The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-27, 11:33:

That's sometimes true, but doesn't remove the fact that sane minded people 30+ years of GUI "evolution" had to end in typing som […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 10:42:

Its so much faster and easier sometimes

That's sometimes true, but doesn't remove the fact that sane minded people 30+ years of GUI "evolution" had to end in typing something on screen to interact with PCs.

This is how things worked, say, in KDE 0.x in 1997 or so, but KDE 0.x had already a sane start menu.

Perhaps Win11's is a lame imitation of the above, given in *nix any executable is in the path, while windows apes that using an indexed search engine just to do that basic job.

Last but not least PCs aren't just PCs, they are connected to big screens in HTPC, they are in automotive, embedded systems, totems, kiosks and so on, so even if a poor start screen can be workarounded using the Unix way, is not said that this is applicable in a keyboardless system

Yeah well yeah I mean its a problem thats for sure...
In many ways is the a very Microsoft problem really isnt it.

Personally I thought the systems you are talking about operated in kiosk mode of Win11 IoT and so it doesnt matter about changes to the start menu, however I do take your point that if those devices are not using the correct version of Windows and it isnt configured properly then problems to do with changes to the start menu might happen...

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-27, 11:51:

Again mudding waters using stupid semantic tricks? […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 10:32:

This is 100% backwards. Gavotte Ramdisk **strictly requires PAE to be enabled** to touch the unmanaged RAM above the 3.25 Gb/4Gb line. It is physically impossible for it to work with PAE disabled.

Again mudding waters using stupid semantic tricks?

If people say PAE disabled intends a precise thing: a system that cant see more than the usual 3~3.3GB.

May not be not strictly correct, but I'm sure every reader here understood that, except you.

If I say "I installed Linux" is pretty obvious to everyone that I'm speaking of the whole OS, even if strictly speaking Linux is just the kernel.

When PAE is disabled, the CPU runs in legacy 2level paging. Page Table Entries are strictly 32 bits wide. The highest address a 32bit pointer can express is 0xFFFFFFFF 4.0 Gb. The chipset remaps the RAM hidden by the MMIO hole *above* the 4 GB line starting at 0x1_0000_0000. If PAE is off, the CPUs MMU has no 36bit addressing capability those physical addresses are electrically unreachable by any driver or code on the machine.

Assuming you're correct here, and I don't know, I don't care. You're talking of EXPLCITLY disabling a feature, which is different from not enabling it.

But even in that case, what changes then? The point doesn't change by 1mm. Gavotte can take use of the memory the OS can't use.

This is the valuable info for people who never heard of it.
Not a wall of technobabble (no matter if correct or not)

Gavotte’s driver explicitly included a "UsePAE"=dword:00000001 registry flag.

That's an internal setting of the program, and obviously the coder used a meaningful name. Could have been called it "UseMikeyMouse" and nothing had changed, as long as the code was written to understand that string.

impossible years or decades ago.

True but tweakNT and NTswitch were things way before XP was released (as the name implies), let alone XP SP2, and when XP2 was released, they were ready to do the first obvious way to get the stolen RAM back, switch XP to the server flavor SKU . Something that doesn't patch a single file, but still lead to the wanted result.

Its not semantics
/PAE allows addresses over 0xFFFFFFFF to be mapped. Without it you can not map it.
Nothing can because 36bit addressing isnt enabled system wide.

disabled PAE is not turning it on in SP1a. It was already on by default in SP2/SP3, and in those it had to be enabled to allow NX Bit to run.

Gavotte can indeed address the RAM over 0xFFFFFFFF that the XP HAL refuses to when unpatched yes. and it does that using PAE, it does not as you said do it when PAE disabled, because when PAE is disabled it cant physically addresses the RAM over 0xFFFFFFFF because of the lack of 36bit addressing.

"This is the valuable info for people who never heard of it.
Not a wall of technobabble (no matter if correct or not)"

Yeah well yeah...
Their RAM is, in modern systems, there and always has been. They just dont know how to get to it. Its just that the XP HAL wont because of the clamp on an unpatched system.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 12:01:

In many ways is the a very Microsoft problem really isnt it.

