I like XP's UI a lot better than Vista's/Win 7's. I'm not thinking of the eye candy, but those annoying "enhancements" to Explorer like forced file sorting upon copying and that window-wide current item bar which makes it hard to drag'n'drop to a folder with sub folders. Small, but numerous annoyances like these mean that my Win7 Pro is still lying unopened on the shelf.
And NT5 is based on NT4, NT5.1 is based on NT5, NT6 is based on NT5.1, NT6.1 is based on NT6. Your point?
I say let XP die, it was a great OS - Im using it now on my aspireone right now- but its life is nearing the toilet bowl. And all this argument is going to happen again with windows 7. When Windows Breeze is here taking my commands and talking to me and I dont even need to touch the PC. Better yet in 20-30 years we will have robots that will do our bidding. I crave robot slaves! "Clean my house, make me food, do the dishes!" I will shout, then there will be a robot uprising and I will have adventures in my dreams/machine world and will be able to fly and do fancy crap mid-air. Mark. My. Words.
Sadly no, NT6 is not based on NT5. It does have a lot of similarities and structure such as the registry system and the rest, to ensure compatibility support, with current and older software. Essentially, a modified NT5 kernel. NT 3 to NT5 only had their kernel patched, hence why they carried the exact same memory management, driver issues (commons ones are conflicts, loading them when the device is no longer there but the driver not removed, unable to restart the driver). NT6.1 (Win7) is based on NT6. Another way to see this, is that Vista had issues (fixed now with SP1 and later), that never existed in previous version of Windows (well NT series, not 9x).
im actually using vista and im having to make do with a 2 year old machine to learn python on lol and what im saying is xp should be patched up,xp beats windows 7 in so many tests i've seen.
I missed out NT5.2, Windows Server 2003. Vista's 6.0 kernel is actually based off 2003 SP1. It certainly wasn't a complete rewrite from scratch.
Yes... but Sever 2003 is not based on XP directly. - Longhorn was XP with patches and new features - Then Microsoft scrap it all, took Server 2003 which is not based on NT3. Then modified several aspects of the kernel which included: Removal of the video layer (I forgot the official name, but remember when you moved a Media Player while a video was paused.. the video did not follow.. yea that layer), Restructure the driver system so that drivers are not tied to the kernel as they were and included new features as restarting, added User Account Control, account system improvements (well, permissions system), and a few other things, including improvement on the DirectX side (hence why DX10 can't be moved under XP). - Then they included support for new technologies natively - Then added DirectX 10 (for Vista) - Then, they added many Longhorn features - Then Microsoft worked on the GUI of Longhorn - Renamed it to Vista (official name), and released it.
I have W7 on my laptop and XP on my desktop, I don't see a real reason to upgrade my desktop. I would but I'd rather upgrade components than the OS. My next computer will have whatever OS M$ has out unless ubuntu can support what I need
i still use XP on 3 of my computers...and it will likely stay on 2 of them. the only reason my primary box will eventually get upgraded is for more RAM support. and page file? who uses that anymore?
The only thing I missed out on by not getting 7 straight away was a £30 discount. XP's speed was convenient, but I got fed up in the end with the general spyware hassle and my AV software deciding it didn't want to update properly by the end. Had the two OS on different disks and dual booted until I was happy with 7 - just need new software for my scanner and that's the only change I need to make, everything else works. However I just hope all those freebie internet lessons the BBC are sponsoring, take place on Windows Vista machines as a minimum, so that silver surfers know the interface.
Still use it on my laptops and prefer it on my laptops. My main PC is with Win7 but find XP so much better with laptops
My Desktop PC hasn't had XP on it since Vista was in Beta, now running Win7 Pro x64 and Vista x86 Ulitmate (GT Legends won't work in Win7) as a dual boot. I ditched XP on my laptop a couple of years ago to start messing about with Linux, gone through Ubuntu, Debian, OpenSUSE and now on Fedora - it runs better under Linux than it ever did under XP!.
