Slashdot Mirror
Experiment: Installing Windows 10 On a 7-Year-Old Acer Aspire One
jones_supa writes: Windows 10 will launch in less than a week and it is supposed to work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Device drivers all the way back to Windows Vista platform (WDDM 1.0) are supported. Softpedia performed a practical test to see how Windows 10 can run on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One netbook powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB mechanical hard disk. The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast, but the operating system itself also works fast.
I have about the same netbook, and I've never used the Windows 7 that came with it, but want to put it back specifically so I can put Windows 10 on it to play with it. I lost the Clonezilla image I made of it years ago and am on the verge of ordering the backup media from the Acer website - I've come up empty on a WIndows 7 Starter ISO. I've loved my little Acer, I've had three bike wrecks with it, one of which my entire body weight went up and down the thing twice as I rolled over my backpack, not a scratch. I double the RAM from 1 to 2 GB the day I bought it and put an SSD in later. The SSD was incredible when it came to increasing the battery life and performance. I've told people it's the laptop Fischer-Price made, and I say it in a bragging manner, I still love my little netbook.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
You forgot to spell Microsoft with a '$' and call it a slashvertisement to get your automagic +5, you silly goose.
That's some boot time!
Still hate the new interface. I will never warm up to the big, ugly colored squares. You know, the ones that they needed to make it work on a tiny phone screen? I will wait to read about useful improvements in the OS before I do anything. Right now I see nothing I want.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
I wonder how much Microsoft paid to Dice in order to get this article placed here?
Probably not much, they'll do anything for a dollar.
All I know for sure, Win10 isn't touching any system I work on until the update issue is backtracked on.
The PC have improved. But with Parallel processing. And most programs are not coded to take advantage of the multiple cores. So the speed of any one of your programs has more or less peaked. However you can run more at the same time.
Until we can come up with easier methods than threads hacks added to most languages, we will still be mostly programming for a single CPU and not parallel processing. It will also help for more colleges to have Parallel processing as part of its undergrad program. Most introduce it in Grad School.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
"Windows 10 will launch in less than a week"
If it won't launch in less than a day, I would say scrap the whole idea.
Trolling is a art,
My notebook has more CPU power and 2GB of RAM. Windows 10 Preview does about 5 minutes of hard drive thrashing after start up. After this the system works fairly well.
As long as we are testing old hardware.
There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine.
I'm just curious, why are live tiles so horrible? I see this reaction often but I never really get a good explanation why, though I've heard many reasons why they are good. They are like icons, except resizable and enhanced with live information. They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I have it on a Compaq C306US with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.73 GHz Celeron. It seemed impressive at first, but the daily Defender signature update brings the machine to its knees. Seriously, the mouse pointer will not even move, and when I was actually able to bring up Perfmon, CPU and disk were both at 100%. That's unusable. I guess the answer is to install another security package, but that's a serious WTF. In 2015, it would be nice if Microsoft had heard of I/O throttling.
The audio also doesn't work unless you disable it, then re-enable it in device manager. I reported this bug with every previous build to no avail.
I wouldn't complain, but Microsoft claimed that every Vista-capable PC could run Windows 10, and that appears to be false.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Yup, agreed - in one case Apple had ditched OSX support for the 2006 Mac Pro but Windows 8.1 ran just fine on it. Hows about that for supporting your own products!
Yes, Amdahl's Law says that if 50% of a procedure's steps must be run in sequence and 50% can be dispatched among a pool of workers, then the speedup from having an infinitely large pool of workers is the reciprocal of 50% . . . or two times. Two time improvement for an infinite number of CPU cores.
After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a process can be run concurrently and which have dependencies. . .
. . . or until recently it was. For one, Moore's law is starting to take effect so its no longer feasible to expect an increase in throughput every 3 years. At the same time programming paradigms, such as better task abstraction, closures and functional-reactive programming make modeling and communicating concurrency an easier task.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
My Late 2009 Mac Mini is running Plex server and home theatre on 10.10.4. First quote I could find about system requirements (from a Mac World article here )
So, which of your three-year old machines is not on that list?
