Ken Springer wrote:
On 1/16/14 3:39 PM, Silver Slimer wrote:
On 16/01/2014 3:25 PM, Ed Propes wrote:
Silver Slimer presented the following explanation :
"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote in message
...

Beta-test *it*? Windows 8? You want to beta test *it* again?

Or do you mean Windows 9, or whatever it ends up being called?

What I'm saying is that I would have been honoured to beta-test
Windows 8 even though that's no longer possible. However, I am hoping
to be invited to the testing for 9. If they're willing to take some of
my suggestions as a long-time DOS/Windows 3.x/9x/etc. user, I think we
could build one hell of a perfect operating system.

What would you do to make it "one hell of a perfect operating system"? I
get curious when people say that.

It would appeal to every imaginable type of PC user.

Just like there is no perfect GUI that fits everyone, there will never
be a perfect OS.

Keeping in mind, they're two separate things.

In Linux, the low levels of the OS are a constant (kernel based).
The decorations, the windows manager, there are a number of options
available, such as Gnome, KDE, XFCE, each one looking a little different.
And without integration (i.e. loading the apps into the menu
structures), even those would look pretty empty without a distro
team to set them up. You can't just load a Window manager package,
and automatically it looks good.

The latest Windows 8 OS portion (i.e. not the GUI), is not a good
OS. It does not behave well when running out of Pool memory.
It "reserves" a portion of CPU cycles for itself (so "100% CPU"
is only about 85% of the true CPU). Games play slower, as the reserved
CPU cycles can't be used. And when it comes time to loading a program
you want to run, if an existing program is using what amounts to
all the available cycles, the thing that loads the next program
is dog slow. Right now, I'm running WinXP, I'm running 7ZIP at about
85% CPU (varies), and if I want to start another program, it starts
in a couple seconds. If I do that on Windows 8, it takes 30 seconds.
It's ridiculously unfriendly. Windows 8 will present a "busy cursor"
(spinning wheel, a la MacOSX), but that animation stops after about
five seconds, leaving you guessing as to whether a program is going
to load within the next twenty five seconds.

So there's plenty of room for them to improve the OS portion
for the next OS. I can live with the GUI distractions, but
the OS behavior has to improve. Nobody seems to notice this
stuff ? Why is it only me ?

WinXP has the odd nasty behavior as well, but I just
don't run into those cases as often. In WinXP, if you
start too many high-demand programs, a bunch of them
will just "die". An over-subscribed OS should still be
able to run the programs - they should all just run slow.
WinXP can't handle that. On my particular installation,
there is also some kind of leak in NTFS file system driver,
which cases the file system to consume more CPU cycles,
after 200GB or more of writes. Those are examples of
WinXP flaws I've seen. But since my programs load
relatively fast, I tend to forgive the other
"corner" cases. I don't run four copies of Prime95
all that often :-)

Paul