Every OS has a page file like system. It's a requirement for proper system operation. As I once explained, page file has several purposes. The first one is extending you RAM in capacity, where the OS switch between processes from the RAM and the HDD. XP ALWAYS do that, as it was designed for system with ultra low memory. This kills battery life (HDD at work all the time, as you switch between processes), consumes time, and reduce responsiveness. While Under Vista/Win7 it's the contrary (follows the same layout as all OS of today), where: WHEN the RAM is full or near full, it start using the page file, else don't use it. The second purpose of the pagefile, is to allow context switch. As you may or may not know, RAM is NEVER fragmented, in the sense that processes put in your RAM is never split into 2 or more parts. It's 1 block. The OS, tries it's best to fit everything nicely. The problem with all OSs, is that they can't move processes in the RAM to make space. Assuming it can, your program that is being moved to make space, will be frozen for a moment. Considering that and OS has A LOT of processes and services running, your computer, no mater how fast it is, will be extremely non-responsive every time you open close open programs, as the OS will try to move everything. Why this effect? Because the processor can only execute instructions that is on the RAM. If the process memory moves, while the processor is doing an operation where it needs to put value at an address within the process (in the heap or stack area of the process), as the address changed. So the processor will put the return data at the wrong spot. Heap and Stack is a segment of a process in memory: (process max size it determined before you run the program. So yes, it grows inside itself, so that it doesn't override on some other process or fragment). So as it can't move things.. it doesn't. Simple. Now, here is the problem, as nothing can move, you can see that what you open and closes your programs, you will come to a point where you have free space in total, BUT you don't have enough space in one area to fit the program that you try to run. It can't go anywhere as all the empty slot in the memory, can't fit that process. The computer can't move anything and can't fragment. This is called external fragmentation. So what happens now? Simple, the Operating System execute something called a Context Switch. Which consists of copying the RAM on your secondary storage where the page file is located (HDD for instance), clear the RAM entirely, and put everything back onto your RAM in a nice clean organized manner (defragmented). As this process executes, your computer is halted. You cant' do anything.. you see your computer frozen for a moment, and will come back. I am sure you all experience this the old days when he was well bellow 256MB of RAM, at least once. Now, that was the method of the old old old days (I mean in the REALLY old days!) Now we have 2, 4, 6, even for 1 GB, 512MB even 128MB of RAM.. transferring all that onto your HDD takes time, and the reverse needs to be done as well. We all moved a big movie file here, and we know it takes a few minutes on an HDD. So what really happens, is that when is while your use your computer, your Operating System performs a backup on your HDD of you RAM. This way, half the job is already done, and uses a smart algorithm, which gets improved for essentially all OS new versions, where they put priority on what goes in the RAM first to hide the delay... usually the OS comes first, so that the only effect that you will see is a slower than normal start of a program, and slower responsiveness of everything else as well, for a moment. Disabling pagefile, means that Context Switch can't occur. Menaing that one day, you may open Firefox (let's say you have 1-2GB of RAM, and never shutdown your computer for a while), you might half half your RAM free, but the OS will go and say "I don't have enough space to your run your program, you are out of virtual memory", or in the case of Windows 7 "The program that you try to run can't because you are out of virtual memory. If you close one of or some of the following programs that I listed here, you can fit your programs: <list of processes that it detects that it can run, hence why you sometimes see drivers program and explorer.exe in the list>". To reduce Context Switch from occurring, the fix is simple, get more RAM than what you need. OS updates will make your computer restarts well enough so that if your computer runs 24/7, it's never a problem, as the RAM is cleared when you restart or turn off your computer, in these days. Also, as you can see, "RAM defragmenter" software does nothing more than force call a Context Switch earlier than normal. So it's totally useless. So there you have.. the importance of page file, and why it's unwise to turn it off.
7 is leagues ahead of XP in this regard. 7 uses a page file, too. Weird huh? But it's not NT4, is it? A PC with 512MB of ram and a Celeron 2.5Ghz runs XP a damn site better than it runs 7, in my experience. I've set up about 50 desktops with roughly the same config and by using WDS it's no bother keeping one XP install up to date to install to many PC's over a domain. I use 7 at home and bought a retail copy to bung on my netbook as I am far happier using it. I grit my teeth when laptops come into work with 7 on and I have to wipe it to put XP on. Imo, 7 is far better, but XP isn't completely useless - patched up, it's no worse or better.
i know XP has a page file system. i was indicating that i turned mine off 4 gigs of ram is enough for 90% of video games and services to run without running out of memory, even when multitasking. turning the page file off gives a noticeable boost in speed to..well...everything as long as im not working on huge video editing projects or whatnot...so far it hasnt been an issue for me (results may vary, of coarse).
Everyone ignored my post on memory management or what? Also XP 32-bit can't address 4GB of RAM. You need a 64-bit Windows, like Vista 64-bit or Win7 64-bit.
i realize that... i didnt ignore your post. turning the page file off essentially fixes the problem with XPs memory management provided you dont run out of RAM (whether it be total amount or chunks large enough to fit an entire program). my computer gets turned off every night, and i have more than enough ram for my current needs, so it never gets plugged up. this is my personal experience and it works great for me, but wont work for everyone. like i said, your results may vary, it just depends on how each of us uses our machines.
4GB RAM is *exactly* what a 32 bit operating system can address. Problem is that the OS needs to communicate with more than simply user RAM so depending the size of your graphics card and other resources, these will share the address space with said 4GB RAM. It's a bit like the old Commodore 64, if anyone can remember that. It had a whopping 64KB RAM, but not all of it could be used, as some of the address space was used for the Basic ROM (0xA000-0xBFFF), some was used for audio and graphics (0xD000-0xDFFF) and some of it was used for the system ROM itself (0xE000-0xFFFF). Yet underneath it all were the full 64KB of RAM. Sorry for being a bit off-topic, but it was fun to reminisce for a moment.
You know, I like when I try to make an assumption on thing such as considering user space, as the graphic card has basically it's own memory and not an issue in 64-bit OS. And then someone comes with the white paper, and brings onto the floor that I am wrong. And in result, my posts gets longer and longer, and packed with "Assuming", and "Considering" everywhere. It's like talking to a developer who thinks he knows more than anyone. You explain your project in details and what you are doing at an overview level, and he acts like your stupid because he know a "better way", which is exactly your way but mentions deep details.. so a 1 min conversation end up being 30min as he explains on what you can do or how things should be done. Or a web designer approach: Mikey: "Yea I'll put a green button at the bottom of the page", and the other guy goes Tom: "Heuu.. no... you need a dark green #0D910D that has a gradient that follows the theme of the rest of the web site [add 3 pages of button explanation]. And as you know nothing! Else, you would know to do research and find that the best position is not at the button bottom of the page, but at the bottom of the CONTENT of page, with 10 pixel margin at the bottom to separates the button page and content nicely, and centered horizontally to make it more visible. To be specific [more about the position and how it's important that the position is there]". My post segment topic of conversation is not how Windows 32-bit manages the RAM per se, it was about what it concerns the users of the system.