We'll leave you alone in your basements while the rest of us go to work. By the way, your mom says there are openings at Burger King.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
El Capitan has been announced to run fine on my 2007 Macbook Pro. Sorry your computer isn't powerful enough.
Yes, I feel like I'm in preschool with the big, bulky Legos when I want the cool small ones. And the big bulky Legos have all this crap in them reporting everything to Microsoft. Also, they are less versatile than small legos. All I want are executable programs that do what I want them to do and no more and don't share my personal data.
This reminds me of recent questions, can anyone build a car that can't be hacked? Well, yes, all the cars built 2 decades ago can't be hacked and contain all the features I want in a car (drives from A to B, air conditioning, heater, radio).
- Take me back to 1984. Please.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves.
Take a closer look.
The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others.
These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI.
It isn't that older CPU couldn't support multi-threading, but the fact it was a single CPU, And threading similar tasks will not offer performance increase per coding complexity. So most programs were not multi-threaded, to do parallel processing, they were multi-threaded as to not hinder the User Interface, or to handle multiple interface requests. (Such as having many users login to the same port) .
Most Desktop applications didn't even bother going that far.
Now with multi-CPU cores, you can have each CPU doing the same calls in Parallel so you can do major speed improvements in you single app.
It isn't the peaking in hardware technology, but reliance on legacy software that was designed for simpler times.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
No "at least" about it. Windows 8 and 10 support secure boot but don't require it.
Windows 8 specifically requires that secure boot be optional in the BIOS for Windows Logo Certification. The only change for Windows 10 is that this requirement is no longer there leaving it up to the vendor to decide if they want to lock your PC down. However for Windows Logo Certification on Windows 10 there is a requirement that OEMs support SecureBoot and have it enabled out of the box.
Windows does not require it.
Windows will run even if you disable it.
I though on Slashdot we hated Eye Candy?
The Glass effect blurs too much, so you are unable to see what is behind it.
The Lamp effect is marginally useful so you can pick your icons where you mouse cursor is jammed at the bottom of the screen.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
*pidgin.
If you're going to gripe about someone's grammar, you really should ensure that yours is impeccable.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast but Windows 10 also works fast as long as you’re not launching a very demanding app such as Photoshop.
My wife's very same netbook runs GIMP, LibreOffice, Firefox and video player concurrently and well under SuSE 13.1
Oh, and under Win7 it takes ages to boot (you do have an antivirus, right?), so I will take the story with a grain of salt or two.
Here's the list of supported Macs for the latest El Capitan Beta which goes back to some 2007 models: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/mac/releasenotes/General/rn-osx-10.11/index.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40016209
As for osx86, I'm running the latest El Capitan Beta just fine on my Main PC (2013ish hardware) and my old Dell Latitude E6420 (2011) without issues - the selected hardware is fully supported. If you want to have OS X run fine on your PC then pay attention to using hardware within the range of what has support, either from Apple or third parties, and you'd be able to run the OS without difficulties.
"I wonder how much Microsoft paid to Dice"
Had the review been unfavorable, who would you claim is the conspirator?
I'm getting really tired of argumentum ad monsantium, the logical fallacy that any position opposing mine has to be shilling for someone.
In my IT business, there is an effect I see all the time. Any change to a familiar interface, even a clear improvement, brings forth a certain cohort of users who insist that their favorite product has been ruined forever.
There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine.
The requirement has been for the "Designed for Windows [Version]" program, if you want to ship with the sticker, be an OEM partner and get the best pricing it's compulsory but it's not an install requirement. That would be stupid of Microsoft, since most pre-2012 machines wouldn't be able to update. Also for Win8 OEMs are required to give you a way to turn it off, for Win10 they're merely permitted. I'm sure some of them will be encouraged by Microsoft to disable it completely, to see if that'll draw anti-trust lawsuits. So not yet, but I bet it's coming soon....
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Personal opinion, the stock Metro Tiles that are there the first time you fire up your computer or Surface tablet are just too much, literally there are just too many of them there. I like the concept of the live tiles, and actually find them useful, but having to scroll through 10 horizontal pages of apps to find what you want is incredibly off-putting. After spending a significant amount of time paring them down to only the ones I find useful, it's actually a usable launch pad.
