marxveix wrote on 2024-11-05, 10:48:

One Windows 10 version is supported up to 2032 i think, i use Window 10 as long as possible and then moving to newer Windows or back to Linux on my newer Machine.

I don’t, I did promise myself to boycott Windows 10 and so I did.
The people around me who make a bit fuss about using Windows 10 are elderly people with outdated hardware.
They're the same folks who forced Windows XP onto outdated 98SE PCs and then used Windows 7 on underpowered Windows XP machines.
No offense, I'm not trying to start a fight. It's simply how it is. 🤷‍♂️

Edit: Because of Linux. They usually end up with Linux Mint. The Linux for ex-Windows users, then go back to Windows. Then Linux Mint and back..
Back in the 2000s, it was Ubuntu they tried to move to.

Even though Adobe Reader isn't supported on Windows 7 they still continue to provide updates anyway. Sometimes the updates fail, but eventually a newer one arrives that installs correctly. The bad part about Acrobat is the cloud-based stuff - it's quite unstable and crashes a lot, even on Windows 10.

As for Linux... well, I'm too old to bother with the steep learning curve, and at this stage I don't see any real advantage in having it.

At this point, Windows looks too "eased out" for my activities to side it away for Linux.

Of course there are a lot of problems that I want to get rid of, and maybe a part of why I am still sticking is the transition and all the changes I need to make to have everything work fine (and of course better)

I ended up using linux since a decade for my main daily configs first cause I usually always have old machines which can still work for home/office tasks with latest linux kernels when Windows support would have been mostly difficult to use when not impossible or discontinued for missing drivers, cpu features, requirements at least officially. Second because modern o.s. since Win 8 became so heavy to require such configs to sustain the weight of these newer Win o.s. versions without much sense for an home and basic Office need.

Also I don't play modern PC or console games anymore so that's not a problem.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-11-05, 11:01:

One Windows 10 version is supported up to 2032 i think

Yes, but it's the same situation with Windows 7 derivatives, with Windows Embedded POSReady 7 getting updates just recently (up to October 2024). And while you can still patch Windows 7 with upcoming Windows Server security updates - software support is limited. Latest Steam beta apparently stopped working on Windows 7 and extended Firefox support support will end soon too. Professional software like Adobe has dropped Windows 7 long time ago, for example. And you bet there won't be any new drivers after October 2025 for Windows 10.

At times i have been using Linux distros also, i can leave without latest Windows OS, but thats not case for everybody.
Most of the time i have been using MS-DOS/ Win98SE/XP/Windows7/10, some Windows OS i can skip or use at minmal.
Windows 3.x, NT3.x, NT4,Windows ME, W2K and Vista are the ones i have been using shortly, Windows 2000 is good OS.

This reminds me - what about that dumb joke about how Windows alternates good and bad versions? (if you cherry-pick)

It was "XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad".
Now this needs to be changed to "XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 no such thing, 10 good, 11 bad".

Maybe with Windows 13 or 14 it will finally stabilize.

dr_st wrote on 2024-11-05, 15:55:

This reminds me - what about that dumb joke about how Windows alternates good and bad versions? (if you cherry-pick)

The newer the OS, the more stuff it has, do we need all this, i dont think so. People still use more Windows 10, than 11 now.
Most of the Windows 10 support ends soon and Windows 11 will grow then. Its more forced, than people really love this OS.

dr_st wrote on 2024-11-05, 15:55:

Maybe with Windows 13 or 14 it will finally stabilize.

Windows 13 or 14 is Cloud OS, you the user using client machine, your data is in servers, new privacy requirements of 2040/2050. 😉

I don't remember a new release of Windows that didn't incur user bitching. Windows 10 had the craziest conspiracy threads on here in 2015. End of days kind of stuff. But it now apparently has a loyal following? Yippie. 😀

swaaye wrote on 2024-11-05, 18:09:

I don't remember a new release of Windows that didn't incur user bitching. Windows 10 had the craziest conspiracy threads on here in 2015. End of days kind of stuff. But it now apparently has a loyal following? Yippie. 😀

Same with Windows 11 now. Still possible to tweak it as user likes it. You have to disable at the first installtion many things and later more, only then somehow fast and usable OS. TPM modules, SSE4.2 requirements, minimal pc specs needs upgrade, cant easly install into old pc. Sometimes i love older equipment and older os more, than new.

swaaye wrote on 2024-11-05, 18:09:

I don't remember a new release of Windows that didn't incur user bitching. Windows 10 had the craziest conspiracy threads on here in 2015. End of days kind of stuff. But it now apparently has a loyal following? Yippie. 😀

User bitching.. I kind of feel sad for Vista here.
It had a long development time and users rejected it for its "high" hardware requirements.

Mostly because users had underpowered XP machines to begin with.
Underpowered for XP, I mean. 20GB HDD, 256MB RAM, "2D" graphics cards (somewhere on DirectX 7 or 8 level).

Windows 7, then came along and was installed on meanwhile Vista-ready hardware. It was praised for being a fine OS, despite nothing more than a revamped Vista.