The Problem of MS isn't that. the problem of MS is that they started to ape the idiotic ideas of Steve Jobs (that can be summarized in downgrade the OS, instead of of upgrading the users) , MS ruled since the day 95 was released and humiliated everything else with its powerful yet incredibly easy to use GUI innovations.

Then they kept refining it until Win7, then Apple started making money with the Iphone and everything went downhill, MS forgot that Windows was Windows, because it was windows, people appreciated it because it WASN'T masOC (or OS2)

and started apeing, concepts that were aliens to windows and that merged poorly in to it.

It's like an Italian that moves in the US to open a restaurant, and start to serve spagetti with ketchup or pizza with ananas, just because he believes can make more money.

It's clearly not a good idea. The moment you start serving spaghetti with ketchup you're not an Italian restaurant anymore, your restaurant becomes an abomination.

Likewise the moment you stick an iphoneish GUI on top of windows you're an abomination as well.

Gnome and other Linux GUIs did even worse, but that doesn't make the MS choices any better.

The Solutor wrote on 2026-09-27, 12:47:

The Problem of MS isn't that. the problem of MS is that they started to ape the idiotic ideas of Steve Jobs (that can be summari […]
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ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 12:01:

In many ways is the a very Microsoft problem really isnt it.

The Problem of MS isn't that. the problem of MS is that they started to ape the idiotic ideas of Steve Jobs (that can be summarized in downgrade the OS, instead of of upgrading the users) , MS ruled since the day 95 was released and humiliated everything else with its powerful yet incredibly easy to use GUI innovations.

Then they kept refining it until Win7, then Apple started making money with the Iphone and everything went downhill, MS forgot that Windows was Windows, because it was windows, people appreciated it because it WASN'T masOC (or OS2)

and started apeing, concepts that were aliens to windows and that merged poorly in to it.

It's like an Italian that moves in the US to open a restaurant, and start to serve spagetti with ketchup or pizza with ananas, just because he believes can make more money.

It's clearly not a good idea. The moment you start serving spaghetti with ketchup you're not an Italian restaurant anymore, your restaurant becomes an abomination.

Likewise the moment you stick an iphoneish GUI on top of windows you're an abomination as well.

Gnome and other Linux GUIs did even worse, but that doesn't make the MS choices any better.

I think Microsoft has never understood why Apple products are attractive to the people who buy them and so try and use elements of them in their own products to win over customers...

About their faults to do with design I would agree with you. I have no idea why they are trying to copy a company whos users seem to like their products mostly because they are not yours. That they also work well is a smaller detail. Or thats what it seems to be to me.
But this conversation departs from the topic of the thread.

The MS Surface in 2012 was when it started to go wrong. MS deliberately made the Windows desktop experience as unpleasant as possible to drive people to buy a Surface.

I think this was the first time MS became actively user-hostile. (People with longer memories may disagree.)

Errius wrote on 2026-09-27, 21:02:

The MS Surface in 2012 was when it started to go wrong. MS deliberately made the Windows desktop experience as unpleasant as possible to drive people to buy a Surface.

I think this was the first time MS became actively user-hostile. (People with longer memories may disagree.)

The Surface is what happens when the panic set in.
It wasnt to stop peoples desktop experience bad is so much as it was to combat the iPad boom of the time.
At the time can you remember how many Windows tablets there were?
Thats why the UI made no sense to most people, because there were none, or not as many as required to combat the iPads rise. The OEMs didnt make them as Windows didnt really support them...
I mean how many of you have heard of XP TPC, or used it... have a copy of it etc...
Not many I suspect. This is a retro PC forum but do you know what PID triggers the TPC install?

Tablets were not a Windows thing but that was the way the market was shifting at the time and Surface was a clutch response to it.
Bill Gates himself said in the early 2000s that tablet PCs were going to be a thing, but Microsoft did little to nothing about it and then when they did because they had to it was a disaster for them.
The OEMs objected to Microsoft making their own hardware to compete with them, they objected to the new UI making their existing hardware look disjointed to the software. People object because of that too.
In the years between the two events the technology just didnt support the vision, and even when it did the software was lacking in that it was a desktop OS with tablet like friendlyness slapped on top of it. Thats why Windows 8 and 8.1 is a UI disaster.