The "Apps" View, their attempt at giving us the start menu back, I have been unable to make useful. Sorted by name, where is Word? Is it under "W" for Word? Just Weather. How about under "O" for office? OneDrive and OneNote. "M" for Microsoft Word? Nope. That's Mail, Maps, Money, and Music. Oh, you have to scroll over a screen to get to "Microsoft Office", there's Office 2010. Hope you weren't looking for Word 2013, cause that's in the next section over "Microsoft Office 2013". The only time it comes close is if you sort the apps by usage. The Category or by Install Date aren't too horrible, but still not incredibly intuitive.
For the most part, I've given up on visually looking for a program to open. I've found the searching function to be far more useful. Hit the Windows key, start typing, pick the application I want to run out of the results. Which works great if you have a keyboard. On the Surface, without the keyboard, swipe from the right side of the screen, touch "search", touch in the search box (because the soft keyboard doesn't come up automatically), the type "Word"...
Now if only OS X would was allowed to work on my 3 year old system which is more than powerful enough for it based on hacked installs, and if only all the software wasn't updated so it won't work on the last OS. Thanks Apple!
Meanwhile I can install Windows 10 on a 10 year old system and play a 16 year old game just fine. Boo Microsoft for being horrible people that don't give away your amazing product for free and don't have a penguin or a fruit as a logo.
What three-year-old Mac doesn't support the latest version of OS X? OS X 10.10 "Yosemite" officially supports Macs dating as far back as 2007 (or 2008 or 2009, depending on the system), and I believe El Capitan will support the same.
R.Mo
Most of those effects are for highlighting open tasks (which is why they call it the task bar). No version of the Start menu has ever used such glassy highlight effects for open tasks.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. For technically minded people.
Unfortunately now that the vast majority of PC's are in the hands of people who are only semi-technical and will happily disable the update service, firewall and anti-virus cause their buddy Steve said it made his PC run faster. Steve also recommends plugging the network cable directly into the cable modem as that router thing just causes parity errors.
It's almost like the should sell a "Home" version for the vast majority of people, then have some sort of "Enterprise" or "Professional" version for technical people.
Actually this is a terrible excuse, because the hardware and driver support is so limited the bar is much lower for Apple to do this.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Is it just me that feels that this isn't a win for Windows 10, but actually a degradation of Windows Vista/7 and - to some extent - 8 in terms of performance losses at those points?
I know that XP -> Vista and XP->7 felt like backward steps at times in terms of performance, and were accompanied by a similar ramp-up in terms of realistic minimum specs. It just seems that in 8 (which is as fast as 7, if not faster, as far as I can tell) and 10 are actually coming back to what they should always have been?
Just junk like Superfetch services and Windows Search - I feel if you were to optimise those more efficiently that they'd easily show a performance improvement. I know that disabling them certainly does (fun fact: Disabling Windows Search on Windows 8 stops you installing new keyboard languages!).
Windows 8 has been my last two mass deployments and, with a few third-party-cured interface problems, is just as good to the users as 7 was, but actually boots, resumes, etc. much faster. And the amount of sheer built-in hardware drivers is phenomenal. I no longer need several images to image dozens of types and models of computer, laptop, all-in-one, etc. just one image will do with maybe a tweak if something requires the very latest graphics drivers.
Windows 10 appears to be continuing this trend of a RETURN to performance, rather than performing miracles. Hardware hasn't got much faster since the Windows 7 days - maybe a core or two more, maybe a graphics card upgrade, but the base CPU/RAM/disk are pretty much in the same area.
I mean, it's good either way. But it shouldn't be shocking. Optimised versions of 7 were sold with netbooks for years, and their hardware was severely limited for a long time. It was just a matter of turning junk off.
My min spec of "Dual or-more-core anything with 4Gb RAM" has held for several years in a row now for business systems, and can be satisfied for a virtual pittance. Only very recently have I contemplated enhancing that to 8Gb of RAM and maybe an SSD as a luxury, but the rest is pretty static.
