Why do you still use Windows XP?

In ,
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message , BillW50
writes:
[]
I don't think Vista was ever offered much on netbooks, though I
could be wrong.

I put Windows 7 on a netbook (EeePC 702 with 16GB SSD) once and it
was awful! As Windows 7 ate up 50% of the CPU power at idle.

There are limits! I once overrode the limits and ran NT on a machine
with 4M of RAM; it worked in the sense that nothing malfunctioned, but
not in a way that could be described as usable. Or, '95 on a '486
(with something like 16 or 32M); that was just about usable, but I'd
not like to go back to those days. I don't know what sort of
processor an EeePC 702 has (nor how much RAM, as opposed to SSD), but
I'd imagine even XP would groan on it: weren't those mostly
originally sold with the (well-disguised) Linux that was customised
for them?

The Asus EeePC 702 (like all 700 series) comes with a Celeron 900MHz,
which they underclock down to 633MHz. Being underclocked they are
virtually impossible to overheat. In fact some have removed the fan to
have a completely noiseless netbook and they work well without a fan.

Most of the 700 series came Xandros Linux. These were the first netbooks
on the market and the ones that you have heard came with Linux. Although
they always came with XP drivers too, in case you rather run XP. Only
much later did they offer XP instead on these machines.

The 702's came with 1GB of RAM but I upgraded all of mine to 2GB. And
stock, 702s came with a 8GB SSD. But I had to upgrade the 8GB to 16GB
just to install Windows 7.

I was shocked how slow Windows 7 ran on it. Eating 50% of the CPU at
idle means that Windows 7 eats about 300Mhz of CPU power just for
itself. 30 years ago if you asked me if an OS eating 300Mhz of the CPU
power would be ok I would say that is crazy. Now jump to 30 years later
and I still think it is crazy.

I started testing Windows 7 on other computers and the 300MHz loss of
CPU power was the norm. In fact, I couldn't find any single core
processor that could run Windows 7 well enough. Only multi-core
processors is the performance satisfactory.

XP flies on the 702 btw. The only problem with XP on the 702 was
sometimes DPCs ate 50, 80 or sometimes 100% of the CPU power. I am not
sure why that happens. It seems to be related to radio interference
nearby. Linux doesn't run as well on these machines especially when
flash or video is involved.

--
Bill
Gateway M465e ('06 era) - OE-QuoteFix v1.19.2
Centrino Core Duo T2400 1.83GHz - 2GB - Windows XP SP3

In message , Char Jackson
writes:
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 08:55:26 -0500, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

Per Char Jackson:
...I'm surprised to hear that a minor shuffling of folder
structures caused you more than a few seconds of downtime. It
shouldn't have taken longer than that to see what the new folder
structure was and get back on track.....

Maybe this is more a comment on my lack of gray matter... but, as
another computer user with decades of experience, I post rants on
a regular basis on the subject of Microsoft's gratuitously moving
the furniture around.

Yeah, coping with a given function may only be a few lost
minutes... but those minutes add up over many functions and
hopping back-and-forth between OS' doesn't help any either.

If it were only the few hours total that a retail user like me
lost, I guess it would be no big deal in the grand scheme of
things. But for a company with 20,000 employees - all of whom
are going to lose those few hours and maybe more if they wind up
going to some sort of class on the new sys..... I would say
that's a *very* big deal man hour-wise.

First, it doesn't really work that way, although that's an easy way
(and unfortunately a common way) to look at it. Twenty thousand
employees losing some amount of time isn't the same as the company
losing 20,000 times that amount of time. I read an article that
pointed out that it's more like everyone losing some amount of time in
parallel rather than serial, so the amount of lost time is the average
amount lost rather than the total amount lost. I suspect that will
generate some comments since it's different from what we're usually
told.

It's also rubbish, I'm afraid. Ten people losing an average of an hour
represents significantly more lost time than five people losing an
average of an hour (same average); granted, possibly not twice as much
(though I would say it was), but certainly not the same. The fact that
the time is parallel rather than serial would only make a difference if
their work was pipelined, like a very old-fashioned production line,
which is unlikely to be using Windows 7 computers.

