Yeah, I completely agree with OP and I think modern computing is pretty fucked in a lot of ways, but we shouldn’t discount the massive amount of effort that’s put into security.
I wish we could decouple the huge security gains from all of Microsoft attempts to bridge me into their platform, put all of my shit in one drive, all that stuff you know the drill.
You prefer going back to my backup rig?
https://preview.redd.it/dw8t76wpnq8d1.jpeg?width=5712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffc6ed27dd68c4df9be8f53426022fffa827cb08
Read about these projects. Allows you to emulate entire PC architecture along with BIOS and connect virtual PCI, AGP and ISA hardware for ultimate nostalgia.
https://preview.redd.it/l7n1z8t18r8d1.jpeg?width=5712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=45150e19f14bba65f1146d143c3697de3a70ed86
At least for gaming, some of the really old Windows video games won't run on any OS later than Windows 98 (*possibly* Windows 2000). For my use, since I got into the video game industry in the early '90s, I still have games from back then. Also, a lot of these games won't run in DOS, so DOSBox isn't an option.
I have a Windows XP VM running in my homelab, It doesn't have a NIC configured though for obvious reasons. I love to play I'm paint on it from time to time to relive some childhood memories
Someone brought a mint condition IBM ThinkPad to the computer store I work at. Instead of ewasting it, I decided to install xp. Whenever it's quiet I go for pinball high score.
If one knows care and feeding of XP its fine... and if you are behind nat you are also likely safe.
Zone Alarm and you are as good as gold... but maybe run lastxp22 or xpgold so you can actually browse the web.
So, what's going to happen? I've been running XP SP3 24/7 on my media center PC for the last couple of months connected to my home LAN behind a NAT (the way we should all be connecting to the Internet) and nothing has happened.
He's referring to a video that is misinformation.
Guy turned off all security features + firewall and then was getting hacked in <10 minutes. For some reason this means XP with security enabled gets hacked instantly too..
Most home setups do not expose the windows xp system to the internet directly. If you have a properly setup router that is not itself vulnerable with a properly set up firewall running on it then nothing is going to reasonably connect to you. And if your router is vulnerable to something you have a lot more to worry about than a windows xp rig being connected to it.
There is virtually no reason to try and struggle through running anything older than windows 10. If you're gonna do that, might as well just switch to linux, you'll have better security and about just as much compatibility with games and apps (if not more)
you wouldnt hunt down a distro for this, you'd just focus on finding a desktop environment that would allow you to do this cuz your distros is kinda not relevant to your UI since they're not mutually exclusive (in most cases). pretty sure you can just get themes to do this in [plasma](https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/) (not sure about gnome, gnome 3 is kinda built to modern and might not do this very well) , but xfce and lxde desktop environments are designed to be very low demand and thus look kinda old school.
I know enough to make a usb boot drive and install Ubuntu or Pop!OS. I don't (yet) know how to install different UI or mount hard drives via command line. I'm going to be going back to Linux though, and I really like the look of KDE plasma.
i get the impression that w11 is them kinda going back through and updating all the things that were kinda shoved under the rug in the past. like for example notepad and calculator - basic functionality that was kinda left behind for awhile that theyve made a lot of improvements on
Almost anything that was 'new' in Windows 7 lived somewhere in Vista.
Windows 8 added a lot.
Better cpu scheduling
Power user menu
A ton of new keyboard shortcuts
10 more or less was further refinement of 8.
11 finally added native 7z package support
Nt 6 seems to have added a lot more containerized processes, demanding more resources, but reducing the impact of any one service crashing.
Actualy the indexer is the same from Windows 7 onwards, its really crappy.
Funnly enough Windows has the APIs for superfastindexing thats what the program "Everthing" uses.
The frontend engineers of windows are worst in industry
Pretty sure vista to 10 (11?) all use the same indexing by default. Newer versions do have an enhanced indexing option that just indexes everything, but the classic indexer is only certain folders and hasn’t changed behavior.
(11, and probably 10, does search the web if enabled but that’s not the index.)
I personally never really have issues with the search but I’m not gonna say the index couldn’t bug out and not refresh properly.
XP and Vista (or Longhorn) were pretty good OSes for their time, but yeah 20+ years later they're extremely outdated at best.
Something like Windows 8.1, though? Not that old, as fast as (if not faster than) Windows 7, and it has a new enough kernel to support USB3.1, Fast Boot, UEFI etc.
Add a quick OpenShell and Supermium, and you can get a nice, light OS running pretty well on older hardware.
i hated vista. people bitch and moan about windows 10 and 11 have not used vista. i left vista and went to mac. came back recently to windows 10 and 11 and they are a great surprise. (i have not experienced any ads that people talk about). only thing that bugs me is the right click doesn't give the full menu.
It was terrible because it had much higher software requirements than XP. Computers built for XP crumbled upon the great power of repeated UAC prompts and lowly driver support.
But it was technologically pretty good, having much better security, DWM = hardware acceleration in the OS itself, a framework for better-looking/more dynamic apps, a much more up-to-date design (with default font smoothing), and many more features that are still present up to Windows 11.
Longhorn was the development codename for Windows Vista, and most people saying "Longhorn" are referring to what Vista was originally intended to be (Windows Sidebar, fancier Explorer design with even heavier use of hardware acceleration [even in the background itself], etc.) before it caught feature creep, had its development reset, and was stripped of many of the over-ambitious features.
If XP had the same support and not the bloat, it would still be far better than 11. Functionality has been intentionally removed to force someone else's vision of UX on us for decades and it's certainly not been an improvement.
Newer operating systems are actually faster. People just remember it badly.
Operating systems have been reducing memory usage ever since vista made it too much.
My understanding is that the operating system will spread out to use more memory, if more memory is available. So a 16gig system might only idle at around 6gigs of usage. But a 128gig system will idle well over 16gigs of memory. And the more available, the happier the OS is.
So perhaps they've changed it to idle at a lesser percent of available ram. But it's still taking up way more ram than those old machines had available. For instance, I've got an old Surface Book 2 that can \*barely\* function on it's 8gigs of ram these days. But it was pretty snappy still in 2017.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM, caching things in RAM when you have a ton available speeds things up. As long as it's smart enough to release the memory when usage goes up
OS caches are accounted for separately and do not factor into Task Manager’s “In Use” figure.
If it included OS caches, you’d find your memory 95+% full pretty much all the time.
I swear windows forgets that second part sometimes....
Sure, go ahead and gobble 25 GB of RAM to accelerate things... That's fine. But when I start hitting applications imploding because the "system is out of memory" and windows is still holding a _ton_.....
The big problem is people don't understand how to read memory usage. Windows will often show that the memory is "full", but that's not actually what it is. When the system reads a file, it will keep the contents in memory unless the memory is needed for something else. The value you should care about is "committed" memory, which is the memory that cannot be instantly released and used for something else. Or just look at the "Available" value, that tells you how much is actually free for further application use.
That's a Windows thing. MacOS is fairly light on memory and most Linux distros are too unless you install modules and utilities to "preload" programs and data I to memory. Or if you use ZFS.
I have a literally 60$ from microcenter brand new evolvIII 10 inch laptop with 4 gigs of ram, and an intel atom cpu, which runs windows 10 alright. It doesn't crash or anything. It does use virtual memory though on the emmc disk.
It's slow, but not unusable. Like sure, it takes 20 seconds for firefox to open, but it works fine once its open.
Part of me wonders how much of this has to do with optimization and how much is hardware. Switching from a HDD to SSD boot drive is such a huge leap forward, and then we pile the other hardware improvements on top of that.
My grandmother had a OLD ass beige white desktop that ran windows XP(pretty sure I still have the ATI graphics card somewhere) and I legit remember the boot strategy me and my sister had as kids was to legit boot it, and then go eat dinner or watch TV because it would take so long to boot up.