I dont think there is any evidence for it to be as an unplesant an experience as possible when you look at what was going on at the time and what have been happening, or not happening with regards to development of software that could take full advantage of the technology that was emerging. And at the time of the iPad release it wasnt released into the PC market anyway... Which is why you got the Surface to give the OEMs a swift kick up the backside to get them into a market that was ignored, but was clearly, going by iPad sales, wanted by the customers.

If you want to have a go at microsoft then there is much ripe fruit there...
The dumbing down of hardware requirements of Vista to shift PCs off store shelves...
Or lowering the hardware requirements of Vista to allow Intel to sell off its junk 945 chipsets... that was a lawsuit case!
Including IE in Win98 to kill Netscape! By which I mean IE was hardcoded into the OS and couldnt be removed on purpose! SO as to prevent law suits because its baked in!
I mean how many people in the mass market had a less that stella experience of the early internet and eCommerce as a result of that decision?

Microsoft has a lot of skelingtons in its closet... Roll some of them out instead of making out like the Surface was designed to stop people using PCs or the 4Gb HAL clamp was there only to screw people over... Or get people who want more RAM to buy mambojambo enterprise grade hardware, I think was the actual idea.

I think Windows became bad because it stopped being Windows.

Microsoft sit up to trend wagons and started cloning all the nonsense which has no place in a productive environment: intuitive user interfaces, touch based handling, eye candy, lifestyle, telemetry, locked boot, webstores, single window and single task interfaces, bloat in user level and system level, low quality slop apps.

These belong to a 150 dollar smart tablet which you use to take photos, listen music, and send messages to your friends - they have no place in a computer.

Linux is the new windows, and there is no way back for Microsoft, because that would require to undo a ~22 year long rampage.

I have a surface pro 7 (or 8? I forget which) that I got for free once it got retired from its light-duty life at work, where it was used as a telehealth kiosk. It got replaced with an ipad.

It's not completely terrible to use, just underpowered, and designed to be the most obtuse thing in the universe to open and upgrade. They wanted to copy Apple, but copied more of Samsung's bad decisions, IMO.

Slapping a bluetooth keyboard and mouse on it, it becomes more of a clumsy 'portable ensamble' "with a pen!". It's good for using inkscape, at least.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 22:20:

Tablets were not a Windows thing but that was the way the market was shifting at the time and Surface was a clutch response to it.

My TC1000/TC1100 2003/2004 (7 years before the iPad) have something to say...

The former is Compaq the latter is HP, and there comes the reason no one have idea of what they are. HP bought Compaq, and the TC1000 line was a strong internal competitor of their useless counterparts, so HP after rebranding and updating the TC1000 (which was underpowered with its Crusoe CPU) in a TC1100 with a great Pentium M, decided to kill it to protect their native HP line (which were more notebooks with a pen than tablets).

IBM that pioneered the the market with their original Thinkpad in the 90's (they are called think PAD for a reason) didn't push the idea, tuning the thinkpads in a notebook line, then their "tablets" where more convertibles than real tablets, just like the original HP line.

In short MS has their fault not beleiving enough in anything was outside the traditional PC market but the partners had a big role in that story as well.

Maybe if Compaq was still independent the TC1000 line would have evolved in something of really well known and well sold.

It was already humiliating for ipads (even current ones) as it was in 2003 in many areas, what they could have done in SEVEN years of evolution?

Fujitsu Point 510...
The TC1000 and TC1100 were up to date versions.
There were lots of them over the years, I know RM got Fujitsu to make some for them in the UK.
I didnt have one myself until about 2009 with an ST5112.

The market was there for a lot more than 7 years, and what did we get in 2004... XP TPC!

Apple and their iPad were late to the party but then when they did show up they had a device that was so polished and ready to market it sold millions in its release weekend, and it sold them to normal people, not high power executives looking for a toy or hospitals looking for a way to record patients data.

Between Microsoft and the OEMs there was so much meat left on the bone that the iPad and its features made it look like it was completely new.

Apple reaslised you dont need a desktop OS to do what people want to do, its just an iPhone with a larger screen, which was fine for most people. And its "most people" who carry cash when they buy these things.

Microsoft should have started to take notice when the Win9x tablets came out, they really dropped a bollock when XP TPC was just a few tools on top of vanilla XP.
By the time they did do something, in Win8 it wasnt what people had come to expect from iPads.

