get how either of these are "monopolistic" either. Is it monopolistic that Linux now has a flag that tells you if a driver isn't open source? Of course this is Slashdot and anything anti-MS doesn't need explanation.

Re:Why use XP over w2k?

[gmarceau]

Thanks for your two lists. XP is indeed acquiring a number of redeming qualities. I realy was expecting a non-upgrade, ala win98->winMe.

I hear that WinXP can perfectly lock you out of using a certain driver, if Microsoft's central database doesn't like it. It seem natural to expect Microsoft will use this to bully companies around. In comparison, w2k driver signing is both passive and usefully informative, as any Linux flag about non-open source drivers.

WinXP also has a concept of a copyright-safe driver track. Those specialy marked drivers run in a super memory-protected space (whatever that means) and are disallowed access to any digital devices like harddrives and usb ports. Again, w2k has some DRM, but not the most actively monopolistic aspects.

Toms hardware review

[faboo]

Tom's Hardware has a much more in depth (and useful) review of the new P4, comparing it to other incarnations of the p4 and various AMD XP models.

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/02q1/020107/ind ex .html

Your Assumption.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bashing someone, in an attempt to say they havn't used somthing, when they have, and their experience is obvious proof, is pretty damned foolish.

Athlon...

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason the AthlonXP stomps the P4 in all the benchmarks is simple. Quantispeed + New instructions. I own a 1.62ghz AthlonXP. Very fast machine. 512 DDR etc... I have a friend that owns a 2ghz P4. We have run benchmarks and found the Athlon maybe 1/6th faster than the P4. I would have to say that AMD met their goal, and proved that you don't need actual clock speed to perform.

Windows Not Slow

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been a linux user since 1995. I've used linux professionally since 1996. I've used nothing BUT linux on my desktop machines at work since 1998. I'm a huge fan of linux. I don't care for Microsoft... I despise their business practices and I feel that every iteration of windows up until windows 2000 was a hunk of garbage.

However, these comments about 2000 and XP being slow are way out of line. They are the type of baseless, smug, nudge nudge wink wink hey other linux geeks look I'm cool I made fun of microsoft comments that I can't stand, and that I think severely hurt the linux community.

I have a dual boot system at home. Its a dual p2 400, with 393 megs of ram. I have two 10 gig hard drives, one with debian gnu/linux, the other with windows 2000 professional. I use each OS for different purposes. I use debian for my work (development), for my hobby (more development), for some games (quake 1-3 mainly) and for my communications (email, irc, usenet, the www).

I use windows 2000 for my games that don't work on linux, for my childrens' games, and my wife uses it for digital photo editing, browsing the web, and getting her email.

Windows 2000 is a decent operating system (sorry to the zealots in the crowd.. but its true). Its been very stable for me. It runs very well on my hardware. I don't have any speed problems. My windows games play fine under it. All my hardware is easily supported with it. Recently I bought a digital camera and a usb printer, and setting them up was a snap. All in all, I've found it to be a very reasonable operating system for desktop use. I've heard XP is much the same, and geared a little more towards home users than 2000.

All my hardware works under linux just fine as well, and linux runs great on the machine. Setting things up is of course more of a PITA.. when I bought my camera and printer, I had to recompile my kernel because I didn't include usb support in my last kernel. I wrote some scripts for automating downloading images of the camera. These are things an "average" home user does not know how to do, and does not WANT to know how to do.

Windows is much farther along in terms of useability by non technical users than Linux is. Linux is playing a serious catch up game in that arena.

Windows 2000 and XP are not slow. Will they run on a 386 with 32 megs of ram? No. Is Linux, with xfree 4.1, a full GNOME or KDE setup, and mozilla reasonable user on older hardware either? No.

Windows 2000 Professional is also in my experience very stable. I've had IE crash a couple of times on me. Certainly no more times than I've had to kill -9 my mozilla processes.

Linux is a great operating system for many things. I love it. Its been a pleasure to watch Linux evolve from its early beginnings to where it is now. However, it still has a long way to go (at least in the desktop arena).

Making unfounded comments about competing operating systems doesn't accomplish anything, other than making you look cool to the other members of the he-man windows hater club. When someone who is unfamiliar with Linux, and uses XP or 2000, hears snickering and comments bashing Windows, when their Windows system in their experience works well, is reliable, fast, and supports all of their hardware, what do you think they think? Do they think "oh gee, I suppose I should use Linux, because Win-doze is for microsoft slaves and retards!". Or do they more likely think "wtf is that person talking about?".