Second, I suspect the transition from XP to Vista/7 was a lot smoother
than you make out. My employer transitioned from XP to 7 around the
end of 2010 and it went without a single whimper. On Friday we had XP
SP3 with Office 2007, and on Monday we had Win 7 with Office 2010. I
don't recall hearing a single complaint within my area, but of course

No, they were all too busy figuring out how to do things ... (-:

I can't speak for the entire 60,000 employee base. Likewise, my wife's
employer is considering a move from XP to 7, so they've started by
giving that combo to a few people in each department to see how they

That's a less risky approach. My employer does it something like that -
or for some things a wide roll-out, but not instantaneous.

handle it. My wife was selected, and she reported that there was no
interruption in her work flow. For people who use applications, it's

XP to 7 as the OS, for people that just use applications, probably
little or no interruption, especially if they use the default locations
for everything (and the people doing the transfer move the files from
the old default location to the new). Office 2007 to '10 probably also
not a great change: 2003 to 2010 (or even 2007) a bit more, as users
have to find where all their old actions are in the new ribbon. (Their
old actions may have been in illogical places, but at least they knew
where they were.)
[]
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

I multitask... I read in the bathroom.

Char Jackson wrote in
:

First, it doesn't really work that way, although that's an easy way
(and unfortunately a common way) to look at it. Twenty thousand
employees losing some amount of time isn't the same as the company
losing 20,000 times that amount of time. I read an article that
pointed out that it's more like everyone losing some amount of time in
parallel rather than serial, so the amount of lost time is the average
amount lost rather than the total amount lost. I suspect that will
generate some comments since it's different from what we're usually
told.


Averages, and statistics, can say almost anything, especially in a magazine
article.

What matters is that if 20,000 workers spend one hour each on something that
stops them doing 1 hour of useful work, that's 20,000 hours of useful work
that didn't get done, and even if it all happened in one hour, that's time
you can't get back. Enough man-hours lost to put a firm into bankruptcy, or
at least 'administration' in times like these.

Depending on exactly what 'useful work' happens to be, the values might be
hard to assess, but in anything that takes an easily quantifiable amount of
time and energy, the lost working time is as easily calculable as numbers of
bricks carried, or numbers of miles driven.

Most failing businesses fail as a result of losing track of this basic
detail, not from failing to grasp finer points of statistics and averages.
Same logic that makes a 'business plan' nonsense the moment it goes beyond a
tangible count of orders placed.

If the work time is spent on coding or design, it's much harder to quantify,
but there is still a huge impact on the ease and rate of that work, based on
distractions alone. Precisely quantifiable or not, the effect of disruption
in a working environment is immense.

"Ken Blake, MVP" wrote in
:

It's true that Windows 7 performance on the EEE is very poor, but
since I essentially use it only for E-mail when traveling, I don't
have any real problem with that.

Awesome. There is a phrase: "sledgemhammer to crack a nut". I think an OS
that reduces a 900 MHz machine (allegedly underclocked to about 633 MHz?), to
the point where handling emails is about the limit of immediate aspirations
for it, has set a new record for some kind of sense of proportion.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 18:16:27 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:

In ,
Char Jackson wrote:
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 16:18:52 -0600, "BillW50" wrote:

In ,
Char Jackson wrote:

I see nothing difficult about moving between two versions of Windows,

You don't? I do!

That's right, I don't, and I doubt that I'm more mentally agile than
the average bear. It's just not that big of a deal. And yes, I know
that you find it difficult because you proclaim it loudly and often.

and in fact to me it's very little different from moving between two
TVs, two cars, two bathrooms in the house, and a hundred other
examples.

They are standardized. Try driving a car that uses the accelerator on
the left and the brake on the right. How fun would that be? Or if the
steering wheel went right when you turned left? Sure you could get used
to it, but it is still stupid.

I've ridden motorcycles for most of my life. The standard location for
gear shift is at your left foot and the rear brake at your right foot,
but a friend of mine had a Brit bike (Triumph?) that had the shifter
and rear brake reversed. I don't even want to say it took 5 seconds to
get used to it because it really took no time at all.

Second example, I bought a bike in 2007 that had the gear shift on the
left handlebar. Time to get used to it was measured in seconds, and
all happened before I tossed a leg over the seat. Not a big deal.

Third example, as a small town kid I learned to drive when I was 6 and
began driving regularly when I was 10 or 11. The steering wheel was
always on the left side until I delivered mail, where the steering
wheel was on the right side. Again, I don't think there was any time
spent on getting used to it. You just get in and drive, just like you
just get on the bike and ride it. We humans are smart enough to adapt
to our surroundings. That ability diminishes with age, some faster
than others, but still.