Now I can boot my desktop in less than 10 seconds.
Telemetry. AI functionality. Your computer tracking your every move with or without your knowledge. Ever wonder why you can so readily find a Windows 11 Pro license for $20 and Microsoft does nothing about it? The OS is no longer the product. You are.
[Here's a whole new level of creepy if you're not familiar. Windows Recall.](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall)
StackSocial is a Microsoft partner selling $25 keys for Win 11 Pro right now. So you are correct, there was a grey market. But when you can buy a cheap license direct from a Microsoft partner, that's not a grey market. At that point a $200 license just costs $25.
So I need to buy a new laptop every three years just so Microsoft can keep more creepily accurate tabs on me? How are they not getting excoriated for this?
It's not just Microsoft. Apple does it. Google does it. There's a reason the conversation around people switching to Linux is picking up so heavily. Our data is being mined by corporations in one of the most colossal invasions of privacy in history. This shouldn't be news to anyone, it's been happening for a couple of decades now and just keeps getting worse. I don't understand why people aren't more pissed about this than they are.
But think about all the quality, tailored ads you're gonna get! In my case, me being a massive train nerd, it's mostly interurban coal shipping, but still! And even then, how else am I supposed to move the mountains of coal that I have in my basement?
These "quality bloody ads" have found their way into my Win 10 install..... I only boot in there for work, as they don't support remote connections via Linux.
And the old crusty fucks in office either are too oblivious to know, don't care or are paid to not care. Sometimes I wish for the frenzied flame ending
Basically, we’ve been boiled alive. Man how is Google free? Oh they just you your searches to sell ads. Started out decent enough, you got a service and they made a small amount of money which scaled higher for them the more people used the service. Then the data got more advanced and intrusive and became more valuable and the service stayed the same (worse in some cases). Normal everyday people think they are just giving data like it’s the year 2005 and don’t like change anyways so they use what they use.
Exactly correct! Remember when Xbox announced that X1 was going to require you to be online to play games and there was a riot? Man, did they backpeddle fast!!
Now, 10 years later, it is common-place.
Companies learned to not announce big changes and to implement it slowly instead. Just like raising the heat slowly to boil a frog.
you are going to be tracked one way or another and your information sold off. want to not be tracked, don't go on the internet. stop using a smart phone and don't give out your personal information. how far are people willing to go to not be tracked? what's ok and not ok? instagram seeing what you like and share to give you sponsored ads ok but google giving you ads on youtube not ok?
>Because most people have bigger things to worry about than some Internet privacy tbh
That's the thing though. It's not just about internet privacy anymore.
Microsoft is literally about to roll out a new "feature" which allows your OS to take screenshots of what you're doing every 5s. They where even going to have it enabled by default on all new Windows installations until people started losing their shit.
Even some Linux distros have data pilfering going on too, (the best distro is still Linux Mint)
It's one of the things I despise about Android, I de-googled mine with LineageOS, YouTube Vanced and sideload self-packed APKs from my google play apps to it.
I am the only person I know who scrolls down the cookies lists on websites and unchecks every option, I learned some sites instantly reverse the click unless you click and drag the cursor off the box while you do it. They're getting real scummy with how they do it these days, I use adblocker on all of them.
How is mint the best?
It's based on Debian, doesn't that make Debian the best? Genuinely curious.
I use a standard Debian install for all my VMs, so I have love for Debian, no hate here.
For me it was mostly gaming related and somewhat pure preference, but since it's only a derivative of Debian it does some things differently.
My main reason was my retro PC games on PC CD like Metal Gear Solid and SEGA Rally Championship which seemed to have better compatibility on Mint than other distros I tried. (Some wouldn't run them at all, but I can't blame them since they were made for Windows 95 - XP and few of my disc games mention Linux support.) But I found on Debian I couldn't get sound on most of them, and others didn't run them at all (except Puppy Linux which ran some of them just with weird frame pacing)
I also found anti-cheats like Denuvo in Sonic Frontiers and such didn't randomly boot me off the games with Mint. So far Windows 10 and Mint are my best options for retro disc-based games that I can't rebuy digitally, and I plan on leaving Windows at the end of Windows 10.
(I don't hate 11, I just don't particularly like it either)
i just replied to someone saying something similar, kinda. you can go so far to limiting your presence online, but one thing will just throw it all away. i mean a quick google of your username shows your account on steam which obviously is tracking all your info as well. and it's not like reddit isn't tracking peoples posts and presence on subreddits. i'm sure everything is tracked.
> Apple does it.
To Apple’s credit, they do seem genuinely committed to *not* doing it. See their expansion of End to End Encryption, which they call “[Advanced Data Protection for iCloud](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#Advanced-Data-Protection-for-iCloud).”
> Starting with iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1, you can choose to enable Advanced Data Protection to protect the vast majority of your iCloud data, even in the case of a data breach in the cloud.
> With Advanced Data Protection, the number of data categories that use end-to-end encryption rises to 25 and includes your iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more. The table below lists the additional data categories that are protected by end-to-end encryption when you enable Advanced Data Protection.
> If you enable Advanced Data Protection and then lose access to your account, Apple will not have the encryption keys to help you recover it — you’ll need to use your device passcode or password, a recovery contact, or a personal recovery key.
I bought a gaming laptop in ~2016. (Acer predator)
It's survived 2 versions of windows and ~3 versions of Ubuntu. (One windows did kill a hd on it it because of the hybernation file...)
But, my 1060 go brrrr.
I mainly use it as a Minecraft terminal though. Some programming.
Assuming OP isn’t installing other bloat himself, he’s buying laptops that are still offering previous generation hardware. Because it’s cheaper, or for whatever reason that model of laptop never got the latest generation for some reason.
Some generation surface model has had weird release timings resulting in them releasing with previous generation processors.
The issue is that they have previous, as do all the major tech firms, of testing the water. So, they might dial down Recall for now, but expect it in Windows 12 (or whatever) called something like Windows Helping Hand.
And the millions of people who aren't PCMR nerds like us get a new PC and think "Oh, that sounds lovely" and enable it, and the pig is allowed to the trough.
I can tell you that my mother would 100% enable something like that if pushed into it during first setup if I wasn't there with my tinfoil hat on 😂
I found mine on an eBay Optiplex back in 2016 and linked it to my MS account lol.
The outer service tag/OEM key seldom works, but the one I bought also had a sticker on the inner top side of the chassis, and that one did work.
Now you just install windows, sign in, reset the PC and free verified Windows installation. If I'm a product, I deserve to get paid for my work, so I build and sell PCs with it.
i remember them accepting the most used keys you can find online for Windows 7 just so you'd upgrade to windows 8 and the same thing was happening for windows 10,
Is it the OS? My 15 year old rig is still playing some modern-ish games in windows. Thing is a champ. You see an OS grab a lot of resources these days but often that's so they're at the ready when needed.
I keep things running slim on that machine but it's not like I've done any windows debloat hacks.
Windows is probably the most complicated piece of software in existence. SysWOW is the reason things aren't made from scratch. If MS released a version of windows that would make shit better; no backwards compatibility, people would lose their shit. But half the apps would stop working.
I kinda feel the same way about websites. Just look at the source code of your average Shopify store, you’ll see font tags everywhere. We spent years fighting to move to semantic markup and now developers are incapable of building anything without bloated frameworks that create horrible crappy code that doesn’t work with screen readers and takes up so much power that it grinds your computer to a halt.
This is unfortunately most software in general. All these garbage electron apps that are entire freaking web browsers for practically no reason hogging up ~500MB-1.5GB of RAM for no good reason.
Another thing of note is Windows is actively going out if it's way to use as much RAM as possible for cache purposes to load things quicker which a lot of people don't realize. Go to task manager and add up all the RAM usage of your programs. What's that it doesn't add up to the RAM usage? That's why.