Only through honestly assessing where we are today can Linux continue to grow and move forward. Standing around patting each other on the back and making fun of other OSes is not a positive activity, and contributes to the negative stereotype of Linux users as an exclusive club of technosnobs.

Re:Windows Not Slow

[coult]

Dude, you should get a Mac and run OS X...you'd never have to reboot into a different OS to a particular app, you could run it all under one OS.

so linux should be a speed demon

[Anonymous Coward]

considering that its based on thirty year old technology....

Not to defend windows...

[Anonymous Coward]

but that is a bios setup problem. You can disable the memory check, it is useless anyway. You can also disable the secondary IDE channel if nothing is on it. This will free up an additional IRQ (typically 15) if you are into that sort of thing.

mod that up!

[rebelcool]

couldn't have said it better myself...

"Microsoft-Free 2003"!

[Sean Clifford]

>I use Windows 2000 primarily on my >desktops and as far as I'm concerned, >thats the last Microsoft OS I'll ever >buy.

My response is probably flamebait, but I have karma to burn.

That spells the end of Microsoft products for me too. Migrations to Windows 2000 was expensive enough, but the weak security design, security-through-obscurity policy, known vulnerabilities, forced upgrades drives me nuts. And it's bloody expensive on top of all that.

A desktop is a desktop to 90% of my users. If it weren't for our need to run Office... Right now, it's going piecemeal. I'm hoping for a "Microsoft-Free 2003"! Hey, that's catchy...

Re:As others will surely also state...

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the number of posts that use the exact wording, "Linux is not ready for the desktop." I am amazed that they are soooo obvious... Sad really.

And the tag team that two of them have going is also fun to watch... One makes a statement, then the other one supports it.

Tisk, tisk tisk. They must really be worried about XP getting trashed. We all know that sales of XP really sucked, and that this dragged down computer sales in the last quarter of the year. Maybe people wanted a choice as to what OS came on their machines.

Personally, I build my own machines. My favorite is a 2 year old dual celeron on a BP6, overclocked to 522MHz. It has 512 MB of RAM and 80 GB worth of RAID 5 hard drives. That machine is so fast, you click on a icon and the app pops up almost as you are letting up on the mouse. Even Mozilla starts in about 2 seconds.

I fix the boot sequence to boot to an Xwindows prompt in just a few seconds. All the servers and a lot of the services are started up after X windows is started. I am suprised that we don't have a better boot sequence in Linux yet. Especially since it was so easy to do this.

Maybe the distribution people need to get together and all agree to a new init method that emphasises boot speed for desktop users. Since this seems to be a problem for a lot of people here.

Only running applications that are linked against one set of libraries seems to help by not having to cache a lot of different libraries.

I also would like to see our applications get prelinked against the libraries that they are using, like under OSX. Linking at run time is just too expensive. It is better to do it just the one time and to save the executable prelinked. This can just be another step in the installation process. Prelinking would easily half the load speed of almost every program.

The last thing that I would recommend is using the intel compiler to compile a some of the executables that are taking a lot of processor, like audio/video codexes.

This would make them run much more efficiently and be able to take advantage of special instructions on the various platforms. This could easily result in upto 20% performance increase over gcc compiled executibles. Not because gcc is bad, but because intel is just good at writing x86 optimized compilers.

An increase of 20% will make a 500MHz processor run like a 600MHz processor, and this is the difference between dropping frames and not dropping frames during recording.

Can you imagine a Linux distribution that did these 3 simple steps? It would boot in 5 seconds to a login prompt, would start programs in sub second times and would need 20% less processor for the same performance as a normal Linux distribution. I'd pay good money for that distribution.

Time plays with your perceptions

[Goonie]

Sure, you might have felt that Windows ran fine on a 286 at the time, but try using it now. You'll be making coffees during the screen redraws. As our computers have gotten faster, our perception of acceptable response time has changed greatly.

I know I recently had to use a 386DX40 running Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe just how slow it felt.

Re:Time plays with your perceptions

[Restil]

True. the screen refreshing really didn't get good until the eisa and vlb cards became available.

Still... when windows was just another application and not your operating system, you didn't notice it as much. :)

-Restil

Huh?

[jelle]

"This kind of comments are, sadly, not making /. the best image in the eyes of the public, and not gaining a reputation for clear, objective content it should (could?) have."

What?? Slashdot is not about making a good image to "the public", and its most important strength is it's massive subjectiveness: The posts by its users.

