Questions about the "end of Windows 7"

On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 17:14:29 +0000, PeterC
wrote:

On Mon, 04 Mar 2019 08:47:37 -0700, Ken Blake wrote:

I have
wondered if W8 could be tamed to be like W7.

Both Classic Shell and, even better, Start8 get it very close.

I use StartMenuX. Had some problems with the usual apps - can't remember
what after 3 years but the setup is now OK.

Thing is, I've managed to get
W7 very close to looking and feeling like XP, i.e. cut all the frippery and
crap.
Given the impending 'demise' of W7 I have wondered about W8. Sorry.

I think it's a very poor choice, but there are those who disagree.

Yes, but at least it gives a few more years.


IICBA I'd try Devuan - at least it doesn't have SystemD.


Not me. As I said yesterday in another message in this thread, I have
no interest in Linux.

On 3/3/19 1:36 PM, Java Jive wrote:

[snip]

In W2k & XP, Control Panel was available in a single column 'Details'
view, but now there is only an icon viewÂ* -Â* people never seem to
understand that searching a 2D array of icons de ipso facto is less
efficient than searching a 1D list, because you have to keep moving your
eyes/head from side to side and then down to scan down an array of
icons, but only have to move your eyes/head in one direction down a
single list.

I definitely agree with you there. One of the first things I do after OS
installation is change that setting.

[snip]

For me, the only version of Windows that had a GUI that even came close
to meriting being described as 'professional' was 2kÂ* -Â* it wasn't so
out of the box, because like every other it defaulted in everything to
icon and not list view, etc, but by dint of some time well spent when
first installed, it could be made acceptably professional.

Considering the GUI, W2K was my preferred version.

BTW, I used it for about 3 years after that so-called "end of life".

With each
version of Windows since, it's taken longer and longer to achieve even
an acceptable result, and even then it's not as professional as 2k.

Yes.

Also, since W2K, there's been a lot of fancy GUI stuff (things like
rounder corners, fake shadows, and UIs made to look like physical
devices) that make no sense on a computer screen.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they
do, but that they try to make us do as they think." [H.L. Mencken]

On 04/03/2019 18:10, Mark Lloyd wrote:

More and more fake directories. I wish directory programs like "Windows
Explorer" would limit themselves to what's actually on the disk.

Exactly! The guiding principle should be that the OS is the OS and a
user's data belongs to the user, and the OS has no business at all
getting involved in it, still less to the "job's worth" extent of
forcing the user to have a pile of crap that they don't need or want. I
keep all my stuff on a separate partition anyway, so what earthly good
are ...
Application Data
Contacts
Cookies
Downloads
Libraries
My Documents
My Favourites, sorry My Favorites
My Music
My Pictures
My Videos
Saved Games
Searches
.... as far as I am concerned, it's all just more bloat.

Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 15:37:33 +0000, Java Jive
wrote:

On 04/03/2019 15:33, Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 12:02:51 +0000, Java Jive
wrote:

On 04/03/2019 06:03, Mike wrote:

Computers are so fast that speed ain't that much of an issue.
Back when it was runtime difference between half a minute and five
minutes, efficiency mattered a lot.

Well, you'd've thought it shouldn't be by now, but it certainly still
is here. Win10 as supplied on this second hand/used PC took several
minutes to boot, the W7 that I replaced it with comfortably less than a
minute.

My personal view is that the attention many people pay to how long it
takes to boot is usually unwarranted.

No, not really, because it's a simple measure of how well and
responsively it can run that OS. If it takes two or minutes to even get
to the point that you can log in, then most probably it's going to be
just as slow when logged in.

Assuming that the computer's
speed is otherwise satisfactory, it is not generally worth worrying
about.

That's the flaw in your argument, it generally isn't. On this PC W7 is
usable, but perhaps a little sluggish, whereas W10 is unusable.



I said "assuming that." If it's not, it's not. If its speed is
generally unsatisfactory, then that's what you should complain about,
not about one little piece of what it does--how long it takes to boot.

Despite what I said above, I actually know it takes several minutes
for my computer to boot, and the reason it takes as long as it does is
that I have several large programs start automatically. To me, that's
good, not bad. If they didn't start automatically, I would have to
start them after I got my coffee, and that would take extra time.