I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong. In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite.
So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there. Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality.
I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric. I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go.
Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn't take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the fax, instead of making a half-harded effort. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother's mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it's a peach of cake.
Why are you whining about something that is 100% optional?
Duh, it's Microsoft
If Windows came with a free cancer-curing app people would be complaining here that you couldn't turn it off.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
1984 was not 2 decades ago
The desktop exists in all its glory in Windows 10. It will still do everything you mentioned. Tiles are not part of the desktop.
The Start menu, however, has tiles. And they can be resized; you can make them smaller than desktop icons if you want. And they can be removed completely if that's not your thing.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
I though on Slashdot we hated Eye Candy?
No, we just hate anything new and/or from Microsoft.
> Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor
These incredibly shallow, self-serving afterthoughts, which don't show coherency with anything else, make me disappointed. It's not even that the 'sleek' little lamp effect looks bad (which it does) or that it's useless (which it is).
The little lamp effect is not diegetic, that's the problem. It is the shallowest possible thing to do on a UI. It is an after-effect, implemented poorly. After decades of UX research, the population gets a stupid, incoherent glow, that's it. When I was a kid, using 8 bit computers, I didn't expect the rapid pace of hardware development, but I didn't expect how broken, bankrupt, degraded and degenerate some of mainstream software 'advances' would become.
The whole desktop thing started as a set of metaphors, with the desktop (duh), documents (for some reason called 'windows'), icons, pointer, etc. Then it got a bit more skeuomorphic with ever more realistic looking Folders cabinets, trashcans and whatnot. There was also an era of pseudo-3D, with drop shadows, bevels and color gradient effects. Then Apple came out with the Lycoris translucent glassy things, which removed a bit from the metaphor (blurs etc. made things a bit more abstract) but also added skeuomorphisms, mimicking - in incredibly shallow ways - the effect of translucency, matte and glossy semitransparent materials, Z-index etc.
Try this: hover the mouse over a taskbar button. The weird little lamp effect will NOT actually follow the mouse up and down, only sideways. The reflections etc. even have a shape, alluding to some optically more complex environment, but it's just an after-effects mask. It adds information where none exists. IOW it adds puzzling noise.
Now move it from one taskbar button to the next. At the boundary, it will not transition as you'd expect. It only casts light on the button over which the tip of the mouse pointer lies. Then you move a couple of pixels away, and suddenly, only the other button gets the light. So obviously both have some Lambertian reflectance, and they apparently lie on the same plane, right next to one another, underneath the magically radiating cursor, and the metaphor breaks. It breaks all reasonable expectations, it surprises the user who looks, in a negative way. It's annoying. The light doesn't appear over anything else, not even built-in window bars or IE browser buttons. It's just a 'visual touch'.
Probably it's meant to be beneficial, for example, disambiguating for the user as to which button he is hovering over. But then why the weird lamp effect, rather than some straightforward effect on the entire button, e.g. a slightly more impactful visual styling? The little lamp is there for some stuff, but it's haphazard and doesn't relate to either the buttons or the mouse cursor, or anything else. It's just someone's brainfart which a management committee just didn't veto.
And more importantly, why is it that we as users get so many inferior features, when there are actually smart people in the industry? Maybe the Windows gravy train is still a near-monopoly on the desktop.
The internal world and visuals of a single computer game show more consistency and cohesion than the series of Windows (and KDE and Gnome) abominations, though a game developer's task is arguably more difficult. There aren't a million things going on on a desktop, unlike in a game, and also, there is no expectation to follow constraints of the game world itself.
So I suggest we set up a museum for Windows versions, or people who are interested in awkwardness, or idiosyncratic icons of an era post the 'peak desktop monopoly', can download such skins with after-effects, but please hire UX experts for the design of an operating system's UI, and what wouldn't pass in other software meant for 'experience' (game, video player etc.) or 'productivity' shouldn't be included in the mother of all UIs, the uncircumventable OS desktop.
And is that so wrong? I liken it to your favorite grocery store changing up where all the products are located every few months. They may have all the studies in the world that say it's a better flow of people to have Product A and Product C right next to each other, but if nobody is looking there, because that's never where it's been before, it's a poor design.