The WDDM 1.1 graphics driver model and accelerated GDI (but not GDI+) were among most notable improvements. The GUI got more ugly, though.

Later on, Vista got been retrofitted with Service Packs and Platform Updates, making it a prettier alternative to Windows 7, while still being limited to WDDM 1.0.

Unfortunately, the damage was done and the reputation was somewhat bad already.
Even at Microsoft, people poke fun at Vista. Really sad for such an once ambitious project.

If I had learned one thing after all these years, then that the "recommended requirements" are the real "minimum requirements" in real life.
The highest configuration level is about enough for a good work flow.

Saving money or adhering to old technologies (old CPU gen, old motherboard or firmware) causes unnecessary headaches.
Its better for mental health to "put wood behind the arrow" and go for an "overkill" configuration.
In best case, this enhances the overall lifetime of the hardware.

Edit: I'm making a distinction between hobby use and serious use here.
For a hobby, an old Windows 98SE PC is still fine.
But I would never recommend it for any serious works these days.
Except if it is running in isolatation and serves exactly one specislized purpose. Like a piece of lab equipment. Say, an infrared spectrometer that had a Windows 3.1 or 95 software.

Edit:

marxveix wrote on 2024-11-05, 18:49:

swaaye wrote on 2024-11-05, 18:09:

I don't remember a new release of Windows that didn't incur user bitching. Windows 10 had the craziest conspiracy threads on here in 2015. End of days kind of stuff. But it now apparently has a loyal following? Yippie. 😀

Same with Windows 11 now. Still possible to tweak it as user likes it. You have to disable at the first installtion many things and later more, only then somehow fast and usable OS. TPM modules, SSE4.2 requirements, minimal pc specs needs upgrade, cant easly install into old pc. Sometimes i love older equipment and older os more, than new.

Well, full SSE 4 support (4.2) should really be available these days. Even Mac Pros from late 2000s have it, too. SSEx as an SIMD is important!
TPM for encryption, too, because we're living in insecure times and have become dependent on the internet more than ever.
It should still be made possible to deactivate it in UEFI, though.

No offense, but looking back I see many parallels to the past.

- CP/M PC users who were left behind and couldn’t run Turbo Pascal (it required Z80 or compatible).

- XT users who were stuck with an 8088 CPU and couldn’t run 90s era DOS software or VGA software (V20 could have fixed it).

- 286 users who had Windows 3.1x run in Standard-Mode and couldn’t run 32-Bit applications (high perfdrivers, Win32s, DCI, WinG, WinMem32 and Win386 Extender needed 386+)

- PC/AT users who had an 286 proccessor and couldn’t make use of MemMaker/EMM386.

- 486DX-100 users (or owners with an partial 586 compatible) who couldn’t run Windows XP, because it was Pentium-optimized.

- Pentium 1 users who couldn’t install latest drivers (esp. USB stuff) on Windows 98SE, because the CPU did lack MMX.

- Et cetera pp.

If I had anything to say at Microsoft, I would make AVX and hardware-assisted acceleration (AMD-V, Intel-VT) an requirement, too! 😁

Edit: I've mention AVX.. An AVX-512 optimized version of ffmpeg was just releases..

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cp … 2-assembly-code

Vista just had too much going on for the time. It was ambitious but they seemed to forget about what it needed to run well on. It was also not entirely stable in that first year, partly because of itself and because of early WDDM drivers. Win2K and WDM had problems like this too.

I think Windows 8 is more likely to still be remembered with angry thoughts though because of its UI. Even though it is faster/lighter than Win7.

swaaye wrote on 2024-11-05, 19:13:

Vista just had too much going on for the time. It was ambitious but they seemed to forget about what it needed to run well on. It was also not entirely stable in that first year, partly because of itself and because of early WDDM drivers. Win2K and WDM had problems like this too.

I think Windows 8 is more likely to still be remembered with angry thoughts though because of its UI. Even though it is faster/lighter than Win7.

The preview of Windows 8 was cool, though! It didn't feature Metro apps yet.
Windows 8 Preview had looked like Windows 7, just more rectangular.
Aero Glass could be rendered in software, too. Thanks to WARP software rasterizer.
Windows 8.x also had built-in USB 3 support, I vaguely remember. If it wasn't for the horrible touch GUI the final version got.. sigh. 😔

A few weeks back I was able to resurrect a Vista machine (Compaq dx2355MT) and initially I used 1GB RAM. Although it worked it was very slow, sometimes freezing for minutes at a time. Later, I found some more RAM for it, and upgrading to 2GB made it run rather quickly indeed, a complete difference. Since I had still more RAM, it now has 4GB. Boots up really fast and works well.

Some windows 7 machines also were repaired, and I can say they also need at least 2GB to run properly. With XP I'd recommend 1G minimum, however Youtube is still watchable with 768MB.

