wrote:wrote:What was the previous avatar? what did I miss? 😁
A Tux sprite from SuperTux with the Windows XP logo and a yellow bezier curve made between the two.
It's not offensive if you think of it, the Tux is but an animal. He does not get what Windows logo means. It's like a dog doing his business on a wheel of Porsche Cayenne. To dog means not to offend Porsche, but to mark his territory.
It wan not so much as the image being offensive, but that of an extension the same arrogant attitude that he started from of if you are not using Linux you are wienie.
<moderator>Naughty words filtered</moderator>
wrote:Stojke, sometimes you protect windows 8 so furiously that I'm starting to think you're working for Microsoft. […]
Stojke, sometimes you protect windows 8 so furiously that I'm starting to think you're working for Microsoft.
I tried it on my father-in-law's computer and I did not like it. Point. Later I had immense trouble removing windows 8 to install a pirated release of windows 7.
Guess what? Even that small number of Windows 8 liscences sold by Microsoft is less than the actual number of liscences in use. You can't get a good notebook without windows 8. There are 2-3 models in the shops around my area which feature ubuntu or no OS at all, however, they are bottom-line low-end machines. So what people do is buy the notebook, pay for the damned windows 8, come home and install pirated seven.
"Don't buy it if you don't like it" sounds quite hypocritic. As if you had a choice.
A few years ago it came out that at least Dell and HP are forced to honor a user's request to remove and be reimbursed for the add-in Windows installation; this was around the pre-Vista "Microsoft is the devil and XP is so evil and inefficient and why can't we just have Windows 98 and ME or use Linux because Linux will replace Windows by 2010 because Windows SUCKS!" era in 2004-2005. I forget what all it entailed but basically you should have uninstall rights but it does involve some paperwork and whatnot to effect it, and I don't know if they would still support such a thing (or if they could support it outside of the US). But it might be worth looking into.
As far as "Windows 8 is trapping new systems!" - the same thing was said about both 7 and Vista and was/is a COMMON complaint for laptops that use hardware that ONLY has WDDM drivers for at least some of its components (usually graphics and/or audio). With Vista-8 all using WDDM I'm guessing that's less of an issue, but moving to a non-Windows operating system might be more of a challenge (I remember when the original Asus Eee came out and the power management software was only available for Windows, and moving to Ubuntu meant killing battery life - it was eventually resolved but things like that are still worth noting). I'm not honestly "taking a side" either way here - if you don't like it, don't use it; its your computer/network and you should use what you're comfortable with or what suits your needs. If producers are unwilling to provide something that suits you, that's a black mark for them.
wrote:I am getting so tired of the negative connotations that go along with a piece of software getting "old". Mass media is winning the masses over with a bunch of BS about "you need the latest and greatest" and all that crap. I especially love mobile phone commercials that exaggerate so much by showing some guy using an old 80's brick cell phone and some douche bag using a iPhone or whatever, and they make the guy using the old phone look unnecessarily stupid and the guy using the new "smart" phone look "cool". Even if a guy was that old school and really wanted to use an old analog phone like that, you wouldn't even be able to due to lack of the support from telecommunication companies (in most places in the world now) that we're slaves to. I remember using my Mortorola StarTAC mobile phone as long as I could and had to give it up because my local provider did not support it's analog function anymore. My phone did all I really wanted it and needed it to do...I really did not want to switch phones at that time, but I was forced to because of the lack of support. I of course eventually wanted to upgrade to a better phone that I could use for texting, but I wanted to do it when I wanted to, not by being forced to. Case and point....I now have a Samsung Galaxy Note 3 that forces me to update my Android software (the notification won't go away until I update) as opposed to my older blackberry phone which gave me the option to decline....I believe that soon no one will have any option to decline any updates for their cell phone or even their PC O/S (unless maybe you resort to using hacked up versions of older software)...that way corporations can have more control of what you use and it will inevitably be easier for them to channel advertising to you on your PC, mobile phone, chip implanted in your brain, or your stupid Google glasses 🤣 .
I agree. There's also a reason I won't *touch* Google products of any kind (including search); that stuff is insidious (and always has been, it's only recently that people have started to take notice because of how infested the world is anymore, and their "do no evil" marketing can't cover all of the nonsense (especially when their CEO keeps going on about how privacy is only a right of the super-rich and so on)).
I still have a Blackberry, because it's the only modern-production phone that isn't infested with ADdroid or based on iOS (I don't have a real problem with Apple except that iTunes-on-Windows is such a hog); I don't think it's ever nagged me to update.