You already know about the fourth example. I move back and forth from
XP to 7 many times throughout the day. There is no period of
adjustment required. I just do what I need to do, and if that means
going to \Users instead of \Documents and Settings, for example, then
so be it. It's trivial to remember little things like that.

I think the TV example was valid, too. Depending on where I am in the
house, I watch one of three TV's, each a different brand with a
completely different remote. I have zero problems picking up any of
the remotes and using it by touch. How is that possible, you say? It's
because we humans can adapt to our environment. Less so as we get
older, perhaps, but I'm not there yet.

I suppose the day is coming when I'll be where you are now, stuck in
my ways and no longer able to adapt, but I hope that day is far off.

| I see nothing difficult about moving between two versions of Windows,
|
| You don't? I do!
|
| That's right, I don't

You seem to be arguing with a number of people
in this thread that they're simply wrong, stubborn,
living in the past, or senile for not wanting to switch
to Windows 7. I wonder why you spend so much time
hanging around in an XP newsgroup in the first place.
Does it just bug you that everyone isn't a "novaphile"?

People can have different opinions
about the changes between systems, but your claim
that there's very little change simply isn't true. For
corporate employees who only use MS Word, the
version of Word may be the most notable factor. They
wolud probably have more trouble switching Word versions
than they would switching Windows versions. Those are
the vast number of people who email from Word, print
from Word, work on Word, and actually have no idea
where their files are. ("It's OK. Word knows.") Those
people don't use PCs. They use MS Word.

But for people who really use their PC, who install their
own software, and who are facile with Windows Explorer,
the changes from XP to Vista/7 are extensive. The
restrictions are just one very big change. It's true
that those restrictions were in place for "lackey"
users on XP installed to NTFS, but that scenario was/is
virtually non-existent outside of corporate workstations.
Vista/7 has made it very difficult not to operate as a
corporate lackey on a workstation PC.

Per Char Jackson:
Do you also get confused when you shop at two stores, and
the second store is not the same as the first?

I see that as a pretty good analog. I wouldn't use the word
"confused", but the local grocery store re-arranges the food
locations I definitely lose time on my next shopping trip - and
I've heard other people complain about it.

The spiel I heard from the grocery store perspective is that
moving stuff around increases sales because people wind up
wandering past products they had not considered buying before -
as they try to find the products on their shopping list.

I'd say it's definitely a time sink from the customer
perspective.
--
Pete Cresswell

Per Char Jackson:
That's right, I don't, and I doubt that I'm more mentally agile than
the average bear. It's just not that big of a deal.

When I used to write mainframe code - way back before anybody
even thought about coding standards - the most
heinously-difficult-to-maintain code seemed tb written by the
smartest people in the shop.

My theory: they were so smart that code being difficult to
understand just didn't occur to them.
--
Pete Cresswell

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in
:

When I used to write mainframe code - way back before anybody
even thought about coding standards - the most
heinously-difficult-to-maintain code seemed tb written by the
smartest people in the shop.

My theory: they were so smart that code being difficult to
understand just didn't occur to them.


That figures. While looking for examples of ANSI C making tabbed controls
(like properties pages) using the Win32 API and no MFC, etc, I saw a few
posts that helped, scattered around the web on forums, and one point that
recurred was commentary that MSDN, the usual source of info that 'experts'
expect people to turn to, was a desert of contextless unhelpful noise.

There is something particularly indolent, stupid, conceited, and narrow-
minded going on when people who want everyone to think they are at the top of
the game, also claiming (or just beleiving) that everyone can and should
already know the same stuff. They can't have it both ways.

The REALLY smart stuff that I have found, is invariably written by a person
who has just learned to do it, and who can present a small, complete working
example. Not surprising, really. Sure, they are NOT experts, but who is
better at drawing a map? The guy who takes time to note details as he passes
a route? Or the idiot who thinks he can draw it all from memory long after he
finished the trail and left the territory?

"(PeteCresswell)" wrote in
:

Per Char Jackson:
Do you also get confused when you shop at two stores, and
the second store is not the same as the first?

I see that as a pretty good analog. I wouldn't use the word
"confused", but the local grocery store re-arranges the food
locations I definitely lose time on my next shopping trip - and
I've heard other people complain about it.

The spiel I heard from the grocery store perspective is that
moving stuff around increases sales because people wind up
wandering past products they had not considered buying before -
as they try to find the products on their shopping list.

