Dec 23, 2008
Windows Vista? I'll stick with XP please
I see the latest news is that Microsoft has granted a further short reprieve to Windows XP. I have a number of computers and they all have XP installed on them and from what I have read I haven't been in a great hurry to "ugrade" to Vista so far. My windows XP installations are stable and give me little trouble; so "if it ain't broke don't fix it" seems like the best policy for me at the moment. I would be interested to hear from anyone that thinks I am an old stick in the mud for not having taken up Vista. Any takers?
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11 comments:
I have Vista and I hate it because it doesn't like my scanner, and there are so many stupid security blocks it's hard to do anything.
The computer geeks in my house all tell me that Windows Vista is a memory pig, and Leviticus 11:7 says - "And the pig, though it has a split hoof completely divided, does not chew the cud; it is unclean for you.". Therefore, I do not run any Windows Vista. ;-)
LOL Looney. THats good enough for me. If you two arent impressed then I guess I have to "take it as Gospel" the eh?
I don't mind Vista too much.
As far as the memory pig issue, it's because of what it does when you have excess memory just sitting there anyway. It assigns some of it as additional video memory. It also loads things into memory "just in case", so when you launch them they will load faster.
But when it gets right down to it, and you're doing something like playing a game or some other memory intensive program, Vista scales itself way back to allow you to do what you need to. I was actually quite impressed.
As an example, I have a RAM monitor in my sidebar, so I can see what percentage is being used at any time. When I exit a game, it drops way down before Vista loads itself back up.
I am constantly running out of memory on the 32-bit machines. Next to me is a dual quad-core Xeon with 32Gbytes of RAM. Using windows xp, it locks when I get to about 16Gbytes used, but Linux lets me use about 30Gbytes before it locks.
@ Looney: Are we talking about RAM or hard-drives? 32GB is a lot of RAM (but crap for hard-drive space)... I can only see that amount of RAM being used on top-end see servers.
Also, the physical limitations of a 32-bit architecture limit it to addressing 4GB of total system memory. And that's including L1 and L2 cache, sound memory, video memory... So even if you have 4GB installed on the motherboard you'd never register that much in a 32-bit environment.
64-bit architecture has a theoretical limit to address 16 exabytes of ram (17.2 billion GB). Of course, that amount doesn't exist yet. That's why we were forced to move to 64-bit systems; we had reached the limits of 32-bit.
Your standard Windows XP is 32-bit. However, there is a 64-bit version if it. I am currently running Vista 64-bit with 4GB of RAM.
Basically, you can't possibly have a 32-bit WinXP machine with 32GB of RAM. High-end 64-bit gaming computers are just now realizing 16GB.
Bah, ignore the word "see" before servers up there in the first paragraph of my last comment. I had re-worded that sentence and missed removing that word.
Marf, I am running either Windows XP-64 or Suse Linux 64-bit. Yes, I am talking about RAM. There are 8X4GByte server memory sticks in this and a noisy fan to remove heat from them. It has a hot swap drive system with a terabyte on each OS setup.
@ Looney: Yeah, it's insane how many memory slots are on one of those server motherboards.
I can't say I've run a server (not seriously, anyway), but if I ever were to I'd use linux. And I have heard good things about Suse as servers.
But really, Linux vs. Windows I'd say Linux takes it no contest. I'd be using linux if all the games would run on it without having to use some windows emulator. Or if I were not a gamer I'd be using Linux.
But getting back to Vista, I wouldn't use it as a server. IMHO, Vista is not built for being a server. It's more of a home-use OS.
I think my over-all point is Vista has had a bad wrap. It's really not as bad as some people make it out to be. I like it better than XP.
I am one of those who installed Vista, uninstalled it and reinstalled XP.
I ever tried Vista. This operating system is displease, so I decided to continue use XP.
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