We have seen that story many times.

Think to Olivetti and its Quaderno, they practically invented the Subnotebook concept, selling a relatively small amount of them,and going belly up just few years later
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olivetti_Quaderno

Four years later Toshiba cloned it with Libretto (even in the Italian name/meaning) and sold it like hot cakes, let alone the EEEPCs (and clones arrived a decade later)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto

But Apple was, and still is the king, in selling something invented by others, as their original brightest ideas.

The original iphone from 2007 had like 1/10 of the features of the very first modern Smarphone. My SE P800, released (again) SEVEN years before the iP1, and even 2026 models have yet to catch up, in many features.

And the P800 had nothing to do with Windows, it ran Sybian UIQ a modern OS tailored exactly for mobile devices.

But still the iphone 1 sold in large numbers. With not even the copy and paste features, a ugly fixed focus camera, no flash, no IRDA, no jog dial, no physical keyboard, no local file exchange, no installable sw, no multitasking.

NOTHING!

Even a "dumb" phone with a bit of mobile java sw installed was HUGELY more useful than first iphones.

So no surprise the ipad, that came after a bit of maturation of the IOS caged environment followed the same scheme.

In short every time we talk about Apple things we aren't really talking about tech, we are talking about Genoa witness style marketing, they just sell ewaste instead of Bibles, but the mechanisms to move the herd are exactly the same.

The Solutor wrote on Yesterday, 01:57:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 22:20:

Tablets were not a Windows thing but that was the way the market was shifting at the time and Surface was a clutch response to it.

My TC1000/TC1100 2003/2004 (7 years before the iPad) have something to say...

And how many of those were in the hands of consumers as opposed to ipads? Did they ever manage to go above 5 digits?

Last few decades are filled with tech that was considered niche until Apple made it "cool" and started making bank on it, after which every competing hardware company investor committee ordered their engineers to podge together a competing device within 2 weeks.

Munx wrote on Yesterday, 09:59:

And how many of those were in the hands of consumers as opposed to ipads? Did they ever manage to go above 5 digits?

One for sure.

Seriously the question is wrong from the ground, given TC1x00 are just two devices, while iPads has what 8 generations, with many sub generations in between.

So, to answer to your question, my TC1100 is still usable today, using a SSD maxed out RAM and a modern PCI Wireless card, latest revision of the Pentim Mobile allows to install even Win8.1 (maybe win 10, not sure), my unit runs Win8 and modern SW backported to it starting from Vivaldi/Opera/Supremium/Thorium/Firefox and so on..

Now tell me what you can do today with an iPad 1, albeit it's 7 years younger?

Last few decades are filled with tech that was considered niche until Apple made it "cool" and started making bank on it

Exactly, Geova Witnesses marketing v.s. technical innovation

The Solutor wrote on Yesterday, 10:16:

One for sure. […]
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Munx wrote on Yesterday, 09:59:

And how many of those were in the hands of consumers as opposed to ipads? Did they ever manage to go above 5 digits?

One for sure.

Seriously the question is wrong from the ground, given TC1x00 are just two devices, while iPads has what 8 generations, with many sub generations in between.

So, to answer to your question, my TC1100 is still usable today, using a SSD maxed out RAM and a modern PCI Wireless card, latest revision of the Pentim Mobile allows to install even Win8.1 (maybe win 10, not sure), my unit runs Win8 and modern SW backported to it starting from Vivaldi/Opera/Supremium/Thorium/Firefox and so on..

Now tell me what you can do today with an iPad 1, albeit it's 7 years younger?

Last few decades are filled with tech that was considered niche until Apple made it "cool" and started making bank on it

Exactly, Geova Witnesses marketing v.s. technical innovation

If you mean run anything modern web-related terribly? Both do it. I know, I own an upgraded Fujitsu P1610.

My point is that MS did not seriously consider tablets until Apple did it, which is why touch devices on Windows each required their own separate touch-screen drivers.

Munx wrote on Yesterday, 11:47:

If you mean run anything modern web-related terribly? Both do it. I know, I own an upgraded Fujitsu P1610.

Not sure what CPU is installed on your Toshiba, but a 2Ghz Pentium M is surprisingly good for its era (dominated in the intel side by idiotic P4s).