I'd say it's definitely a time sink from the customer
perspective.

Interesting.. One thing I noticed once, a local shop had changed a lino
floor, but kept everything else as it had been. I had seen the old lono floor
a couple of times a week for years, but the moment I saw the new floor, I had
no ability to recall what the old one had looked like! This had no effect on
my shopping time other than mentioning this fact as a curiosity, when paying,
but the effect was strange, and if anythign HAD relied on the bit of memory
that had stalled, I might well have lost a lot more time, or been disoncerted
enough to leave if I knew another shop I could remember was equally easy to
reach.

One supermarket (Gateway, now the Co-op, in Britain), decided to arrange its
long shelves like those non-touching perpendicular raised bars often seen on
drain covers. The idea was that no long views could be had, compelling people
to look more closely, and walk around ends of shelves to see the sides of
others. They assumed that this would cause a rise of sales by making people
think of more things they could buy. This failed. Never mind 'getting used to
it', or adapting to new layouts, some layouts are INHERENTLY unhelpful. That
one cost them money, and the next refit saw a return to standard parallel
aisles. Arguably that debacle was why eventually Gateway lost the store to
the Co-op.

From a few posts here, and on the web, it's beginning to look as if Microsoft
have made a similar error.

On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:31:16 -0000, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"BillW50" wrote in :

You forget that you can make Windows 95
to look very much like Windows 3.1 if you would like.

File Manager? That is a vision I now wish I could wash off.


type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.

--
[dash dash space newline 4line sig]

Albi CNU

In message op.v91kosyf1r0rdn@dell3100, Harry Vaderchi
writes:
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:31:16 -0000, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"BillW50" wrote in :

You forget that you can make Windows 95
to look very much like Windows 3.1 if you would like.

File Manager? That is a vision I now wish I could wash off.


type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.

I just did, and didn't find it anywhere on my hard drives. I do remember
that it was still there on '9x, though I only ever used it once or twice
as a curiosity.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:
In message op.v91kosyf1r0rdn@dell3100, Harry Vaderchi
writes:
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:31:16 -0000, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"BillW50" wrote in :

You forget that you can make Windows 95
to look very much like Windows 3.1 if you would like.

File Manager? That is a vision I now wish I could wash off.


type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.

I just did, and didn't find it anywhere on my hard drives. I do remember
that it was still there on '9x, though I only ever used it once or twice
as a curiosity.
--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
-Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

File Manager (winfile) was in some ways nicer to use than Windows Explorer,
but it didn't support long file names. I think you might be able to still
run it on XP, but it's not a good idea, since it is unaware of long file
names (and will break them if you do anything with them using File Manager).

On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:32:39 -0000, J. P. Gilliver (John)
wrote:

In message op.v91kosyf1r0rdn@dell3100, Harry Vaderchi
writes:
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:31:16 -0000, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"BillW50" wrote in :

You forget that you can make Windows 95
to look very much like Windows 3.1 if you would like.

File Manager? That is a vision I now wish I could wash off.


type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.

I just did, and didn't find it anywhere on my hard drives. I do remember
that it was still there on '9x, though I only ever used it once or twice
as a curiosity.

Ah, when I said Search, I was avoiding typing g**gle; and I omitted a
space - try here
http://www.brydon.net/winfile/



--
[dash dash space newline 4line sig]

Albi CNU

In message op.v92saock1r0rdn@dell3100, Harry Vaderchi
writes:
On Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:32:39 -0000, J. P. Gilliver (John)
wrote:

In message op.v91kosyf1r0rdn@dell3100, Harry Vaderchi
writes:
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012 22:31:16 -0000, Lostgallifreyan
wrote:

"BillW50" wrote in :

You forget that you can make Windows 95
to look very much like Windows 3.1 if you would like.

File Manager? That is a vision I now wish I could wash off.


type "winfile" or search for NTwinfile for XP systems.
the NT version has very good permission controls added in.

I just did, and didn't find it anywhere on my hard drives. I do
remember that it was still there on '9x, though I only ever used it
once or twice as a curiosity.

Ah, when I said Search, I was avoiding typing g**gle; and I omitted a
space - try here
http://www.brydon.net/winfile/

Ah, sorry.


--
J. P. Gilliver. UMRA: 1960/1985 MB++G.5AL-IS-P--Ch++(p)Ar@T0H+Sh0!:`)DNAf

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible,
he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he
is
very probably wrong." - Arthur C. Clarke