Questions about the "end of Windows 7"

"PeterC" wrote

| OK, I'll risk excommunication: as an interim step, how does W8 compare
with
| W7 and W10?
| I couldn't find a news group for W8, which should tell me something.

Strange, isn't it? The same thing happened with
WinME. Microsoft disowned their baby and even
left it out of official documents. And everyone went
along with them -- without question, pronouncing
the disowned version to be unusable junk.

The only problem I remember with ME was that
occasionally the desktop would disappear at boot,
leaving a white background with red warning text.
It was basically just 98 with a little too much
decoration and a name that was at the same time
both pretentious and goofy. (Microsoft used
ambiguous, lower case fonts in the logo, but
pressured the media to always call it "Me" and
not "ME". They wanted to call it "My Windows"
without getting blamed for such tastelessness.)

Vista was damned because it was
the first truly restricted version and MS went
overboard trying to blend lackey user mode with
admin, producing a message-box-infested disaster.
It also got a bad reputation because of the scandal
with the Intel 915 chipset: Microsoft invented a
Vista Basic version with no Aero at the last minute
because Aero was too much a bloated mess of
techno-kitsch to run on older hardware. And Intel
had a vast trove of 915 chipsets that fit into that
category. And Intel wanted to dump them on the
market. So MS betrayed all their other partners
who had dutifully updated all their hardware, and
gave Intel an out. And people got very confused.
They thought they were paying for clever, semi-
transparent window frames and didn't get them.
There were numerous articles about how to tell
crippled Vista from real Vista. It got ugly and Vista
was blackballed.

Just recently I needed a patch and found XP and
7 versions, but no mention of Vista.

That's the unique thing about Microsoft: They
successfully sell each new version by blackballing the
last. I don't know any other company that gets
away with that: "Buy iPhone 15. Because iPhone
14 sucks and you don't want to have to live with it
even a minute longer." The lapdog tech media never
fail to use tired phrases like "flagship version" and
"latest and greatest", to gently nudge the public into
assuming that Microsoft's latest slop is the key to
happiness.

MS improved on Vista with UAC in 7. It's virtually
the same as Vista, as far as I can tell, except for
UAC. (The platform 6 API updates seem to be almost
all introduced in Vista.) But Vista became known as
junk and 7 got the dubious title of "best Windows
ever".

8 was the first introduction of Metro. Again, they
went overboard, trying to force it on people. It didn't
make sense. No one needs phone apps on a desktop.
Then the MS phones went kaput. And their tablets
went kaput. There's essentially no non-desktop
Windows anymore. Yet their whole marketing scheme
centered on the idea of selling "experiences" across
devices: You'll be happy and fulfilled with Windows
because it's everywhere, from your phone to your
computer to your frig door. The linchpin of that
scheme was Metro apps everywhere. Message your
dentist from your desktop, run out the door, and get
that message on your phone or car dashboard.
Microsoft was going to bring us warm and fuzzy
Jetsons living. Microsoft would let app makers manage
your life and they'd get a 30% cut for themselves. No
more being suckered, making only $50 billion a year.
They were going to get their fair share for a change!
Why should Bill Gates be left to eat at McDonalds after
all he's done for humanity?

The basic problem with 8/10/Metro is that it's based
solely on greed, with no basis in practicality. People
don't need phone app desktops. They need productivity
software. If they want to use services they can go
online. After all, the Metro-style apps that MS are
pushing as the newest Windows programming are really
just webpage apps, anyway. HTAs. But MS saw Apple
making a killing by middlemanning phone apps at a 30% cut
and they wanted a piece of that action. They managed
to overlook 3 big drawbacks:

1) They didn't even have a phone worth talking about!

2) Apple's market is suckers who love to pay full retail.
Microsoft's market is business. The retail suckers are
only the beta testers for MS. They make most of their
money on crazy-expensive corporate licensing.

3) If MS have no device and no market then they'll
have no software. The success of Windows was based
on an army of software developers who made a living
writing Windows software. Now MS was cutting them off
and telling them to please write phone apps and give MS
a 30% cut. Developers even have to buy a license to
lose money on making Metro apps! (I can write Windows
desktop software without ever talking to Microsoft.)