But when it's finished booting, it's fine. I have no complaints about
its speed (and I'm running Windows 10 Professional).

My wife's computer, on the other hand (also running Windows 10), has
almost nothing starting automatically. Her computer boots very quickly
and runs very quickly after booting.

It would be interesting to know what you consider "boots very quickly"
means, but if it does, I'm assuming you're using a SSD. Otherwise I'm
gonna guess it's several minutes.

I wonder if anyone has a computer using Windows 7 or 10 that boots up in a
couple of minutes without a SSD. IOW, not 4 or 5 or 10 minutes, to the
finish screen.

On 3/3/19 2:54 PM, Bill in Co wrote:

[snip]

Carriage return???? You mean for a horse and buggy??? :-)

"Don't step in the exhaust."

--
"Of course, we cannot guarantee our Bibles against normal wear or
abuse." [Oxford University Press]

On 3/3/19 3:58 PM, Jukka Lahtinen wrote:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink

Typewriter??? What is a typewriter? LOL.

A noisy real-time printer that prints each letter to the paper as you
type it.

and a poor delete function that leaves a sticky mess.

(referring to liquid paper)

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they
do, but that they try to make us do as they think." [H.L. Mencken]

On 3/3/19 8:24 PM, Mike wrote:

[snip]

Vista started out as crap because it was unfinished.
By the time 7 arrived, Vista appeared to be up to that
level.Â* I switched from Vista to 7 only because Media
Center in Vista wouldn't allow more than 2 TV tuners.

For any windows install, the second thing I do after disabling updates
is to go into advanced
system settings and turn off all visual effects except smoothing of
fonts.Â* As long as I can get a video driver that supports 1920x1080,
I'm good to go.

and turn off the option (for "Windows Explorer") that lies to you about
file names. This makes it easy for malware writers, they can put on a
file named "stuff.txt.exe" that gets shown as "stuff.txt". Click on it
and Windows knows this is an .EXE, so you get the virus instead of a
harmless text file.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they
do, but that they try to make us do as they think." [H.L. Mencken]

On 3/4/2019 6:54 AM, Mayayana wrote:
"Mike" wrote

| Today, it's not at all about the speed or size or functionality
| of a program.
| It's all about CASH FLOW.
| It's about first to market, biggest lure for the clueless masses,
| shortest design cycle, lowest cost, highest profit.
|

Yes. I have a friend who does software testing
for a company that releases weekly! I asked her
what language they code in. She gave me a list.
It turned out their "software" is actually a webpage
running all kinds of script libraries like jquery, along
with all kinds of back-end scripting and tools. I
can't imagine it's anything but seat-of-the-pants
programming. JQuery, as far as I can tell, is a giant
javascript wrapper for people who don't know either
javascript or web design.

| The same reason you probably
| have 5 rusty old fans in your attic. Hopefully you don't
| buy a toboggan that you need to store.
|
| My hobby is buying stuff at garage sales, fixing it up nice and storing
| it in the attic.
| We probably wouldn't get along...

We might. At least I'd know who to ask if I
needed to replace a broken bakelite handle on a
1950 toaster.

But that's getting to be a difficult hobby. Everything
is made disposable these days.

That's a good thing. Otherwise, there wouldn't be any repairable
stuff at garage sales. Early adopters ensure there's lots of usable
stuff available for cheap and not even busted.

I find that most everything can be fixed.
All you need is duct tape.
And superglue
And a spot welder
And a lathe
And a solder reflow fixture
And a friend with a 3D printer
And an equivalent device from which to steal parts
And be satisfied with a wheel that's not quite round.

And, most importantly, the realization that your time is worthless.

The key to a happy life is low expectations.
Go with the flow, even if that puts windows 10 on your machine.

I hate to throw
out toaster ovens and DVD players, but it's more
expensive to fix them, if it's even possible. We talk
about global warming but more things are disposable
than ever before, there's more unnecessary packaging
than ever before, and the economy depends on it
more than ever before.

Humans are selfish. I'm very frugal with Earth's resources,
but it doesn't make a dent. Luckily, I'll be dead before
we kill the planet.