But aside the speed the fredoom unknown in Apple camp, allows to do whatever you like with it, from installing any Linux distro, Android, *bsd, whatever. Evan masOC if you one stupid enough.

You can use it as a remoteFX client, to play even relatively recent AAA games, you can use it as a an extension of your main machine using something like Input director or Synergy.

As for Web you can use whatever fits your preferences, from the modded Opera 12 to access the post 2013 web, to console browsers like Lynx, eLink an alike, you can use one of the light Builds from Roytam1, of Palemoon, FF, Seamonkey, whatever. You can use any post 2013 browser, depending the balance you prefer between compatibility and lightness.

And even sticking with the original XP Tablet edition is possible, given how much work the community has done to keep XP alive and kicking, starting from OCA
https://github.com/shorthorn-project/One-Core-API-Binaries

My point is that MS did not seriously consider tablets until Apple did it

True. But don't tell me that the herd that bought Apple devices cared about that.

Android was written from the beginning with mobile devices in mind, still the herd bought/buy Apple, because it's cool/trendy/expensive not because (supposedly) works better

, which is why touch devices on Windows each required their own separate touch-screen drivers.

So you think that iPads screen works magically, no driver required?

Obviously they use a driver like everyone else, but obviously, it's way easier to deal with one or two drivers than dealing with hundreds of OEMs.

Freedom has a price, sometimes in good old currency, sometime you pay it in additional headaches, time, work.

Personally I find that price cheap, the herd does not.

AncapDude wrote on 2025-12-22, 04:38:

AI is a disease

AI is a tool. The issue is that they want to use it for everything all the time. The problem with the modern world is not capitalism or the free market as the left came to believe. The problem is, how these companies do whatever they want with nobody i.e. the corrupt politicians trying to stop them.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-09-27, 10:32:

wierd_w wrote on 2026-09-25, 16:52:

My "Ultimate XP" system is based on a i7-5775C, with a nvidia Titan Xp (Pascal) with 32Gb of system RAM. All of which is fully used by XP including the VRAM. So I know what can be done now. That isnt in dispute by me at all.

You are using the Titan Xp with Windows Xp?

dominusprog wrote on Yesterday, 17:26:

AI is a tool. The issue is that they want to use it for everything all the time. The problem with the modern world is not capitalism or the free market as the left came to believe. The problem is, how these companies do whatever they want with nobody i.e. the corrupt politicians trying to stop them.

Companies doing whatever they want without government intervention = The very definition of Free Market
Plus, government and politicians are corrupt mostly because they serve the interests of the rich and not the people as they are supposed to. And the rich nowadays are powerful enough because the way capitalism works (basically the system rewards and respects wealth accumulation above all else, which encourages corrupt behavior to get more wealth and power).

Note that I'm not saying capitalism is evil: Corruption existed far before it, and it surely had a purpose by transferring power from aristocrats to the bourgeoisie and arguably developing technology and other areas. But for a lot of people in the left like me it's not about changing/adapting capitalism because it's "bad", but because it's not working as well for the modern world anymore.

gaffa2002 wrote on Yesterday, 22:28:

Companies doing whatever they want without government intervention = The very definition of Free Market

Not really. A company cannot do whatever they want all the time. A company cannot send goons to your house to beat you up until you buy their products, because then the market is not "free" for you, the consumer. Everyone, both buyers and sellers, has to be making a free choice in order for it to be a free market.

keenmaster486 wrote on Today, 00:06:

gaffa2002 wrote on Yesterday, 22:28:

Companies doing whatever they want without government intervention = The very definition of Free Market

Not really. A company cannot do whatever they want all the time. A company cannot send goons to your house to beat you up until you buy their products, because then the market is not "free" for you, the consumer. Everyone, both buyers and sellers, has to be making a free choice in order for it to be a free market.

Is that so? Depending on where you live, companies resort to literal slavery and child labor to make their products.
Plus why would they need goons if they can control you in far more efficient ways anyway (change laws, control the police, supplies, technology)?
Thats a complex discussion… in pure economics the definition of “free” is just that nobody points a gun to your head or creates a law that forces you to buy something, but real life is far more complicated than that… is it really a free choice if you need a product to survive and there is only one person offering it? What choice do I truly have?