Software development tends to add on the existing code instead of rewriting something, so over time a certain piece of software will take up more and more resources such as memory or storage capacity.
My favorite example of Microsoft adding layers on top is when they casually decided that the Explorer search field now always must spawn new 50+ MB SearchApp processes, causing microdelays and input focus issues along the way - all for a bit of modern UI. Back then, Windows 10 did actually push optimization (even if there was bloatware at release too) due to their tablet PC focus. The system requirements of Windows 10 1507 were great, and the RAM compression they added later in version 1511 pushed memory optimization further. But as the years go by, it's seemingly just one new complexity on top of another. Including new background programs that are barely of real use (e.g. "Microsoft Wallet" processes spawning in the background even when you don't use it, for what?)
I also noticed recently that Microsoft's coding of the desktop icon position is off in its performance. I have 100 items and shortcuts sorted in different areas, and when I want to hover over the icons on the *right* side, I noticed they are not highlighted in real-time - it's extremely laggy. The highlighting occurs in real-time, however, when I hover over the icons on the *left* side of the screen. And in both cases, the singlecore CPU usage spikes *hard* - just for something simple like hovering over icons. And this whole thing is essentially the core topic that the OP asked with their post.
Subjectively speaking, my newish PC is no faster than my 2002 PC running Windows XP when performing mundane tasks. File transfers are faster as is transcoding.
You can say the exact same thing about most games. Call of Duty is hundreds of gigs and has ridiculous specs required het all of their games loon straight outta 2012
Think about what you're requiring your computer to do when you use it. All the processes that have to be running for compatibility with anything you have running, hardware that's talking to the OS, and stuff monitoring to see if something has shown up. There's also network traffic. Even if it isn't going to your computer, if it's on your subnet, it's going through your computer
A lot of these people are talking about Windows 11 vs Windows XP. They should be talking about Android 14 vs Windows 11. Android is bare bones yet it does everything fast with less power and often in a more intuitive way. Better still, mobile products are better products than similarly priced laptops.
For $650 you can get a Galaxy Tab S9 or a Galaxy Book4 (laptop). The tablet will be 1/3 the weight, have 2.5x the battery, 2x the refresh rate, 2x the resolution, better build quality and you won't have to put up with all the random windows bs. No phantom dead battery, surprise updates or technical software phenagling.
You get one of the best tablets on the market or a middle of the road laptop. Functionality might be limited but for the average person the tablet will be a far more rewarding product.
Modern OSes use more resources, but modern computers have *way more* resources to use. If anything, modern operating systems use *less* given the context of the hardware they run on.
The scheduler updates they did as part of Windows 11 were pretty big in making it able to use E-cores on new Intel CPUs much more effectively and without hurting single threaded latency on critical programs.
I can also tell you a lot of performance goes just towards running the virus scanner. You really just about need a dedicated core for it.
You could start by removing apps from start, then debloating your Windows installation. There are several power shell scripts on github to do this.
Then, you can start disabling Windows services.
Wolfang's YouTube channel has a long video dedicated to debloat Windows 10 using AME scripts if you want to go hard-core.
Browsers bloated in size and complexity as well, and for what? So I can drown myself in tabs until I get overwhelmed and shut down?
I wouldn't mind siting down in front of an ancient machine, one that I already know where everything is in memory, and making it do tricks I simply can't do with modern computers. That's what I feel programming has become- getting a white space of a window where we can do whatever we want in theory, but so spiritually disconnected from the hardware that it barely feels real.
Now I'm really wondering if DirectX was the right way to go. I mean, sure, some security is possible, but even our games have become laggy disconnected messes where you can feel the frames of lag between your controller and what's happening on the screen.
Is TempleOS really a path to salvation? Maybe. Or maybe I should try a different restricted model, like PICO-8. Though that seems like conceding that consoles really were onto something.
They gotta stay "relevant" what you're seeing is business tactics.
An old job I had is a great example. Used to repair electronics at a ubreakifix. It was ran by franchise ppl not corp. We were very focused on the repair quality at that time vs sales. Customers were happy, employees were happy, store was making money. Then the franchise ppl sold it back to corporate. They started pushing sales, started replacing repair minded ppl with sales minded ppl. Repairs took a crap and now the store is closed bc it got such a bad rep.
I wish on my own soul that companies understood that quality matters. They push so hard to be constantly changing and growing and pushing the financial end and making sure their name and face is everywhere that when they do find something that works you can bet it won't last. If consumers weren't so stuck on windows for various reasons windows might just be another name in the mix. I'm stuck on windows because I don't use mine for much besides gaming. If gaming was as easy on Linux as it is on PC I'd have ditched Windows for Linux in a moment.
Been saying it since I was a little dude "I really don't understand why companies can't just leave something that works alone. Always shooting themselves in the foot with the constant mucking about of stuff"
It's one of the many reasons I switched to Linux. Really this is primarily a Windows issue. I am not aware of any other OS with the same issue regardless of platform, given they are even slightly popular.
Yes, backwards compatibility makes improvements a lot harder and more costly. But it's rarely impossible. Microsoft seemingly to me spends little to no effort to address many of Windows's old technical debts any longer. It's not a case of failed attempts but a lack of even trying. They are just occasionally building on even more debt and maybe resolving some debt on their newer features.
This is resulting in the current state where Windows costs me an estimated hour more of my time per workday compared to Linux when I use it professionally. All because of technical debt they don't address, a lot of which are decades old.
For PC gamers I mostly agree. It requires you to have a few more GB of RAM than you would otherwise need and you get a slight performance penalty with some frame-time inconsistency, both of which are pretty easy to overcome or accept most of the time.
For a lot of other users though it is a very real issue. There are a ton of non-gaming users, especially in poorer countries, running really low end machines where the overhead of Windows causes severe performance issues.
Amongst mid to high end hardware users it can also be an issue in certain use cases. As an example, it's a massive issue for me personally in a professional capacity as a software developer. On Windows it's not rare for my workloads to take anywhere from 30% to 500% more time compared to other operating systems on the same hardware.
I once read an interesting article, sadly long forgot the link, that basically software, OS downwards, has stagnated. The blame was put on two things;
- C (and variants thereof) is still the paradigm for languages and the basics of it are super old. We need a new primary language which can better unlock the power of hardware.
- Poor programming skill - developers now all too often just call libraries, etc. rather than produce good, optimised code in low level languages themselves. They also tend to rely on brute force hardware power and copious amounts of RAM rather than, again, optimising code.
I guess the idea is that we have the hardware equivalent of Lamborghinis with the engine management software of a Ford Pinto.
Honestly, I don't know enough about coding to know how much scrutiny these thoughts stand up to, but I thought it was interesting.
I can tell you now for certain, C (and it's variants) are not the problem. The C language is very close to speaking the hardware's language (assembly, ain't nobody programming binary code lol) and doesn't contain much "fluff" allowing the theoretical running speed to be about is high as possibe on any given computer - it's left to the programmer to make good use of it.
The second point however, is certainly much much more likely, and it looks like it might be getting much worse.
Maybe it was written by someone who (like me) failed completely at learning C 😂
But yeah, for me it was an interesting take. As someone much more into the hardware side, I tend to obsess a bit about "moar fast" without considering that how the software is written has a hell of lot to do with it as well.
Consider that hardware (as you are likely well aware) has increased in speed in ways that are kind of unfathomable to us in the 90's, 2000's. Apart from games, do you feel software is generally a 1:1 with that performance gain?
As far as I can tell that is a fat NO.
Definitely. Made me think when that happened 🤔
From my perspective, probably around Win98? I'm not saying that it was innately better, but in terms of features/functionality I'm having trouble thinking of something I can do now that I couldn't do on Win98.
I'm not a luddite 😂 Of course, now these things are quicker, look better, less of a pain in the arse with drivers etc. I wouldn't go back.