"But you can change all the options..." if you can find them. Changing the finer points of the visuals such as Icon Spacing and Title Bar font used to be behind Desktop / Properties / Appearance. Now it's Desktop / Personalize / Window Color. That's...less intuitive.
Every new version of Windows since 2000->XP has suffered from the unnecessary moving of options and screens. They've all been focused on the dwindling number of people who have never used a computer at the expense of the other 99%. Maybe the new layout makes more logical sense if you have no muscle memory or expectations. Then as soon as everybody gets used to the new layout, they go and fuck it all up again.
Was it wrong that I read this in Ricky's voice from Trailer Park Boys?
Windows 10 minimum requirements are basically a 1GHz processor and 1GB of RAM.
Good snark. But for all that, any platform that people can use to Get Stuff Done is an ok platform.
Some people like the pretty of the Mac.
Some people like Windows bc it has All Teh Biz Apps
Some people like Linux bc reasons too numerous to list (but I totally don't have an opinion)
At the end of the day, if the system does what you want it to do - help design and compile software, perform data analysis, display graphics, watch video, edit content, ad infinitum - then it is a useful system for you. If the guy across the street doesn't use the same system, he's not a heretic, and as long as you can reasonably expect to exchange files with other users - a foregone conclusion, these days - then it's all good.
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
....and this is why some people don't get laid. IJS.
Really, the knee-jerk reactions have gotten tired. Yeah, everybody makes jokes about other systems - Linux guys tell jokes about Windows and Mac, etc. But y'know what? They all have their place, and sometimes the cute girl actually, you know, is using Windows to run spreadsheets or databases to do legitimate, difficult work. Yeah, sometimes it'd be easier on Linux - or easier, anyhow, for anyone who's been doing LAMP for years and has some background - but if she can do her work on Windows (or Mac, or whatever), don't deride her choices, be glad that she's using computing resources to do something complex....we need every brain we can get working at full capacity these days. :-)
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
So it sounds like VMware Player is exactly what you want. Virtual Machines live as a file on your system, not a drive, they are VIRTUAL machines running under your machine. It is like running Windows 10 in a Chrome session rather than directly on your system. There is no dual booting happening, no partitioning. It is as safe as safe can get to uninstall, you just delete the files.
The upgrade process is reversible just as any installation is reversible. You can just reinstall Windows 7 from the original installation disks. There very likely will be no uninstallation process or downgrade process, it will be a reinstall of everything. The general public is very unlikely to upgrade though, they are more likely just to buy a new computer with Windows 10 on it as they can't be bothered.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
This is not true. There is a performance impact on many Windows 7 machines. But if so, you can just go to Advanced settings and click "Display for Best Performance" and you're done. Windows 10 makes this the default, more or less (although the RTM added a lot of Glass effects which does look nicer than the previous betas).
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
> After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a process can be run concurrently and which have dependencies. . .
He didn't have to choose - he could have taken a parallel approach.
Wow, you really got worked up over the lamp effect. :D
It's not "more modern looking", it's simply a modern designer trend. There's a really big difference.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Viewing distance.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
10ft UI works differently from mobile UI works differently from desktop/laptop UI. Microsoft making a mistake in their desktop/laptop UI doesn't mean that the same thing wasn't a mistake in their 10ft UI, as well. It's my opinion that the current look of the dashboard is vastly inferior to the blade UI that the system had when I bought it, and the functionality went down the crapper with it. It was easier to find things that I wanted before, and there weren't multiple ads on every single screen of the damned thing. Then again, the blade UI would've been terrible for the desktop as well, but it was perfect for a game console with a known set of easily-categorizable features.
Searchable tiles work fine on a phone OS. Tab-like pages ("blades") work well on a system with known functions, like a game console. Tree-structure menus, possibly complemented by a feature to perform a search work, and with a screen that commonly-used programs or files can be placed on work nicely on a desktop system, which may have many diverse functions. Switch those around, and you start getting sub-optimal UIs (in my opinion).
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.