Questions about the "end of Windows 7"

"Mark Lloyd" wrote

| In 2018, I did my 2017 taxes at Credit Karma ( creditkarma.com ).
| It's free, unlike desktop software. And though it uses the same
| interview approach as Block and Turbotax, the prompts are much better
| written. I'm sticking with Credit Karma this year.
|
| It's NOT free (no corporation would spend hundreds of thousands of
| dollars for TV advertising to give something away). It may be OK, but do
| consider what you're paying (money isn't the only important thing).
|
| If you don't pay for the product, YOU'RE the product.
|

I was wondering about that. They show ads? Or do
they actually sell your personal info? I suppose their
TOS would tell. Personally I've always done my own
taxes, using the IRS manuals. I can't imagine uploading
all that data to some online company who says they'll
file for me. What a seductive stash of data for hackers!

Java Jive wrote:
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 !-(

Well, ok, I actually timed mine, and it took 1 minute to the log-on screen,
and a bit over 2 minutes, to the finish boot up screen.. This is a Dell
Latitude E6500 laptop, with Windows 7 Professional 32 bit, 2.8 GHz, and 4 GB
of RAM. So my memory was off. I got it on eBay, and specifically wanted,
and got, the 32 bit version.

I also use Pale Moon, or rather, New Moon, a build of PM that still works on
XP. Like you, I find it a bit lighterweight than Firefox.

Wolf K wrote:
On 2019-03-04 13:10, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 3/3/19 12:56 PM, Stan Brown wrote:

[snip]

In their defense, every new version of Microsoft software, both
Windows and Office, makes it significantly harder to _know_ what is
going on behind the screen. I remember the whole Libraries stuff that
was introduced in Windows 7, so that we could no longer know where
files were being saved.

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


????

Example of something that's not on the disk, please.

Maybe the infamous junction points and directories that you can never reach
the end of, when traversing with Windows Explorer? Virtual directories.

On 3/4/2019 10:31 AM, Java Jive wrote:
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!Â* 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.Â* I
keep all my stuff on a separate partition anyway, so what earthly good
are ...
Â*Â*Â*Â*Application Data
Â*Â*Â*Â*Contacts
Â*Â*Â*Â*Cookies
Â*Â*Â*Â*Downloads
Â*Â*Â*Â*Libraries
Â*Â*Â*Â*My Documents
Â*Â*Â*Â*My Favourites, sorry My Favorites
Â*Â*Â*Â*My Music
Â*Â*Â*Â*My Pictures
Â*Â*Â*Â*My Videos
Â*Â*Â*Â*Saved Games
Â*Â*Â*Â*Searches
... as far as I am concerned, it's all just more bloat.

It's called STANDARDIZATION and it's the cornerstone of interoperability.

You may not like it.
It may have historical constraints that make it less desirable
than if you started over today, but it works for joe average user.

Let me hasten to add that nobody here is joe average user.

They're defaults, but most of the time, your files can be directed
to or moved to your favorite file organization. I don't have
anything I need in ANY of the above directories. Applications
that I use have stuff there, but I don't need to know about it.

You and I may think we know better than M$ and seek to edit stuff
in protected directories, but joe average should stay the hell out.

If you want to see what happens without that standardized default file
structure and the bloated registry, look no further than linux.

Take two different flavors of linux and some applications.
Developers have freedom. Users get to go on a scavenger hunt
to see whether the text editor they know how to use is installed.
And if it isn't they have to go figger out which application installer
they need to use to install the application installer they know
to implement the steps in the tutorial they read using the default browser
that they had to learn how to use.
Then, they get to go figger out whether the .conf file they need to edit
got put in usr or usr/lib or user/lib or /etc or any of the other places
random stuff gets put by random developers with no guidance.
Never mind that they have no idea what needs to be put into that .conf
file, or understand that this particular .conf file gets overwritten so
they have to use a specific utility to enter their changes into that file.
God help them if they screw it up.

Ask any Windows guru how to edit the registry to do this or that
and they'll give you an answer that's likely to work.