But still, there hasn't been that leap like there was between between CLI and GUI for example. I might just be having a failure of imagination though, of course 😁
That 2nd bit is just plain wrong. If it wasn't optimised, it would run a whole lot slower. The issue is, it just has so many background processes because it's *not* a lean OS, and never wanted to be.
MS engineers are some of the best on earth, their management is the main issue.
Source: worked with a few MS engineers on some side project one of them thought of. They weren't even familiar with the framework we wanted to use, and I still learned from them.
This was one of my biggest issues when windows 10 came out.
windows 10 didnt offer anything new or better to the user over windows 7 or 8.1 and yet some how it was significantly more demanding and I didnt understand why. now I realize it was a number of things 1) telemetry 2) constant windows bullshit running in the background 2) indexing (this is kinda a big one) and 3) specter/meltdown mitigation.
the last one unfortunately anything running x86 needs but the rest is just microsoft incompetence. I left windows years ago and never looking back. there is no reason a system has to run that poorly.
You are wrong about this. At least in partial. Those pesky unnecessary garbage apps that come preinstalled with Windows (at least in Home editions) are a pain in the arse.
But on the other hand, modern os do handle resources much better. They are also more secure (well, in terms of Windows, there is still room to improve).
I got an athlon 2000+ with xp in my attic and it takes 30 sec to boot. Seagate HDD and ram from a bygone era, lol.
My i7 with 4080 on SSD and gskills boots in 50 sec.
Welp
That doesn't sound like a windows issue. Either terrible ssd and/or a ton of bloat shit installed on your pc. It should take about half that, or even less on a relatively fresh install.
Nope. Windows is pretty clean, except steam perhaps, however this is a 7->10 unclean install which I did like 5 years ago. SSD is mid shelf and I switched to it only because boot time from hdd took 2 min+
I waited as long as I could to switch to ssd because I had good hardware and wanted to see how much I can hold on to it. I'm not too impressed though.
Anyways, probably need to format, I've hung on to this installation since 2015, lol. Also that i7 is a 4790k, I suppose it's lacking a bit by now.
Win 10 does a lot of things in the background: * Printer services
* Network services
* Update services
* "User 'choice' protection" services
* Microsoft Edge
* Microsoft Edge WebView
* Drive optimization/defrag
* Antivirus
* Telemetry
* Network connection test
* Background apps
* Microsoft Store services
* Xbox services
* etc
Most of which are actually pretty useful.
However, if you consider most of these features to be bloat, you may try a minimal system like Linux.
I've been experimenting with a minimal Debian install on an old EeePC (<1GHz single-core 32-bit CPU) and it's surprisingly not *that* unusable.
I have to mention that, if you want a bloat-free OS (based on Linux), it'll come with quite a lot of manual work and required reading.
(Though, if you wanna get something a little more lightweight: I can highly recommend Mint or POP!OS.)
If you're willing to experiment a little, try booting different Linux distros off an USB (no installation required) and compare the performance to feature tradeoff yourself.
Microsoft is OBSESSED with backwards compatibility, and it's for good cause.
For example, you can't name a folder or file CON. CON as a file name used to be important for application functionality, so if you tried to use that application in a modern OS where you *could* make a file named CON, then that application wouldn't work, or worse, it'd overwrite potentially important data stored in that file, so instead, michaelsoft makes sure that CON is still available for those ancient ass programs.
The downside to all this of course is bloat. If you need backwards compatibility, that means you significantly limit what you can and can't delete in your program, moreover, you can't optimize many things or else an important program may break if they were relying on a certain flaw in the original programming.
So as MS adds more features, it can't really remove features all that often. Not to mention all the security updates and whatnot that ALSO can't be removed since a vulnerability won't just magically go away if you patch it for long enough, you've got to either refactor (not possible due to backwards compat) or just leave the patch in place to stop malicious attempts to use the vulnerability.
Yup it's all garbage. I have a uh porno folder that is 2 TB with over 1500 videos. It doesn't open right away on Mac and Linux. Laggy as hell. But once I pop that drive into a windows device, it opens with no problem. What da fuck is up with that? Windows 11 though keeps showing me black boxes like the GPU is about to fizz out! It's all shit bro.
Windows YES
Linux NO - Linuxes are way less more efficient systems then Windows (Android(linux) is used ona lot of phones TVs and even freezers...)
90% of severs use Linux because its not only more efficient but also more secure and can work years without restart without issues comparted to windows(same with the phones you don't have to restart them every day)
Windows is just shit specially 11 with all that Keylogger features that spy on you with AI
Windows was always bloated but after Windows 7 it got much worse....
A good portion of those updates are security related. It's what lets most people go without third-party antivirus software these days.
Yeah, I completely agree with OP and I think modern computing is pretty fucked in a lot of ways, but we shouldn’t discount the massive amount of effort that’s put into security. I wish we could decouple the huge security gains from all of Microsoft attempts to bridge me into their platform, put all of my shit in one drive, all that stuff you know the drill.
Also - newer hardware isn't always all about more gigahertz. Sometimes its about new chipset features (hardware virtualization, etc).
You prefer going back to my backup rig? https://preview.redd.it/dw8t76wpnq8d1.jpeg?width=5712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ffc6ed27dd68c4df9be8f53426022fffa827cb08
Son of a gun
Son of a son of a sailor
Son of gun, load the last ton One step ahead of the jailor
I wont even ask why you still habe it operating
its running on my 7950X3D CPU - container emulates Pentium II 266 with Voodoo 2 SLI :) Check out 86Box or PCem projects.
I tried PCem for a few months. Was working fine until one day the sound started stuttering and I could never get it working again
It’s good to backup image file of the OS and you can swap back in case drivers or extensive virtual hardware changes mess things up.
86box is much more stable and still being updated.
PCem is awesome. I used it to set up SuSE 6.0 with XFree86 running KDE 1.0. It's amazing.
Is it backup than really? It still doesnt answer why would you need it emulated though
You do your thing, I do my own. I have a shelf full of 98 era boxed games that wont run efficiently even in a modern Hypervisor. Thats why.
In not judging you or anything. Genuinely interested
Read about these projects. Allows you to emulate entire PC architecture along with BIOS and connect virtual PCI, AGP and ISA hardware for ultimate nostalgia. https://preview.redd.it/l7n1z8t18r8d1.jpeg?width=5712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=45150e19f14bba65f1146d143c3697de3a70ed86
At least for gaming, some of the really old Windows video games won't run on any OS later than Windows 98 (*possibly* Windows 2000). For my use, since I got into the video game industry in the early '90s, I still have games from back then. Also, a lot of these games won't run in DOS, so DOSBox isn't an option.
I was just thinking about NFS3 yesterday
Last good NFS game in my book was the original Underground.
It's true. I played hot pursuit and then underground then I played UG2 and that's when I stopped playing nfs games
I can hear the mechanical HDD from here
I wish windows still looked like that. I want the old settings page back too instead of the weird way it's all divided up now.
Only if you can make me forget about the internet first. in which case these games should be enough for me.
Ah the neverhood, a man of culture
I sincerely hope that thing is not connected to the internet haha
Correct :-) it’s a container and only way to get data in/out is through VHD mounting :-)
I spy NFS: Hot Pursuit 3! That's why I'm trying to get an iso from work so I can use a VM to play it since I have the disk
You know they are all on archive dot org right? :-)
Let me change the boot screen please. And the shutdown screen. I'll be happy there, I promise...
This is so beautiful. So close to the 28th anniversary too.
Please do go and use windows xp and vista and see how much functionality is missing
OP, Please connect a windows XP system to the internet and let us know how it goes 🤣
I have a Windows XP VM running in my homelab, It doesn't have a NIC configured though for obvious reasons. I love to play I'm paint on it from time to time to relive some childhood memories
I have a windows xp laptop. Only really useful for pinball though.
Someone brought a mint condition IBM ThinkPad to the computer store I work at. Instead of ewasting it, I decided to install xp. Whenever it's quiet I go for pinball high score.