Does it really matter if you don't have the absolute newest O/S on your PC? As long as that piece of software does what you need it to do and do it well, do you really need to "upgrade"? I certainly don't think so for the most part. I have worked as a AutoCAD draftsperson, architectural designer, photographer, and have had numerous other office jobs where I used MS Office software and many graphics programs and have to say that with most of the work I have ever done, I could get by and get by well with just Windows 32 bit based software running on decent to excellent 2002 to 2008 hardware or maybe even older in some cases. Actually even the majority of AutoCAD and Photoshop software during the Win95/98 era would still serve me just fine today as well. Case and point, I am currently using a Lenovo W520 with i7 processor and discreet video and 16GB of RAM on Win7 64 bit O/S and it still runs slower in most cases (except for 3D rendering and 2D point cloud rendering) for simple MS office software than my WinXP 32bit system with 3GB ram and slower Core2Duo processor and crappy 1gb video card on my home computer.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with an ex-Intel engineer - we got to talking about Netburst and Intel's "20GHz future" and all that, and he brought up his mom and her Pentium MMX-based IBM that she had faithfully used for over a decade to send out a weekly email to the family via Earthlink dial-up. Point was: if the machine can satisfy your application requirements, it's done and it's time to hit the bar. 🤣
That was all well and fine until the multimedia nightmare of Flash and such erupted and we've got websites that are more demanding than 3D games of 15 years ago...
As far as performance - I did a comparison between Windows XP Professional and Windows 7 Home Premium (when I upgraded a machine) in AQ3, it dropped something like 33,000 points after the upgrade. 😵
Even when it comes to gaming, I really think that the 'life' of WinXP could have been extended even further by exploiting more of the newer hardware capability by just making it compatible with older Direct X versions.
My understanding is that DirectX 10 and later could not be "ported" to Windows XP efficiently or cheaply, because they heavily rely on WDDM which it does not support. I'm not saying it's entirely impossible, just that I understand it to be quite complex/expensive to properly implement and validate (which is part of the reason no third-parties have done it as a "hack"). That said, it's not like that matters very much - with a few very recent exceptions, most games topped-out with DirectX 9c which will run happily on Windows XP.
It's really funny how people always say that Windows XP is getting old, when most of those people just use MS Word and browse the internet. Even for gamers, Windows XP still has so much to offer. I for one, have not had the time to play many of the games released during the last 10 years and would still be happy just gaming on my XP 32 bit machine and just missing out on the newer games 'optimized' for Windows 7 and 8.
Honestly most of those newer games run just fine on XP, unless they explicitly REQUIRE DX10/11 support. Game developers have supported XP and DirectX 9 very well for the simple reason that it held onto market-share very well over the years, and that Vista and 7 were not adopted very quickly; they want to sell as many copies of their game as they can after all.
My point is that Windows XP probably fulfills the computing power needs for most people...I would venture to say almost all the people I know except for some avid 'modern gamers' and designers requiring the fastest 3D rendering capability possible for their work don't need anything newer that WindowsXP.
I'd go further than that and say Windows 95 fulfills the computing power needs for most people, and that in the vast majority of cases (pro users and gamers aside) most of the "performance requirements" that people have to satisfy are dealing with multimedia bloat than any real performance requirement. For example - word processing software from the 1990s still let people write full-length manuscripts, and email happily existed on 56k, but all of the animated bloat won't play nice with a Pentium or a dial-up connection. So you require the user to have a powerful CPU and GPU to pretty-up a task that it really doesn't matter for and call it "enhanced features" 🤣.
As far as 3D gaming goes - the bloat there is pretty bad too. I'm not saying we should all be using GeForce 256s, but if you think about how effectively long the Voodoo 2's life was with Glide, or how effectively long-lived most game consoles are (especially given their generally limited memory and storage abilities) versus gaming on a desktop computer. It's just nuts.
It's funny that the only reason I ever upgraded from SP1 to SP3 is because I could not access my iPod I got back in 2008 with XP SP1...I was forced to upgrade to SP3 so I could sync my stupid iPod. I find it really hard to believe that Apple couldn't have made my iPod Touch 8GB compatible with Windows XP SP1 or even win98 for that matter. I find this to be absolutely unnecessary an absolute outrage and obvious planned obsolescence at it's best (or worst).