Ask any linux guru and you'll get a ration of crap about how stupid you
are. If you're lucky enough to find someone helpful, you'll get a detailed
answer for what works on HIS system, but is less likely to work on yours.
Ain't freedom grand.

M$ took a step backwards when they left some configuration in control
panel and put more/similar/conflicting configurations in the gear on the
start menu. Then they obfuscated a lot of it with GUID identifiers
instead of readable text.

Standardized defaults good.
Chaos BAD!

On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 11:32:48 -0700, "Bill in Co"
surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote:

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.


Although my computer (the slow one to boot) boots from an SSD, my
wife's doesn't. Hers boots from a hard drive. I've never timed how
long it takes to boot, but your guess is wrong. It's well under one
minute.


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 2019-03-04, Mark Lloyd wrote:
BTW, I still have a C64. It could last a long time, since it's seldom used.

I still have mine along with the 1541 floppy drive and various other
accessories. (Even the Z80 CP/M cartridge.) It still worked last time
I fired it up but that was probably 5-6 years ago.

--
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On Mon, 4 Mar 2019 14:34:55 -0500, Wolf K
wrote:

On 2019-03-04 13:10, Mark Lloyd wrote:
On 3/3/19 12:56 PM, Stan Brown wrote:

[snip]

In their defense, every new version of Microsoft software, both
Windows and Office, makes it significantly harder to _know_ what is
going on behind the screen. I remember the whole Libraries stuff that
was introduced in Windows 7, so that we could no longer know where
files were being saved.

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


????

Example of something that's not on the disk, please.


Network Locations
OneDrive

On 04/03/2019 19:44, Mike wrote:

It's called STANDARDIZATION and it's the cornerstone of interoperability.

You may not like it.
It may have historical constraints that make it less desirable
than if you started over today, but it works for joe average user.

It doesn't, because what happens with Joe Average is that (s)he
downloads so much stuff that they fill up the system drive, and the
whole thing grinds to a halt. If you are a UK resident, you can
convince yourself of this very easily by installing the BBC's iPlayer
downloader program. Unless it's been changed since I last used it about
4 years ago, it will ONLY allow you to download stuff to the C: drive,
there is no means of configuring it to save downloads elsewhere. So you
leave it downloading overnight, and in the morning find a PC that takes
several minutes to respond to a single keystroke.

Let me hasten to add that nobody here is joe average user.

Actually, nor is anyone else.
They're defaults, but most of the time, your files can be directed
to or moved to your favorite file organization.

Yes, but I *can't* get rid of the bloat I don't need, and *that's* the
real point. MS is being a "job's worth" with my data.

You and I may think we know better than M$ and seek to edit stuff
in protected directories, but joe average should stay the hell out.

And that includes staying off the system drive, but Windows is set up to
enforce their using it!

If you want to see what happens without that standardized default file
structure and the bloated registry, look no further than linux.

Take two different flavors of linux and some applications.
Developers have freedom.Â* Users get to go on a scavenger hunt
to see whether the text editor they know how to use is installed.
And if it isn't they have to go figger out which application installer
they need to use to install the application installer they know
to implement the steps in the tutorial they read using the default browser
that they had to learn how to use.
Then, they get to go figger out whether the .conf file they need to edit
got put in usr or usr/lib or user/lib or /etc or any of the other places
random stuff gets put by random developers with no guidance.
Never mind that they have no idea what needs to be put into that .conf
file, or understand that this particular .conf file gets overwritten so
they have to use a specific utility to enter their changes into that file.
God help them if they screw it up.

This is about software and is therefore moving the goal posts and
irrelevant, because I was talking about keeping the OS out of user data,
and the Windows OS at that.

Ask any Windows guru how to edit the registry to do this or that
and they'll give you an answer that's likely to work.

[snip insulting crap that used to be true but IME isn't any more]
If you're lucky enough to find someone helpful, you'll get a detailed
answer for what works on HIS system, but is less likely to work on yours.

With both cases it depends very much on what you want to know and who
you ask. For example see if you can find out for me how to remove the
ratings column from the playlist in the now-playing view of Windows
Media Player.

Ain't freedom grand.