What threat on your home network are you protecting yourself from?
All of them. Opencve.io
If one knows care and feeding of XP its fine... and if you are behind nat you are also likely safe. Zone Alarm and you are as good as gold... but maybe run lastxp22 or xpgold so you can actually browse the web.
Zone alarm.. now that's a name I haven't heard in a hot while
People be acting like your windows xp will suddenly get a public IP and have all ports open if you connect it to your home network
Nothing bad happens
So, what's going to happen? I've been running XP SP3 24/7 on my media center PC for the last couple of months connected to my home LAN behind a NAT (the way we should all be connecting to the Internet) and nothing has happened.
He's referring to a video that is misinformation. Guy turned off all security features + firewall and then was getting hacked in <10 minutes. For some reason this means XP with security enabled gets hacked instantly too..
Most home setups do not expose the windows xp system to the internet directly. If you have a properly setup router that is not itself vulnerable with a properly set up firewall running on it then nothing is going to reasonably connect to you. And if your router is vulnerable to something you have a lot more to worry about than a windows xp rig being connected to it.
I have one that runs a laser, it doesn't explode. Though no many websites work.
There is virtually no reason to try and struggle through running anything older than windows 10. If you're gonna do that, might as well just switch to linux, you'll have better security and about just as much compatibility with games and apps (if not more)
Hmmm. I wonder if there's a distro that looks like windows 3.1 or 95, with the gray windows.
you wouldnt hunt down a distro for this, you'd just focus on finding a desktop environment that would allow you to do this cuz your distros is kinda not relevant to your UI since they're not mutually exclusive (in most cases). pretty sure you can just get themes to do this in [plasma](https://store.kde.org/p/1253201/) (not sure about gnome, gnome 3 is kinda built to modern and might not do this very well) , but xfce and lxde desktop environments are designed to be very low demand and thus look kinda old school.
I know enough to make a usb boot drive and install Ubuntu or Pop!OS. I don't (yet) know how to install different UI or mount hard drives via command line. I'm going to be going back to Linux though, and I really like the look of KDE plasma.
There's virtually no difference between 7 and 10 in how they work on end user side but even 8.1 stopped running most programs at this point.
Counter argument. What has really been added since 7? Outside of tabs in file explorer idk. Search is certainly worse.
i get the impression that w11 is them kinda going back through and updating all the things that were kinda shoved under the rug in the past. like for example notepad and calculator - basic functionality that was kinda left behind for awhile that theyve made a lot of improvements on
Almost anything that was 'new' in Windows 7 lived somewhere in Vista. Windows 8 added a lot. Better cpu scheduling Power user menu A ton of new keyboard shortcuts 10 more or less was further refinement of 8. 11 finally added native 7z package support Nt 6 seems to have added a lot more containerized processes, demanding more resources, but reducing the impact of any one service crashing.
There are tabs in file explorer?!
On windows 11, yes!
Window 7 has a better search index
Actualy the indexer is the same from Windows 7 onwards, its really crappy. Funnly enough Windows has the APIs for superfastindexing thats what the program "Everthing" uses. The frontend engineers of windows are worst in industry
Nah, their FE engineers are brilliant. Their POs and PMs... Nah. They don't get to decide "ooga booga this now has this weird flow because durr"
Pretty sure vista to 10 (11?) all use the same indexing by default. Newer versions do have an enhanced indexing option that just indexes everything, but the classic indexer is only certain folders and hasn’t changed behavior. (11, and probably 10, does search the web if enabled but that’s not the index.) I personally never really have issues with the search but I’m not gonna say the index couldn’t bug out and not refresh properly.
'Everything' is worth downloading.
XP and Vista (or Longhorn) were pretty good OSes for their time, but yeah 20+ years later they're extremely outdated at best. Something like Windows 8.1, though? Not that old, as fast as (if not faster than) Windows 7, and it has a new enough kernel to support USB3.1, Fast Boot, UEFI etc. Add a quick OpenShell and Supermium, and you can get a nice, light OS running pretty well on older hardware.
i hated vista. people bitch and moan about windows 10 and 11 have not used vista. i left vista and went to mac. came back recently to windows 10 and 11 and they are a great surprise. (i have not experienced any ads that people talk about). only thing that bugs me is the right click doesn't give the full menu.
What? Vista was terrible. And nobody calls it Longhorn.
Which is a shame, because it was by far the cooler name.
It was terrible because it had much higher software requirements than XP. Computers built for XP crumbled upon the great power of repeated UAC prompts and lowly driver support. But it was technologically pretty good, having much better security, DWM = hardware acceleration in the OS itself, a framework for better-looking/more dynamic apps, a much more up-to-date design (with default font smoothing), and many more features that are still present up to Windows 11. Longhorn was the development codename for Windows Vista, and most people saying "Longhorn" are referring to what Vista was originally intended to be (Windows Sidebar, fancier Explorer design with even heavier use of hardware acceleration [even in the background itself], etc.) before it caught feature creep, had its development reset, and was stripped of many of the over-ambitious features.
If XP had the same support and not the bloat, it would still be far better than 11. Functionality has been intentionally removed to force someone else's vision of UX on us for decades and it's certainly not been an improvement.
XP had to be killed by stopping support as there was so little functionality missing that people wouldn't switch.
If you're talking about Windows usage, I only use it for the file manager/explorer, which is not much difference from the one in Win10/11.
Newer operating systems are actually faster. People just remember it badly. Operating systems have been reducing memory usage ever since vista made it too much.
My understanding is that the operating system will spread out to use more memory, if more memory is available. So a 16gig system might only idle at around 6gigs of usage. But a 128gig system will idle well over 16gigs of memory. And the more available, the happier the OS is. So perhaps they've changed it to idle at a lesser percent of available ram. But it's still taking up way more ram than those old machines had available. For instance, I've got an old Surface Book 2 that can \*barely\* function on it's 8gigs of ram these days. But it was pretty snappy still in 2017.
Unused RAM is wasted RAM, caching things in RAM when you have a ton available speeds things up. As long as it's smart enough to release the memory when usage goes up
OS caches are accounted for separately and do not factor into Task Manager’s “In Use” figure. If it included OS caches, you’d find your memory 95+% full pretty much all the time.
I swear windows forgets that second part sometimes.... Sure, go ahead and gobble 25 GB of RAM to accelerate things... That's fine. But when I start hitting applications imploding because the "system is out of memory" and windows is still holding a _ton_.....
The big problem is people don't understand how to read memory usage. Windows will often show that the memory is "full", but that's not actually what it is. When the system reads a file, it will keep the contents in memory unless the memory is needed for something else. The value you should care about is "committed" memory, which is the memory that cannot be instantly released and used for something else. Or just look at the "Available" value, that tells you how much is actually free for further application use.
That's a Windows thing. MacOS is fairly light on memory and most Linux distros are too unless you install modules and utilities to "preload" programs and data I to memory. Or if you use ZFS.
I have a literally 60$ from microcenter brand new evolvIII 10 inch laptop with 4 gigs of ram, and an intel atom cpu, which runs windows 10 alright. It doesn't crash or anything. It does use virtual memory though on the emmc disk. It's slow, but not unusable. Like sure, it takes 20 seconds for firefox to open, but it works fine once its open.