So with 8 and 10 MS decided to exploit the strength
they do have -- giant customer base -- by holding
hundreds of millions of desktop customers hostage and
trying to force any old thing down their throats that
would yield a 30% cut of the action. Or even force their
own services on people. That, alone, is the root of
all the post-7 troubles.

I had occasion to fix a Win8.1 system with a
failed hard disk awhile back. I installed the free
desktop/Start Menu fixer. It all seemed OK. As
I recall, with 8.1 and the start menu fix I didn't
have to actually see the Metro UI.

It's always basically some version of Windows.
I don't know of any major changes since Vista.
7 added UAC. 8 added Metro. 10 added spyware
and forced updates. If you can tolerate the increasing
hassles, bloat, spyware and betrayal then any version
is just dandy as far as getting stuff done with software.

There is one real factor, which is differences
in 3rd-party support. But if it works in 7 it should
work in 8. And 7 support is not going away anytime
soon. XP support is only recently being phased out.
(After all, XP SP3 is only something like 2 years
older than Vista.) Business is still mostly on 7.

There are really 2 stages in that. The first stage
is companies that use end of support as an excuse
to drop a Windows version and save a little money.
Adobe might be one of those. Paint.Net is another
good example. They update to every new .Net version
and thereby drop support as they go. Then the second
stage is when few people use a Windows version
and/or something a programmer needs is not available
in that system. That's only happening now for XP.

"Mike" wrote

| Why do people get so turned off by registration or email?
| Create an alias.
| Safe surfing is a good idea, but email and phone are a non issue
| if you plan for it.
|

Again, you're projecting your preferences to others
and insisting people should think your way.

Registration means being added to a marketing list.
Using an alias means lying and deliberately tricking
the company. You suggest I should stoop to being a
lying sleazeball in order to try out a product? No. The
whole thing is not honorable. You're lowering yourself
to their level before you've even downloaded. They
scam you. You scam them.... The story of the Internet.

"Mike" wrote

| But the key word here is "INEVITABLE". "It won't hurt as
| much if you don't resist."
|
Ah. OK. I guess you're right. Which way to the gas
chambers, then? Down this hall and 3rd door on the
right? Thanks for your help.

| For 10 Pro, at least, windows update minitool does a seemingly
| good job of managing updates. It has a bug that it just
| aborts if there are too many updates. If you wait too long
| it will tell you that you don't have enough 'storage' to continue.

This is what I love about Win10 fans. As I was saying
before about Mac fans. Win10 fans don't say, "this works
better". They say, "You should update, because it's only
partly broken and only fails part of the time and only spies
part of the time and the rest of the time it sort of works
and you kind of have to update eventually, anyway, and
I have XP in a VM if I want to use software, and to tell the
truth I've reverted to Win7. So you should update to
Win10.... Easily the best Windows version ever."

|
| Candy Crush? They're installing games without asking?
|
|
| YES they are.
| Every major upgrade gets you a new start page full of live tiles that
| you have to stop and remove. Some let you uninstall, some don't.
| It takes a few minutes every year or so. Annoying, but doesn't even make
| the top 100 life annoyances list.
|
Another great selling point for Win10:

"Hey, it's obnoxious, and it's even ad-infested. On the
bright side, we don't call them ads and with the help of
dramatically lowered expectations, Win10 is easily the
best Windows version ever."

Sorry to give you such a hard time, but the more you
try to sell Win10 the more you manage to do the opposite.

"J. P. Gilliver (John)" wrote

| If you have a SSD and use sleep instead of shutdown, boot time is a
| non-issue.
|
| If you use sleep instead of shutdown, does it matter whether you have an
| SSD?

I think he meant that an SSD boots fast, so the
bloat of Win7 can be partially hidden with newer
hardware.

| Fire it up when you're bored and learn.
|
| I'm never bored for periods long enough for them to be worthwhile for
| such sessions.
|

I was thinking that, too. I used to love exploring
tweaks. These days I can't be bothered. If I have
to spend two weeks of intensive work to make the
product usable then that's just 2 weeks wasted that
I'm not getting paid for.