Yes, and I'd like to see more of it with Windows, for example by
removing the bloatware and useless ratings column in Windows Media Player.

Standardized defaults good.

Not when it leads to fouling up the system drive.

Chaos BAD!

As per W10 Start Panel

On 04/03/2019 19:40, Bill in Co wrote:

Wolf K wrote:

Example of something that's not on the disk, please.

Maybe the infamous junction points and directories that you can never reach
the end of, when traversing with Windows Explorer? Virtual directories.

With, even more stupid, circular references.

On 04/03/2019 19:38, Bill in Co wrote:

Well, ok, I actually timed mine, and it took 1 minute to the log-on screen,
and a bit over 2 minutes, to the finish boot up screen.

Eh? What do you mean by "the finish boot up screen". I would expect in
common with most others, I consider booting to be the time taken from
switch on to the logon screen, what other meaning could it have?

Java Jive wrote:
On 04/03/2019 19:38, Bill in Co wrote:

Well, ok, I actually timed mine, and it took 1 minute to the log-on
screen, and a bit over 2 minutes, to the finish boot up screen.

Eh? What do you mean by "the finish boot up screen". I would expect in
common with most others, I consider booting to be the time taken from
switch on to the logon screen, what other meaning could it have?

Booting to the log-on screen, where you have to enter your password, is one
thing (about one minute over here). Then it takes its sweet time to
actually finishing booting up to the Windows 7 desktop (about 2 minutes over
here). That's the distinction.

On 04/03/2019 21:44, Bill in Co wrote:
Java Jive wrote:
On 04/03/2019 19:38, Bill in Co wrote:

Well, ok, I actually timed mine, and it took 1 minute to the log-on
screen, and a bit over 2 minutes, to the finish boot up screen.

Eh? What do you mean by "the finish boot up screen". I would expect in
common with most others, I consider booting to be the time taken from
switch on to the logon screen, what other meaning could it have?

Booting to the log-on screen, where you have to enter your password, is one
thing (about one minute over here). Then it takes its sweet time to
actually finishing booting up to the Windows 7 desktop (about 2 minutes over
here). That's the distinction.

Fair enough, but both my PCs take much less time than 2 mins to get from
logon screen to desktop. However, again, with W10 this PC took ages to
d that.

Java Jive wrote:
On 04/03/2019 21:44, Bill in Co wrote:
Java Jive wrote:
On 04/03/2019 19:38, Bill in Co wrote:

Well, ok, I actually timed mine, and it took 1 minute to the log-on
screen, and a bit over 2 minutes, to the finish boot up screen.

Eh? What do you mean by "the finish boot up screen". I would expect in
common with most others, I consider booting to be the time taken from
switch on to the logon screen, what other meaning could it have?

Booting to the log-on screen, where you have to enter your password, is
one thing (about one minute over here). Then it takes its sweet time to
actually finishing booting up to the Windows 7 desktop (about 2 minutes
over here). That's the distinction.

Fair enough, but both my PCs take much less time than 2 mins to get from
logon screen to desktop. However, again, with W10 this PC took ages to
d that.

No, I mean it takes an additional one minute from the logon screen to the
desktop screen. The total time is 2 minutes, about double that of my XP
version

On 04/03/2019 22:09, Bill in Co wrote:
Then it takes its sweet time to
actually finishing booting up to the Windows 7 desktop (about 2 minutes
over here).

No, I mean it takes an additional one minute from the logon screen to the
desktop screen. The total time is 2 minutes

I think you need to think about how your posts are read by someone who
can't read your mind!

Java Jive wrote:
On 04/03/2019 22:09, Bill in Co wrote:
Then it takes its sweet time to
actually finishing booting up to the Windows 7 desktop (about 2 minutes
over here).

No, I mean it takes an additional one minute from the logon screen to the
desktop screen. The total time is 2 minutes

I think you need to think about how your posts are read by someone who
can't read your mind!

Perhaps. :-) But I'm not sure if 2 minutes *total time* is typical, but
I'm guessing, maybe. Regardless, it's a lot slower than XP. And of course
there's no smoke and mirrors, and and fake directories or junction points,
and blocked accesses, either. :-)