Bill in Co wrote:
Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 10:37:23 -0700, "Bill in Co"
surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote:


Caveat: I'm running either XP or Win 7 32 bit, so 1 or 2 GB seems to be
adequate,

In my experience, not for most people. Sometimes 2GB is enough, but
1GB is very rarely enough. But it mostly depends on what applications
you run and how big are the data files you use them on. For example,
edit a large video file and it's unlikely you'd be happy with 2GB.


and rarely have more than one or two applications open at the same
time.

In general, how many applications you have open hardly matters. Much
more important is what applications they are, and especially whether
they are doing something at the moment. Even a big application, if
it's open and you're not doing anything with it, will quickly get
paged out and not affect the performance of the program you're
actively running.

I mentioned this in another post, but probably should add it he
Caveat: I'm running either XP or Win 7 32 bit, so 1 or 2 GB seems to be
adequate, and rarely have more than one or two applications open at the same
time. I bought an old Win 7 laptop on ebay with Win 7, and more
specifically, the 32 bit version of Win 7. And I'll add one more thing,
and that's that the programs I use are not memory intensive,or albatrosses
like Adobe.

Test your OSes in a virtual machine and see how
much they need.

I've run Windows 10 on 256MB, and you can open Notepad.
The Memory Compressor (whatever that is) runs continuously.

1GB should be sufficient for Vista/Win7/Win8/Win10.

If you apply memory pressure to the OSes, their memory
usage drops to 350MB or so. But you can start them with
less memory and see how they hold up.

The Memory Compressor should not be running at a
significant level, if you boot with 1GB memory available
total.

And the usage properties of the Pagefile are different
on these OSes as well. The Pagefile doesn't get used
quite as much (which might be an attempt to help SSD drives).

Paul

On 3/3/19 9:52 PM, Roger Blake wrote:

[snip]

Although I no longer use a typewriter, I do have a pretty ancient
Panasonic KX-P1124 dot matrix printer for use with multipart forms.
I actually bought it for use with a Commodore 64 what seems like
a lifetime ago. I'm continually amazed that it still works.

I had an Epson MX-80 for use with my C64 until the late nineties when I
sold it (with as 80386sx PC).

BTW, I still have a C64. It could last a long time, since it's seldom used.

--
Mark Lloyd
http://notstupid.us/

"The objection to Puritans is not that they try to make us think as they
do, but that they try to make us do as they think." [H.L. Mencken]

"Mike" wrote

| https://jsware.net/jsware/msicode.php5
|
| Looks like it works.

I should say so!

If it ever doesn't I'd appreciate hearing about it.
If you look at the version history you'll see that
every once in awhile I find I've overlooked a way
to screw up an MSI that I hadn't planned for. Oddly,
it's been an MS MVP and Microsoft themselves who
have made the faulty MSIs I've come across
in the past. Then the unpacker doesn't work right
and I have to figure out what they screwed up and
find a way to work around it.

Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 3/3/19 9:52 PM, Roger Blake wrote:

[snip]

Although I no longer use a typewriter, I do have a pretty ancient
Panasonic KX-P1124 dot matrix printer for use with multipart forms.
I actually bought it for use with a Commodore 64 what seems like
a lifetime ago. I'm continually amazed that it still works.

I had an Epson MX-80 for use with my C64 until the late nineties when I
sold it (with as 80386sx PC).

BTW, I still have a C64. It could last a long time, since it's seldom
used.

I had a LOT of fun messing around with its predecessor, the VIC-20. And I
didn't even have any backup, so after writing some programs in BASIC, or
occasionally assembly using the HesMon adapter, I'd have to leave the
computer continually, if I ever wanted to resume playing with it. Then I
got to heaven by finally purchasing the cassette tape backup recorder, so I
could finally save any programs I was writing, and turn the thing off. :-)

Mayayana wrote:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote

I took a look at that start menu in your Windows 10 jpg. Is that what
you call a good and usable start menu?? It's just a bunch of silly
tiles to me. So I gather that's what Windows 10 is all about - tiles up
the kazoo. Why would any rational person want that, over the much
simpler and more descriptive text menu entries for their programs?


No, silly. It's international. Don't know what a
picture of a squirrel with tire tracks across it means?
Serves you right. Now you know how someone in
China feels trying to read "Irfan View", you
insensitive clod.