Contrast that with when my workplace was rolling out W2k, each machine got just 64MB. Power users scored 128MB.

have been using w11 for a while now both ar home and at work. the most annoying part is the stupid functionality of the right click menu ther are also some weird bugs like popup windows with no text or buttons, w10 software not being compatible and some strange issue with the microphone for microsoft teams (what a piece of junk software).

dr_st wrote on 2024-11-05, 15:55:

It was "XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad".
Now this needs to be changed to "XP good, Vista bad, 7 good, 8 bad, 8.1 no such thing, 10 good, 11 bad".

Windows 10 is both good and bad. It had a long development cycle with lots of features added along the way. Last versions are good*, since Microsoft has finally stopped torturing users with new untested features. Although they are apparently planning to add something next year, which is concerning.

*After you patch out all telemetry and junk like Bing search.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-05, 19:00:

It had a long development time and users rejected it for its "high" hardware requirements.

Vista before SP1 was horrible and just serviceable before SP2. It really was a beta release of Windows 7. Also both Vista and Windows 7 are painfully slow without SSD or at least 10K Velociraptor. And first affordable SSDs like Intel X25-M have appeared around Windows 7 release.

Joakim wrote on 2024-11-05, 19:47:

have been using w11 for a while now both ar home and at work. the most annoying part is the stupid functionality of the right click menu

You may already know, but to fix right click menu open command prompt as Administrator and type the following.

reg.exe add "HKCU\Software\Classes\CLSID\{86ca1aa0-34aa-4e8b-a509-50c905bae2a2}\InprocServer32" /f /ve

This is one of my main complaints about new user interface design, everything is hidden in pointless sub menu's.

Joakim wrote on 2024-11-05, 19:47:

microsoft teams (what a piece of junk software).

Teams business or the completely different and incompatible product but with almost the same name Teams personal which comes preinstalled and causes loads of confusion.
But hey, I'm not even mad, I'm so used to MS giving stupid names to products for so long now.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-11-05, 22:35:

Windows 10 is both good and bad. It had a long development cycle with lots of features added along the way. Last versions are good*, since Microsoft has finally stopped torturing users with new untested features.

*After you patch out all telemetry and junk like Bing search.

Yeh I think Windows 10 and above kind of "cheat"
Version 1507 acts and feels very different to 22H2, yet everyone just calls it Windows 10.
Much more so than Windows 8 vs 8.1 which people count as a different OS? I thought it was just a bug fix of the stupid (lack of) menu

The difference between the first Windows 10 release v the last one is comparable to unpatched day one Vista vs fully patched Windows 7 SP1, if not more drastic.

Jo22 wrote on 2024-11-05, 19:00:

It had a long development time and users rejected it for its "high" hardware requirements.

Vista before SP1 was horrible and just serviceable before SP2. It really was a beta release of Windows 7. Also both Vista and Windows 7 are painfully slow without SSD or at least 10K Velociraptor. And first affordable SSDs like Intel X25-M have appeared around Windows 7 release.

Yes, performance wasn't ideal. A RAID configuration was recommended, I suppose.

Copying files took long, also because Vista (or 7 ?) had a built-in file compressor/decompressor meant for network drives.
This feature would be great for LAN or Internet use, but not local drives.

SSDs. When Vista was in development, hybrid HDDs had been an alternate future vision to SSDs, still .

Vista did support special hybrid HDDs that allowed the OS to access the flash part to store Windows system files.
It was a variant of Ready Boost technology.

Unfortunately, the technology wasn't being adopted.

Instead, HDDs like the Momentus XT did contain a self-learning algorithm that would cache sectors in flash that had been loaded multiple times.

This had a downside, though. HDD defragmentation would mess this cache up, the learning process would have to be repeated.

Later, industry rather went for fully solid-state technology.

Edit: The hybrid drives were SSHDs, I think. Windows ReadyDrive was the technology, I think.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_drive

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Vista_I … gies#ReadyDrive

https://www.ign.com/articles/2006/06/14/hybri … premium-laptops

Windows 11 seems to get out of the way to redesign some GUI elements to make it more difficult to tweak by 3rd parties, eg. new taskbar. I don't follow anymore, the newer ones don't run on my PC anyway, even installation ISO just crashes during boot logo, but I've read something along the lines of them ripping out the old taskbar so can't be restored with ExplorerPatcher.

Maybe in time hackers will catch up. Perhaps I'll have new computer by then, who knows, but as it is, don't do much interesting on it, so no incentive to replace it just yet. Though I can't help but suspect this thing has some subtle hardware faults that make some parts of Windows subtly glitch over time.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-11-05, 22:35:

Vista before SP1 was horrible and just serviceable before SP2.

So was XP before SP1/SP2 respectively, for that matter.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2024-11-05, 22:35:

Also both Vista and Windows 7 are painfully slow without SSD or at least 10K Velociraptor. And first affordable SSDs like Intel X25-M have appeared around Windows 7 release.

Windows 10 is far worse on a spinning drive. My old Core 2 Quad Vista desktop never got an SSD, even after I upgraded it to Win7. Standard 7200RPM drive, and not a very new one either. Can't say that it flies, but it doesn't stutter either. Oh, and Win7 boots noticeably faster. I recall that one of the things specifically optimized between Vista and 7 is multi-threaded boot.