On Sat, 2 Mar 2019 21:35:27 -0700, "Bill in Co"
surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote:

Mayayana wrote:
"pyotr filipivich" wrote

So far, I have found one thing Word does, which WP doesn't: break
a large brochure up into signatures. But all the rest, - ?ave you
ever tried to track down where the style change was made which is
screwing up the document?"

You lost me there. I used to use WordPro from a magazine
CD. Then I switched to OO and now Libre Office. But I
only use it a bit, to write out receipts, contracts, bills, etc.
I made the template files years ago, so I've never really had
to master office programs.

Did you ever consider the much leaner Kingston Office (aka WPS Office now),
or Softmaker Free Office? They are both a LOT less bloated then either
OpenOffice or LibreOffice, but may not have everything you need, not sure.
Just wondering.



It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program
being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes
a lot of disk space.

My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first
computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program
used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. Word and
WordPerfect each use about 1GB of disk space. At today's disk prices,
when a 1TB drive costs around $50 USD (less per GB, for bigger drives)
1GB of disk space is about 5 cents worth. If my quick look at the
amount of disk space each uses was wrong, multiply the numbers by 10
if you like, and make it 50 cents each; I still wouldn't care.

I have two 2GB drives on my computer, and they cost around $60 each.
That lowers the cost of the disk space each uses to around 3 cents.

We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our
needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how
comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it
uses.

"Ken Blake" wrote


It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program
being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes
a lot of disk space.

My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first
computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program
used was very significant. But these days it means nothing.


It never means nothing. I think I probably don't want to
see what your attic looks like. "Who cares if we have 5
fans that don't work? There's plenty of space up there."

There are a number of different reasons to avoid bloat.

1) Simple attentiveness and orderliness. There's something
to be said for keeping house. That's true no matter how
big your house is. If the programmer is a slob then what
should we expect from their software? And why let the
disk get filled for no reason? It just makes it harder to
do regular backup of data and store disk images of the OS.

2) Speed and resources. Libre Office takes about 425 MB
on my machine. All I want is the word processor. I avoid
using it because it takes several seconds to load. I've got
an 8-core, 3.3 GHz CPU and yet LO brings me back to the
old days of showing a splash screen while the program
lumbers into functionality. It uses 90 MB RAM just to sit
there. Maybe you don't remember, but there was a long
period when splash screens were thought to be a thing
of the past because CPUs were so fast. Yet 3.3 billion
operations per second isn't enough for LO to get on its
feet in less than 5 seconds. (And that's just one core.)

3) Sloppiness and lack of professionalism. Bloated usually
means sloppy and/or ignorant. Sloppy because people
keep adding functions without cleaning up. Ignorant because
most bloat is due to wrappers. By wrapper I mean something
that packages other functionality. If you write code to
produce an editor, that's software. If you write code that
uses an editor component then your software is a wrapper.
If that component is written in Java or .Net then you now
have an editor that's a wrapper, which itself is a wrapper
of something that's also a wrapper. A 2 MB editor becomes
500 MB without any change in functionality. The difference is
that you don't have to know how to code in order to use
wrappers. Which means you probably don't know what you're
doing. So why should I use your software.

I have a good example of that close to home: My most
popular download currently is an MSI unpacker. It unpacks
MSI installer files. The only other program I know of that can
actually do the same thing is called Less Msierables. All
other programs I know of that are claimed to do the job
actually can't. (They run an admin install or maybe, like
7-Zip, they can extract a CAB file. But they can't actually
unpack the installer.)

LM is open source. But there's not much code. Because
LM uses the Microsoft Wix toolset for working with MSIs.
A wrapper around msi.dll. Wix, in turn, and LM itself, use
..Net. In this case it requires at least .Net v. 4. .Net
itself is an extremely bloated, slow wrapper. Something like
1/2 GB for v. 4. That's why very little Windows software
is written in .Net.