News for nerds, stuff that matters, you know. Not selling anything, just talking about stuff that matters. outsiders don't look at /. as "The Linux Marketing Department", outsiders don't look at /. period, and insiders talk about stuff that matters.

Re:As others will surely also state...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi. I'm one of the people who said Linux isn't ready for the desktop.

I hate to burst your bubble of paranoia. I don't work for Microsoft. I'm not part of some vast Microsoftian conspiracy to flood slashdot with pro MS posts. I don't even LIKE Microsoft.

I love Linux. I've been using Linux for 7 years. I've been using linux on my desktop machines exclusively for 4 years. I've been a huge Linux advocate the entire time I've used it. I worked on several projects to try to get various hardware companies to support Linux. I have thousands of usenet posts archived on google on the various linux advocacy newsgroups, promoting linux, and arguing against Microsoft and their practices.

Linux is *not* ready for the desktop of non technical users. It does *not* compare favorably to Windows 2000/XP or Mac OSX as a consumer level operating system.

Windows does many, many things automatically that Linux does not. These are things that consumers do NOT want to have to do for themselves. The hardware you buy comes with windows drivers that install automatically. IE downloads the plug ins you need automatically when you come across multimedia content on the web. The list goes on.

Regular home users who use their computers to play some games, check their email, browse the web, download from their digital cameras, print some things, etc, don't WANT to know how their computer works. They don't want to know that if only they'd recompile their kernel with usb mass storage support and SCSI emulation support, then sudo to root, they could copy their images off their camera by mounting /dev/sda1. They want to plug in their new toy and have it work.

People like yourself, who chalk up any criticism of linux as some sort of conspiracy, are one of the biggest obstacles to the growth and adaptation of linux.

"386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM"

[Anonymous Coward]

> This setup might have a chance to run XP
> without it feeling like a 386/16 running
> Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright,
> thats probably crazy talk ;)


Sigh, the crazy talk here is constant assertions like that. I dual boot XP Home against Debian unstable, for a couple of reasons, including testing the DVD playback against Xine and Diablo II ( no, I won't crack it to run it under wine ).

XP runs fine, quite responsively on a dual P3 550 with a half gigabyte of memory. These are not superhuman system statistics.

If we all want to flaunt the technological or other superiority of our chosen operating system, that's fine. But lets do it on hard numbers and reasonable, accuracte statements, not stuff like the above.

A.C.

Re:"386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM"

[Anonymous Coward]

>Sigh, the crazy talk here is constant assertions like that.

Sigh, comments written in TT suck unless you are writing on a TeleType.

You lose all respect and any possibility of convincing anyone of anything when you use that typestyle.

Lame computer joke

[ryanvm]

This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM.

Is it just me or does this sound like a joke you'd hear from Nick Burns - Your Company Computer Guy?

Try turning off power management.

[Anonymous Coward]

Set your computer to a standard PC instead of an ACPI-compliant PC. ACPI has problems with older devices, especially when you have something ISA in your system. I had a friend with the same problem; he set his computer to be a "standard PC" and the problems vanished.

Re:As others will surely also state...

[mikera]

Agree totally.

I have an intrinsic dislike for Microsoft because of their abusive monopoly status, and perhaps even a bit of British "support the underdog" attitude.

But I still use Win2k as my primary OS just because I can't do the things I want in Linux without spending hours on the web tracking down obscure bugfixes. Those are hours much better spent down the pub.

Benchmarks for the new processors

[Lars T.]

In its latest issue the German magazin c't tests the new P4s and Athlons. There is a teaser (in German), and the SPEC Benchmark results online.

BTW, the new "Prestonia" Xeons implement "Hyper-Threading" (a form of SMT), and report to have two logical processors.

I'll see your bet and raise you a Mac

[Weasel Boy]

The parent article really resonates with me because my experience is nearly the same as Mr. Coward's. I, too, have been using Linux since around 1995 and use it on my professional desktop now. I also have a dual-boot (uniprocessor) Windows/Linux machine at home, and share his sentiments about that. What's interesting to me, though, is that you could replace all of the Windows references in the parent article with MacOS 9, and it would still be mostly true in my experience (I triple-boot Linux and two versions of MacOS on one box).

solaris is painfully stable

[me0]

Solaris is painfully stable...Ok, so it hasn't got all the hip stuff that the average linux distro has, big deal.

I had to reboot a solaris box once and I don't even count the numerous times I have to kill those shiny w2k boxes at school. Actually I have yet to find something that windows does better.

The only thing windows actually got going is driver support, yup!

Good Day, Gentlemen

[hettberg]

burp!