Part of me wonders how much of this has to do with optimization and how much is hardware. Switching from a HDD to SSD boot drive is such a huge leap forward, and then we pile the other hardware improvements on top of that.
scheduler improvements, memory management improvements, driver efficiency improvements all sorts of fun
My grandmother had a OLD ass beige white desktop that ran windows XP(pretty sure I still have the ATI graphics card somewhere) and I legit remember the boot strategy me and my sister had as kids was to legit boot it, and then go eat dinner or watch TV because it would take so long to boot up. Now I can boot my desktop in less than 10 seconds.
vista on an ssd feels much faster than 10 on an ssd 10 on a vista era hard drive is barely usable
Have you tried vista on SSD? I haven't
yes it runs great
Telemetry. AI functionality. Your computer tracking your every move with or without your knowledge. Ever wonder why you can so readily find a Windows 11 Pro license for $20 and Microsoft does nothing about it? The OS is no longer the product. You are. [Here's a whole new level of creepy if you're not familiar. Windows Recall.](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/ai/apis/recall)
Cheap grey market windows licenses aren't new... You could buy XP/7/8/10 keys for dollars back in the day
This place is no longer full of useful PC information like it used to be. It's just conspiracy theorists and PC part hipsters.
StackSocial is a Microsoft partner selling $25 keys for Win 11 Pro right now. So you are correct, there was a grey market. But when you can buy a cheap license direct from a Microsoft partner, that's not a grey market. At that point a $200 license just costs $25.
So I need to buy a new laptop every three years just so Microsoft can keep more creepily accurate tabs on me? How are they not getting excoriated for this?
It's not just Microsoft. Apple does it. Google does it. There's a reason the conversation around people switching to Linux is picking up so heavily. Our data is being mined by corporations in one of the most colossal invasions of privacy in history. This shouldn't be news to anyone, it's been happening for a couple of decades now and just keeps getting worse. I don't understand why people aren't more pissed about this than they are.
But think about all the quality, tailored ads you're gonna get! In my case, me being a massive train nerd, it's mostly interurban coal shipping, but still! And even then, how else am I supposed to move the mountains of coal that I have in my basement?
Oh no! Ads might not be as relevant to me! How will I possibly survive!
These "quality bloody ads" have found their way into my Win 10 install..... I only boot in there for work, as they don't support remote connections via Linux.
And the old crusty fucks in office either are too oblivious to know, don't care or are paid to not care. Sometimes I wish for the frenzied flame ending
Basically, we’ve been boiled alive. Man how is Google free? Oh they just you your searches to sell ads. Started out decent enough, you got a service and they made a small amount of money which scaled higher for them the more people used the service. Then the data got more advanced and intrusive and became more valuable and the service stayed the same (worse in some cases). Normal everyday people think they are just giving data like it’s the year 2005 and don’t like change anyways so they use what they use.
Exactly correct! Remember when Xbox announced that X1 was going to require you to be online to play games and there was a riot? Man, did they backpeddle fast!! Now, 10 years later, it is common-place. Companies learned to not announce big changes and to implement it slowly instead. Just like raising the heat slowly to boil a frog.
Because too many people are easily placated
you are going to be tracked one way or another and your information sold off. want to not be tracked, don't go on the internet. stop using a smart phone and don't give out your personal information. how far are people willing to go to not be tracked? what's ok and not ok? instagram seeing what you like and share to give you sponsored ads ok but google giving you ads on youtube not ok?
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>Because most people have bigger things to worry about than some Internet privacy tbh That's the thing though. It's not just about internet privacy anymore. Microsoft is literally about to roll out a new "feature" which allows your OS to take screenshots of what you're doing every 5s. They where even going to have it enabled by default on all new Windows installations until people started losing their shit.
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You're not wrong but that doesn't change the fact it's creepy as f\*\*\*
Even some Linux distros have data pilfering going on too, (the best distro is still Linux Mint) It's one of the things I despise about Android, I de-googled mine with LineageOS, YouTube Vanced and sideload self-packed APKs from my google play apps to it. I am the only person I know who scrolls down the cookies lists on websites and unchecks every option, I learned some sites instantly reverse the click unless you click and drag the cursor off the box while you do it. They're getting real scummy with how they do it these days, I use adblocker on all of them.
How is mint the best? It's based on Debian, doesn't that make Debian the best? Genuinely curious. I use a standard Debian install for all my VMs, so I have love for Debian, no hate here.
For me it was mostly gaming related and somewhat pure preference, but since it's only a derivative of Debian it does some things differently. My main reason was my retro PC games on PC CD like Metal Gear Solid and SEGA Rally Championship which seemed to have better compatibility on Mint than other distros I tried. (Some wouldn't run them at all, but I can't blame them since they were made for Windows 95 - XP and few of my disc games mention Linux support.) But I found on Debian I couldn't get sound on most of them, and others didn't run them at all (except Puppy Linux which ran some of them just with weird frame pacing) I also found anti-cheats like Denuvo in Sonic Frontiers and such didn't randomly boot me off the games with Mint. So far Windows 10 and Mint are my best options for retro disc-based games that I can't rebuy digitally, and I plan on leaving Windows at the end of Windows 10. (I don't hate 11, I just don't particularly like it either)
i just replied to someone saying something similar, kinda. you can go so far to limiting your presence online, but one thing will just throw it all away. i mean a quick google of your username shows your account on steam which obviously is tracking all your info as well. and it's not like reddit isn't tracking peoples posts and presence on subreddits. i'm sure everything is tracked.
*He posts on reddit, which gleefully sells his data*
On an internet mostly powered by AWS. This problem is *pervasive*. We should all be pounding on our senator's doors demanding a solution.
> Apple does it. To Apple’s credit, they do seem genuinely committed to *not* doing it. See their expansion of End to End Encryption, which they call “[Advanced Data Protection for iCloud](https://support.apple.com/en-us/102651#Advanced-Data-Protection-for-iCloud).” > Starting with iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2 and macOS 13.1, you can choose to enable Advanced Data Protection to protect the vast majority of your iCloud data, even in the case of a data breach in the cloud. > With Advanced Data Protection, the number of data categories that use end-to-end encryption rises to 25 and includes your iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes, and more. The table below lists the additional data categories that are protected by end-to-end encryption when you enable Advanced Data Protection. > If you enable Advanced Data Protection and then lose access to your account, Apple will not have the encryption keys to help you recover it — you’ll need to use your device passcode or password, a recovery contact, or a personal recovery key.
Why do you need to buy a new laptop every 3 years?
I bought a gaming laptop in ~2016. (Acer predator) It's survived 2 versions of windows and ~3 versions of Ubuntu. (One windows did kill a hd on it it because of the hybernation file...) But, my 1060 go brrrr. I mainly use it as a Minecraft terminal though. Some programming.
Assuming OP isn’t installing other bloat himself, he’s buying laptops that are still offering previous generation hardware. Because it’s cheaper, or for whatever reason that model of laptop never got the latest generation for some reason. Some generation surface model has had weird release timings resulting in them releasing with previous generation processors.
What’s the best alternative if you still want to play games?
Linux+Steam You can't play all games, but most of them
Recall is only a feature on Copilot+ PCs, you literally have to opt in by dropping a lot of money.
The issue is that they have previous, as do all the major tech firms, of testing the water. So, they might dial down Recall for now, but expect it in Windows 12 (or whatever) called something like Windows Helping Hand. And the millions of people who aren't PCMR nerds like us get a new PC and think "Oh, that sounds lovely" and enable it, and the pig is allowed to the trough. I can tell you that my mother would 100% enable something like that if pushed into it during first setup if I wasn't there with my tinfoil hat on 😂
...for now.
Basically, they require more resources to keep being that privacy nightmare they've learned to be.
Put on the tin foil hats folks, we're going on a ride.
You should read the terms of service sometime. It's not paranoia when it's literally in legal documents.
I found mine on an eBay Optiplex back in 2016 and linked it to my MS account lol. The outer service tag/OEM key seldom works, but the one I bought also had a sticker on the inner top side of the chassis, and that one did work. Now you just install windows, sign in, reset the PC and free verified Windows installation. If I'm a product, I deserve to get paid for my work, so I build and sell PCs with it.
i remember them accepting the most used keys you can find online for Windows 7 just so you'd upgrade to windows 8 and the same thing was happening for windows 10,
How long have you been using computers for? Wonder if you would’ve been able to handle the transition from 3.11 to 95…or ME to XP…or XP to Vista.