LM does the job and it's got a nice UI. But the program
starts at 1.5 MB. I don't know what it might need to
download. Then it requires the .Net 4 framework. So it's
going to have an enormous memory footprint.

My version is 196 KB. It uses msi.dll directly. It runs fast
and light, on virtually any existing Windows system, without
needing installation or support files. The memory footprint
shows 5 MB on my system.

The functionality is all in msi.dll and cabinet.dll, which
are system files.

I don't mean that as a brag. The point is there's no
excuse for bloated multi-wrappers. There's no excuse for
Java or .Net on desktops. There's no excuse for needing
5 seconds of splash screen on an 8-core, 3.3 MHz CPU.

Take a look for yourself. Avidemux and Audacity, pro-level
video and audio software, are only 45 MB each on my system.
The program I use more than any other, Notepad, is 67 KB.
The Sysinternals programs are all small and dependency-free.
Sumatra PDF reader is 11 MB, while Adobe Reader was something
like 120 last I saw. IrfanView, a beautifully-made image viewer
that borders on being a fullscale image editor, is about 3 MB
without the plugins. I show it using 5 MB RAM to sit there,
while Pale Moon is using about 150 MB... just to sit there!

That mess adds up. Mike was just talking about how one of
the reasons he thinks he needs Win10 is because browsers
are so resource-hungry. How did we get to such an absurd
point, where modern hardware -- multi-core CPUs and
multiple GBs of RAM -- can't handle the software load?
Sloppiness and bloat. The space was there, so people
used it. They got sloppy. 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.

On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program
being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes
a lot of disk space.

I think bloated means different things to different people, and I think
people's personal definitions have changed over the years. Mine have.

Toward the beginning of the PC age, it could certainly have meant that a
program has gotten physically larger, thus taking longer to install,
longer to launch, consuming more disk space and more RAM. I'd also
include longer to type in, (remember those?), and longer to download,
for things that came that way. Those are all aspects of a program that
has gotten *bigger*. For me, all of those things have fallen by the
wayside and don't matter anymore. For completeness, I could add a
complaint that bloated programs run slower than their leaner
counterparts, but today's computing hardware largely masks that kind of
thing because current hardware is so powerful.

In the past 10+ years, to me bloated means that the features in a
program that I want and use are slowly disappearing into a mist of
ever-expanding other features that I don't care about. IMHO, the poster
child for bloated software is IrfanView. In the various Windows groups,
users defend and promote IV, so every couple of years I dutifully
download and install IV to take a look. A few minutes later I uninstall
it because its UI is such a mess. Others proclaim that IV can do
everything, which perhaps it can, but where in the sam h*ll is the stuff
that I want it to do? So to me, it's bloated beyond belief. I don't care
about disk space or any of that other stuff. The program itself is
bloated to the point of being entirely unusable.

My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first
computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program
used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. Word and
WordPerfect each use about 1GB of disk space. At today's disk prices,
when a 1TB drive costs around $50 USD (less per GB, for bigger drives)
1GB of disk space is about 5 cents worth. If my quick look at the
amount of disk space each uses was wrong, multiply the numbers by 10
if you like, and make it 50 cents each; I still wouldn't care.

I have two 2GB drives on my computer, and they cost around $60 each.
That lowers the cost of the disk space each uses to around 3 cents.

We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our
needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how
comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it
uses.

I agree with all of that last paragraph, and I apply it to a program
that has feature-bloat. When a program is feature-bloated, it'll have
endless menus and submenus, with tons of keyboard shortcuts that make no
sense, and a GUI that has a hard time showing me what I need to know.
There are different kinds of bloat, but that's the kind of bloat that I
object to. Not disk space.

--

Char Jackson

On 3/2/19 1:43 PM, Bill in Co wrote:

[snip]

I tried Linux (Cinnamon Mint, etc), but found it's just not worth all the
hassle, at least to me. Plus I've got way too much invested (program wise)
in Windows at this point.

There is no rule that says you can't use more than one OS (different
computers, dual boot, or a virtual machine). You don't have to give up
Windows to try Linux.