Apple products in a Windows ecosystem are usually a mess to begin with; that's the sole reason I stopped bothering with them. Personally I think (and this is certainly more than a little biased) Apple intentionally makes their Windows software as bloated and nasty as possible to make OS X look more attractive, because things like iTunes and Safari run much better there (because they're optimized to!). I think it's a marketing thing - hook'em with the iPod, iPhone, iPad, whatever and then slowly work on them to also buy the super-duper expensive PC running OS X.
I just want to make it clear that I am not saying that windows 7 "sucks" or that Windows 8 is plain crap or whatever. I think that many can argue about the good points and bad points of almost any O/S until the cows come home, but the fact of the matter is that no matter how much a person loves an O/S version more than another, we are now facing the inevitability of dependency on internet giants/telecommunications companies with a certain monopoly (or oligopoly) that will eventually decide what programs you will use whether you like it or not (as long as you want to participate in using the internet). This is what should be discussed and questioned, not what O/S is better.
Yes. This. 😎
It's so blatantly obvious that O/S's like Windows 8 are facilitating the move to being more dependent on corporate initiatives to control what you are seeing (advertising), have access to your browsing activity and tendencies (marketing data collection) and even now holding your data on the "cloud"...what a load of BS...having my personal information stored on 'the cloud'...are you f'ing kidding me?? I am glad there are still sites like Vogons out there where you can discuss topics like this freely and get free information on how to run your old software, but how long will it last? I wouldn't be surprised if one day when I try to log on to Vogons I will get a message that says, "please click on this link to upgrade your browser and O/S to Windows 9 and service pack 3,654,785 to log on" 🤣 I really hope that day will never come.
Google and Facebook are the fore-front of this movement. 😵
Honestly I don't have any real issues with any of the recent versions of Windows - they're all different from one another on some level, and all have something of a learning curve. When Vista came out I remember everyone moaning about having to learn "a whole new thing" and then again with 7, and now that Microsoft is taking that away there's more crying. I get that change does bring about mixed feelings - I actually remember this being a topic relating to forum UIs and MobyGames in another thread somewhere around here. I don't think Windows 8 or 8.1 is the "great satan" - it's just very very different, and very much optimized for a different kind of machine than Windows Vista or 7. I think it reflects the broader shift to tablets/phones/etc as people's primary computing vehicle more than anything else. From the time I've spent with on a desktop machine, I can say that I'm probably more comfortable with my Windows XP and Windows 7 boxes, but I could live with it if it was what I had available. It isn't unusable. My understanding is that legacy support has been pretty much cooked, but that's why we have old computers, right? 😊
to some of you other members excuse my going of the deep end
but as a moderator and admin on other forums I would not tolerate the trolling behavior
try spending numerous hours cleaning out 500 to 600 spam posts per day on forums and then having to council members on trolling behavior
even with the complicated recaptcha and numerical schemes they are getting thru.
do you even want to think how irritated you could get!
I would not even be on this forum site but was asked to join it by a friend
my technical skills center around robotics and automation, with quite a background in electronics.
so I wont bother you people any more
I don't think bragging about "technical expertise", "30 years of fortran" and "forum moderation" history makes anyone more right, especially from someone calling constructive disagreement "trollish behavior". If that's so, then welcome to the internet - you have seen NOTHING that is actual trolling.
Also wasn't your 'final post' just a page ago?
wrote:I don't think bragging about "technical expertise", "30 years of fortran" and "forum moderation" history makes anyone more right, especially from someone calling constructive disagreement "trollish behavior". If that's so, then welcome to the internet - you have seen NOTHING that is actual trolling.
Also wasn't your 'final post' just a page ago?
Agreed. Dealing with spambots and such isn't a valid excuse to bite someone's head off, and this recent trend of just declaring anyone who disagree with "a shameless troll" is kind of sickening. 😵
And dealing with spambots is not really that much of a chore, if you know you are doing.
Indeed. I haven't seen a spam post on my board since I cared to install a particularly powerful captcha a few years ago.
Am I the only one thinking this thread is not about people buying w7 privately anymore?
hey guys, what did I miss?
It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes.
Moderators can lock this and/or clean it up, if you guys like.
"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen
Stiletto
Huh? Who's "trolling" here?
I thought he supposedly got rid of himself long back..?? 🤣
wrote:Huh? Who's "trolling" here?
I thought he supposedly got rid of himself long back..?? 🤣
What is dead can never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.
wrote:What is dead can never die, but rises again, harder and stronger.