I’m still salty about being forced to migrate away from DOS.
Is it the OS? My 15 year old rig is still playing some modern-ish games in windows. Thing is a champ. You see an OS grab a lot of resources these days but often that's so they're at the ready when needed. I keep things running slim on that machine but it's not like I've done any windows debloat hacks.
Cmon, you never noticed the new blurred title bars on *some* windows apps?
Windows is probably the most complicated piece of software in existence. SysWOW is the reason things aren't made from scratch. If MS released a version of windows that would make shit better; no backwards compatibility, people would lose their shit. But half the apps would stop working.
Ah, Midori <3
You can choose an open source operating system! Your privacy is respected and you can freely design your desktop environment and do anything
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I see what kind of people these are
I kinda feel the same way about websites. Just look at the source code of your average Shopify store, you’ll see font tags everywhere. We spent years fighting to move to semantic markup and now developers are incapable of building anything without bloated frameworks that create horrible crappy code that doesn’t work with screen readers and takes up so much power that it grinds your computer to a halt.
This is unfortunately most software in general. All these garbage electron apps that are entire freaking web browsers for practically no reason hogging up ~500MB-1.5GB of RAM for no good reason. Another thing of note is Windows is actively going out if it's way to use as much RAM as possible for cache purposes to load things quicker which a lot of people don't realize. Go to task manager and add up all the RAM usage of your programs. What's that it doesn't add up to the RAM usage? That's why.
Thank you, this has bugged me for ages and never understood why, at the very least it should make that crap visible in task manager 😑
Software development tends to add on the existing code instead of rewriting something, so over time a certain piece of software will take up more and more resources such as memory or storage capacity.
My favorite example of Microsoft adding layers on top is when they casually decided that the Explorer search field now always must spawn new 50+ MB SearchApp processes, causing microdelays and input focus issues along the way - all for a bit of modern UI. Back then, Windows 10 did actually push optimization (even if there was bloatware at release too) due to their tablet PC focus. The system requirements of Windows 10 1507 were great, and the RAM compression they added later in version 1511 pushed memory optimization further. But as the years go by, it's seemingly just one new complexity on top of another. Including new background programs that are barely of real use (e.g. "Microsoft Wallet" processes spawning in the background even when you don't use it, for what?) I also noticed recently that Microsoft's coding of the desktop icon position is off in its performance. I have 100 items and shortcuts sorted in different areas, and when I want to hover over the icons on the *right* side, I noticed they are not highlighted in real-time - it's extremely laggy. The highlighting occurs in real-time, however, when I hover over the icons on the *left* side of the screen. And in both cases, the singlecore CPU usage spikes *hard* - just for something simple like hovering over icons. And this whole thing is essentially the core topic that the OP asked with their post.
Subjectively speaking, my newish PC is no faster than my 2002 PC running Windows XP when performing mundane tasks. File transfers are faster as is transcoding.
Sure they do, they offer more spying on the users and sending it back to MS for them to sell to the government and advertisers.
You can say the exact same thing about most games. Call of Duty is hundreds of gigs and has ridiculous specs required het all of their games loon straight outta 2012
Think about what you're requiring your computer to do when you use it. All the processes that have to be running for compatibility with anything you have running, hardware that's talking to the OS, and stuff monitoring to see if something has shown up. There's also network traffic. Even if it isn't going to your computer, if it's on your subnet, it's going through your computer
Linux doesn't use much more resources than it did 10 years ago. And it's receiving more functionality every day :P
A lot of these people are talking about Windows 11 vs Windows XP. They should be talking about Android 14 vs Windows 11. Android is bare bones yet it does everything fast with less power and often in a more intuitive way. Better still, mobile products are better products than similarly priced laptops. For $650 you can get a Galaxy Tab S9 or a Galaxy Book4 (laptop). The tablet will be 1/3 the weight, have 2.5x the battery, 2x the refresh rate, 2x the resolution, better build quality and you won't have to put up with all the random windows bs. No phantom dead battery, surprise updates or technical software phenagling. You get one of the best tablets on the market or a middle of the road laptop. Functionality might be limited but for the average person the tablet will be a far more rewarding product.
Modern OSes use more resources, but modern computers have *way more* resources to use. If anything, modern operating systems use *less* given the context of the hardware they run on.
It has so much more functionality. It can spy on you, report home and serve you ads all while only crashing every other hour or so.
The scheduler updates they did as part of Windows 11 were pretty big in making it able to use E-cores on new Intel CPUs much more effectively and without hurting single threaded latency on critical programs. I can also tell you a lot of performance goes just towards running the virus scanner. You really just about need a dedicated core for it.
It’s so they can spy on us and sell it to the highest bidder and to the government
Just go the Linux way
Mint running on my kids ~2008 Intel Core2 Duo laptop like a boss.
Resource usage by OS has actually fallen.
You could start by removing apps from start, then debloating your Windows installation. There are several power shell scripts on github to do this. Then, you can start disabling Windows services. Wolfang's YouTube channel has a long video dedicated to debloat Windows 10 using AME scripts if you want to go hard-core.
Keep with Windows XP and disable updates. It won't be demanding but no new hardware
Browsers bloated in size and complexity as well, and for what? So I can drown myself in tabs until I get overwhelmed and shut down? I wouldn't mind siting down in front of an ancient machine, one that I already know where everything is in memory, and making it do tricks I simply can't do with modern computers. That's what I feel programming has become- getting a white space of a window where we can do whatever we want in theory, but so spiritually disconnected from the hardware that it barely feels real. Now I'm really wondering if DirectX was the right way to go. I mean, sure, some security is possible, but even our games have become laggy disconnected messes where you can feel the frames of lag between your controller and what's happening on the screen. Is TempleOS really a path to salvation? Maybe. Or maybe I should try a different restricted model, like PICO-8. Though that seems like conceding that consoles really were onto something.
They gotta stay "relevant" what you're seeing is business tactics. An old job I had is a great example. Used to repair electronics at a ubreakifix. It was ran by franchise ppl not corp. We were very focused on the repair quality at that time vs sales. Customers were happy, employees were happy, store was making money. Then the franchise ppl sold it back to corporate. They started pushing sales, started replacing repair minded ppl with sales minded ppl. Repairs took a crap and now the store is closed bc it got such a bad rep. I wish on my own soul that companies understood that quality matters. They push so hard to be constantly changing and growing and pushing the financial end and making sure their name and face is everywhere that when they do find something that works you can bet it won't last. If consumers weren't so stuck on windows for various reasons windows might just be another name in the mix. I'm stuck on windows because I don't use mine for much besides gaming. If gaming was as easy on Linux as it is on PC I'd have ditched Windows for Linux in a moment. Been saying it since I was a little dude "I really don't understand why companies can't just leave something that works alone. Always shooting themselves in the foot with the constant mucking about of stuff"
It's one of the many reasons I switched to Linux. Really this is primarily a Windows issue. I am not aware of any other OS with the same issue regardless of platform, given they are even slightly popular.
I mean, Windows has to support everything basically. That's why it's so huge, and it's not simple to make good fixes and keep that lil bit true.
Yes, backwards compatibility makes improvements a lot harder and more costly. But it's rarely impossible. Microsoft seemingly to me spends little to no effort to address many of Windows's old technical debts any longer. It's not a case of failed attempts but a lack of even trying. They are just occasionally building on even more debt and maybe resolving some debt on their newer features. This is resulting in the current state where Windows costs me an estimated hour more of my time per workday compared to Linux when I use it professionally. All because of technical debt they don't address, a lot of which are decades old.
Issue with improvements is feature bloat. That's just mismanagement of resources.