On 3/2/19 2:01 PM, Ken Blake wrote:

[snip]

1. I've got way too much invested (*knowledge* wise) in Windows at
this point. I'm not interested in starting from scratch to learn
something new to me.

2. There are undoubtedly a number of programs that I run on it Windows
and are important to me that are not available for Linux. Quicken is
one, but other come to mind. (Yes, I know there are Linux alternatives
to Quicken, but I'm not interested in making the investment of time to
learn them and find whether they are just as good for me).

Some (usually simpler) Win programs run in WINE. I do regularly run one
program that won't, it's in a virtual machine running Win 7.

3. There is much more Windows software to choose from.

These are also the main reasons I'm not interested in Apples. I don't
claim that Windows is better. Might Linux or Apple Operating systems
be just as good as, or even better than Windows? I don't know. Maybe
they are. But I'm not going to take the time and trouble to find out.

I would never change to an unfamiliar OS all at once. Keep the old one
for what you need it for.

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

"I don't see any god up here." -- Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), Soviet
cosmonaut

On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 11:21:06 -0600, Char Jackson
wrote:

On Sun, 03 Mar 2019 09:04:46 -0700, Ken Blake
wrote:

It's very common for someone to complain about some particular program
being "bloated." What they mean by that, I assume, is that it consumes
a lot of disk space.

I think bloated means different things to different people, and I think
people's personal definitions have changed over the years. Mine have.

Toward the beginning of the PC age, it could certainly have meant that a
program has gotten physically larger, thus taking longer to install,
longer to launch, consuming more disk space and more RAM. I'd also
include longer to type in, (remember those?), and longer to download,
for things that came that way. Those are all aspects of a program that
has gotten *bigger*. For me, all of those things have fallen by the
wayside and don't matter anymore. For completeness, I could add a
complaint that bloated programs run slower than their leaner
counterparts, but today's computing hardware largely masks that kind of
thing because current hardware is so powerful.

In the past 10+ years, to me bloated means that the features in a
program that I want and use are slowly disappearing into a mist of
ever-expanding other features that I don't care about. IMHO, the poster
child for bloated software is IrfanView. In the various Windows groups,
users defend and promote IV, so every couple of years I dutifully
download and install IV to take a look. A few minutes later I uninstall
it because its UI is such a mess. Others proclaim that IV can do
everything, which perhaps it can, but where in the sam h*ll is the stuff
that I want it to do? So to me, it's bloated beyond belief. I don't care
about disk space or any of that other stuff. The program itself is
bloated to the point of being entirely unusable.

My personal view is that that's nonsense. Back when I got my first
computer in 1987, it had a 20MB disk drive, and the space a program
used was very significant. But these days it means nothing. Word and
WordPerfect each use about 1GB of disk space. At today's disk prices,
when a 1TB drive costs around $50 USD (less per GB, for bigger drives)
1GB of disk space is about 5 cents worth. If my quick look at the
amount of disk space each uses was wrong, multiply the numbers by 10
if you like, and make it 50 cents each; I still wouldn't care.

I have two 2GB drives on my computer, and they cost around $60 each.
That lowers the cost of the disk space each uses to around 3 cents.

We should be concerned with what a program does, whether it meets our
needs, how stable it is, how fast it is, how easy it is to use, how
comfortable we are with its GUI, etc., not with how much disk space it
uses.

I agree with all of that last paragraph, and I apply it to a program
that has feature-bloat. When a program is feature-bloated, it'll have
endless menus and submenus, with tons of keyboard shortcuts that make no
sense, and a GUI that has a hard time showing me what I need to know.
There are different kinds of bloat, but that's the kind of bloat that I
object to. Not disk space.



OK, but you and I have very different definitions of "bloat."