I'm allowed to be insensitive now, since it's been greenlighted by our
infamous POTUS, as our Commander In Chief. Do try to keep up with the
times, you snowflake! :-)

On 04/03/2019 18:32, Bill in Co wrote:

I wonder if anyone has a computer using Windows 7 or 10 that boots up in a
couple of minutes without a SSD. IOW, not 4 or 5 or 10 minutes, to the
finish screen.

Yes, this one - I haven't actually timed it, but, unless it's doing
updates, it boots within about a minute, in fact my guess would be that
if measured from the grub menu comfortably within a minute.

FTR, it's a second-hand/used Dell Precision M6300, Intel Core 2 Duo
(T7500) @ 2.2GHz, 4GB RAM, running W7 64-bit Ultimate on a Toshiba
MQ01ABD050V, a conventional HD. It's not as fast as my other W7 laptop
- a Dell Inspiron 15RSE 7520 Core i5-3210M @ 2.5GHz with 8GB RAM
running Windows 7 Home Premium on a Western Digital WDC
WD10JPVT-75A1YT0, again a conventional HD (which has just taken 21
seconds from switch on to logon screen for a resume after hibernation,
no grub menu on that one) - but then no-one in their right mind would
expect it to be.

It groans sometimes loading a memory hungry program, for example Firefox
(I use Pale Moon which has a much smaller memory footprint for more or
less the same functionality), but generally it's fine running my
everyday stuff - Explorer, Pale Moon, two copies of Thunderbird (one
for mail, another for news), Digiguide UK TV guide, a console or two, a
backup program which I run in the evening but otherwise just sits there,
and usually Explorer within Control Panel in a separate Window from the
above. These are nearly always running, other programs are run as
needed. I've used some fairly resource-intensive programs such as
FFMPEG and Handbrake on it, and it copes fairly well.

By contrast W10 took ages to get to the login screen, at a guess at
least about 3 minutes, and was unusable thereafter.

I should perhaps point out that I've customised this build, so Task
Manager shows about 40-50 processes running when the machine is idle
with no programs loaded (and, as already pointed out, that's still
double what I've been able to whittle W2k & XP down to), whereas W10 was
running as supplied by the reseller, but I didn't and still don't think
it would be worth even considering customising W10 to try and run it on
this PC - I'm pretty sure that it would still be unacceptably slow.

I did have a Precision M4300, a slightly slower older model with 4GB RAM
and a conventional HD, and it struggled more with W7, so in the end I
sysprep-ed my 32-bit XP build on it until I could decide what to do with
it, but the decision has now been taken out of my hands - it's now one
of a myriad of items of electronic or electrical equipment that has died
on me in the last 18 months or so. I shan't bore you by listing every
single one, even supposing I could remember them all, but they range
from that laptop to my mobile phone to an electric fan to a 3-year old
fridge freezer to a washing machine with god knows how many routers in
between, and the latest is that my immersion heater has just died so I
have no running hot water. Fortunately however, I fixed the shower a
year or two back, so at least I'm clean, even if for the moment the
dishes aren't !-(

"Ken Blake" wrote


In general, how many applications you have open hardly matters. Much
more important is what applications they are, and especially whether
they are doing something at the moment.


Not necessarily. Pale Moon is using 150 MB RAM here just to
sit there. Firefox is similar. And they're the older versions that
don't run each instance in a separate process. If you have
40 tabs open, doing nothing, in recent vintage Firefox, you'll
still have each one loading independent instances of at least
some parts of the program.

On the other hand, visual Studio 6 (VB) loaded with a
large project loaded is using 1/8th as much RAM. Even
with the additional load of the entire MSDN help system it's
using about 1/5 of what FF takes to sit there. And I
still have more than 2/3 of my 3+ GB free.

I suspect many of the people who complain about RAM
are running bloated browsers with loads of tabs open,
in which they're logged into various sites like Google
or Facebook, and allowing videos to load in pages they're
not even looking at. Most people also don't block auto-refresh.
So things like news sites are reloading the whole thing
every few minutes.
Tabs have arguably been a disaster in that sense, making
it easy for people to keep a multitude of webpages open at
once, for no reason, at a time when webpages have become
amazingly bloated. A few years ago 100 KB was too big to load.
Now a single page that loads 20 MB is not unusual. That's
bigger than most software programs.