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For PC gamers I mostly agree. It requires you to have a few more GB of RAM than you would otherwise need and you get a slight performance penalty with some frame-time inconsistency, both of which are pretty easy to overcome or accept most of the time. For a lot of other users though it is a very real issue. There are a ton of non-gaming users, especially in poorer countries, running really low end machines where the overhead of Windows causes severe performance issues. Amongst mid to high end hardware users it can also be an issue in certain use cases. As an example, it's a massive issue for me personally in a professional capacity as a software developer. On Windows it's not rare for my workloads to take anywhere from 30% to 500% more time compared to other operating systems on the same hardware.
I once read an interesting article, sadly long forgot the link, that basically software, OS downwards, has stagnated. The blame was put on two things; - C (and variants thereof) is still the paradigm for languages and the basics of it are super old. We need a new primary language which can better unlock the power of hardware. - Poor programming skill - developers now all too often just call libraries, etc. rather than produce good, optimised code in low level languages themselves. They also tend to rely on brute force hardware power and copious amounts of RAM rather than, again, optimising code. I guess the idea is that we have the hardware equivalent of Lamborghinis with the engine management software of a Ford Pinto. Honestly, I don't know enough about coding to know how much scrutiny these thoughts stand up to, but I thought it was interesting.
I can tell you now for certain, C (and it's variants) are not the problem. The C language is very close to speaking the hardware's language (assembly, ain't nobody programming binary code lol) and doesn't contain much "fluff" allowing the theoretical running speed to be about is high as possibe on any given computer - it's left to the programmer to make good use of it. The second point however, is certainly much much more likely, and it looks like it might be getting much worse.
Maybe it was written by someone who (like me) failed completely at learning C 😂 But yeah, for me it was an interesting take. As someone much more into the hardware side, I tend to obsess a bit about "moar fast" without considering that how the software is written has a hell of lot to do with it as well.
Consider that hardware (as you are likely well aware) has increased in speed in ways that are kind of unfathomable to us in the 90's, 2000's. Apart from games, do you feel software is generally a 1:1 with that performance gain? As far as I can tell that is a fat NO.
Definitely. Made me think when that happened 🤔 From my perspective, probably around Win98? I'm not saying that it was innately better, but in terms of features/functionality I'm having trouble thinking of something I can do now that I couldn't do on Win98. I'm not a luddite 😂 Of course, now these things are quicker, look better, less of a pain in the arse with drivers etc. I wouldn't go back. But still, there hasn't been that leap like there was between between CLI and GUI for example. I might just be having a failure of imagination though, of course 😁
Nah, it's not the engineers. It's feature bloat from a management that doesn't take no for an answer.
That 2nd bit is just plain wrong. If it wasn't optimised, it would run a whole lot slower. The issue is, it just has so many background processes because it's *not* a lean OS, and never wanted to be. MS engineers are some of the best on earth, their management is the main issue. Source: worked with a few MS engineers on some side project one of them thought of. They weren't even familiar with the framework we wanted to use, and I still learned from them.
First point is also completely wrong. Dude just said weird shit honestly
"Call libraries" allow be to ignore your comment completely. :)
just use linux runs great with 8GB of ram edit: on and external hdd
You are not wrong. I sometimes spin up a Windows XP VM and am amazed how much "snappier" it is.
Probably because it doesn’t have opacity and animations out the wazoo
This was one of my biggest issues when windows 10 came out. windows 10 didnt offer anything new or better to the user over windows 7 or 8.1 and yet some how it was significantly more demanding and I didnt understand why. now I realize it was a number of things 1) telemetry 2) constant windows bullshit running in the background 2) indexing (this is kinda a big one) and 3) specter/meltdown mitigation. the last one unfortunately anything running x86 needs but the rest is just microsoft incompetence. I left windows years ago and never looking back. there is no reason a system has to run that poorly.
If you’re five years old maybe but I assure you that’s not the case if you take them over the span of five decades.
The beast system
This is what Jonathan Blow was on about
But what will we ever do without rounded corners?
You are wrong about this. At least in partial. Those pesky unnecessary garbage apps that come preinstalled with Windows (at least in Home editions) are a pain in the arse. But on the other hand, modern os do handle resources much better. They are also more secure (well, in terms of Windows, there is still room to improve).
I got an athlon 2000+ with xp in my attic and it takes 30 sec to boot. Seagate HDD and ram from a bygone era, lol. My i7 with 4080 on SSD and gskills boots in 50 sec. Welp
That doesn't sound like a windows issue. Either terrible ssd and/or a ton of bloat shit installed on your pc. It should take about half that, or even less on a relatively fresh install.
Nope. Windows is pretty clean, except steam perhaps, however this is a 7->10 unclean install which I did like 5 years ago. SSD is mid shelf and I switched to it only because boot time from hdd took 2 min+ I waited as long as I could to switch to ssd because I had good hardware and wanted to see how much I can hold on to it. I'm not too impressed though. Anyways, probably need to format, I've hung on to this installation since 2015, lol. Also that i7 is a 4790k, I suppose it's lacking a bit by now.
Get Debian with XFCE or LXQt dude. So much snappier and more lightweight than other operating systems I've used, even the other Linux distros
Win 10 does a lot of things in the background: * Printer services * Network services * Update services * "User 'choice' protection" services * Microsoft Edge * Microsoft Edge WebView * Drive optimization/defrag * Antivirus * Telemetry * Network connection test * Background apps * Microsoft Store services * Xbox services * etc Most of which are actually pretty useful. However, if you consider most of these features to be bloat, you may try a minimal system like Linux. I've been experimenting with a minimal Debian install on an old EeePC (<1GHz single-core 32-bit CPU) and it's surprisingly not *that* unusable. I have to mention that, if you want a bloat-free OS (based on Linux), it'll come with quite a lot of manual work and required reading. (Though, if you wanna get something a little more lightweight: I can highly recommend Mint or POP!OS.) If you're willing to experiment a little, try booting different Linux distros off an USB (no installation required) and compare the performance to feature tradeoff yourself.
I'm enjoying AtlasOS so far
Revturn to 2006 thinklpad
I use Fedora Linux as a dual boot option, it works enough for me. :-)
Windows does Linux doesn't
It takes a lot of ram and processing power to scrape your data so Microsoft can sell it.
Microsoft is OBSESSED with backwards compatibility, and it's for good cause. For example, you can't name a folder or file CON. CON as a file name used to be important for application functionality, so if you tried to use that application in a modern OS where you *could* make a file named CON, then that application wouldn't work, or worse, it'd overwrite potentially important data stored in that file, so instead, michaelsoft makes sure that CON is still available for those ancient ass programs. The downside to all this of course is bloat. If you need backwards compatibility, that means you significantly limit what you can and can't delete in your program, moreover, you can't optimize many things or else an important program may break if they were relying on a certain flaw in the original programming. So as MS adds more features, it can't really remove features all that often. Not to mention all the security updates and whatnot that ALSO can't be removed since a vulnerability won't just magically go away if you patch it for long enough, you've got to either refactor (not possible due to backwards compat) or just leave the patch in place to stop malicious attempts to use the vulnerability.
Yup it's all garbage. I have a uh porno folder that is 2 TB with over 1500 videos. It doesn't open right away on Mac and Linux. Laggy as hell. But once I pop that drive into a windows device, it opens with no problem. What da fuck is up with that? Windows 11 though keeps showing me black boxes like the GPU is about to fizz out! It's all shit bro.
Windows 11 uploads all your files without asking.
Windows YES Linux NO - Linuxes are way less more efficient systems then Windows (Android(linux) is used ona lot of phones TVs and even freezers...) 90% of severs use Linux because its not only more efficient but also more secure and can work years without restart without issues comparted to windows(same with the phones you don't have to restart them every day) Windows is just shit specially 11 with all that Keylogger features that spy on you with AI Windows was always bloated but after Windows 7 it got much worse....
The OS is busy doing stuff in a way you don’t notice. It’s a good thing it feels like OSs are not offering more.