"Sam E" wrote

| I tried Linux (Cinnamon Mint, etc), but found it's just not worth all
the
| hassle, at least to me. Plus I've got way too much invested (program
wise)
| in Windows at this point.
|
| There is no rule that says you can't use more than one OS (different
| computers, dual boot, or a virtual machine). You don't have to give up
| Windows to try Linux.
|
The discussion has been pretty much about
whether Win10 is usable, whether Win7 is outdated,
etc. In that context, Linux is only relevant if it's a
serviceable replacement. For most people, for
numerous reasons that have been detailed, it's
not. It's not likely that it ever will be. After 20-odd
years, it's still a geek hobby full of half-finished
software that gets no longterm support. For all
that time it's been a great server system for
people able to do all the required config, but it's
not a software *platform* at the level that
Windows is.

On 3/2/19 2:50 PM, J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

[snip]

There's the fly sensor, as in one of the sketches in "Kentucky Fried
Movie" (IIRR) ... (-:
[]

I don't remember that one, but I do remember "The popcorn you're eating
has been ****ed is. Film at 11.".

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

"I don't see any god up here." -- Yuri Gagarin (1934-1968), Soviet
cosmonaut

"Char Jackson" wrote

| IMHO, the poster
| child for bloated software is IrfanView. In the various Windows groups,
| users defend and promote IV, so every couple of years I dutifully
| download and install IV to take a look. A few minutes later I uninstall
| it because its UI is such a mess. Others proclaim that IV can do
| everything, which perhaps it can, but where in the sam h*ll is the stuff
| that I want it to do? So to me, it's bloated beyond belief.

What the Sam Hill do you want to do? IV is not
a good choice as image editor because it doesn't
have an MDI window to work with multiple images.
It doesn't have layers, multi-undo, etc. What it's good
for is simple image viewing. I haven't used anything
else since Win98. I assign IV as the default for image
formats. As a viewer, none of the other stuff is in
the way.

You can do most image operations with IV. And most
of them can be done in batch mode. That's a big
help to people who only work occasionally with images
or only need to resize, change formats, etc. But if you
really work with images in any serious way you need an
image editor.

"Mayayana" on Sat, 2 Mar 2019 23:52:36 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"Bill in Co" surly_curmudgeon@earthlink wrote

| Did you ever consider the much leaner Kingston Office (aka WPS Office
now),
| or Softmaker Free Office? They are both a LOT less bloated then either
| OpenOffice or LibreOffice, but may not have everything you need, not sure.
| Just wondering.
|
Sounded interesting but I jut went to check them out.
WPS - website's a mess, mostly embedded in javascript.
Not much to see otherwise. The source code looks like
they require an email address.
Free 2018 - Website not much better. XP not supported.
No sign of older versions. Requires registration.

Was talking with The Wife this morning. If I had the mad skillz,
I'd write a word processor called "My Typewriter." Times Roman or
Courier as default, bold, underline or italics as options. Basic
editing. She said "Typewriters don't have bold and italics!" well,
yes, but ...
Then I got into feeping creatures. Typewriter clicks when you
press the keys, and a Ding! at the edge of the screen, or the Enter
key. an option to have random capital letters entered as bottom half
the capital above and top half of the lower case letter below.
Control H backs up, overstrikes the next key typed.

Oh well.



--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?

"Mayayana" on Sun, 3 Mar 2019 00:13:05 -0500
typed in alt.windows7.general the following:
"pyotr filipivich" wrote

| WP handles all that and it is 12 sheets (iirc). I take the
| printout, fold it nicely, and then trim it on the book plane. (Yeah, I
| do some bookbinding on the side. Another long story.)
| I _could_ take the text from final WP file, paste it into Word,
| then have Word print it as two 6 sheet signatures. "neater".
| But not for a five hundred page document, which I intend to print
| out "some day".
|
| All of which is probably far more than you cared about. B-)

It's beyond my expertise. I'm more intersted in the prayers.

Shall I add you to my list? 8-) Or were you asking what they
were? (FYI Pretty much straight out of the Eastern Orthodox Prayer
books, main change is that where they have "Pray for N[NN]." I
inserted the names. So I don't have to try and remember who I said I
would pray for. Lord have mercy the memory isn't what it used to be.)


--
pyotr filipivich
Next month's Panel: Graft - Boon or blessing?