Operating Systems discussion - Versus Mode

[RED BARON]

Well, this discussion basically began in the current desktop topic and seeing it grow it seems to be something that deserves a thread.

So here goes:
Personally I am an avid fan of the windows 7 OS and feel that windows have gone the wrong way with the touch based windows 8 OS - Now it should be said that I haven't myself tried it, only read about it and the problems people have with it (Notes of confusion, hard to use, programs that doesn't work on it - so yea).

But is it bad? How does it compare to other OS's? Are we in a Vista/XP scenario? Former loved OS systems - or for the heck of it: what problems or joys have the systems given you?

 

[Deleted member 219079]

I had over 3 years Windows Vista, which completely sucked, I got BSODs, nonsense errors, unwanted shutdowns, compatibility fails and sudden performance drops.

Now I've got my Windows 7 Ultimate and I've faced 0 errors or anything. Biggest differences has been in shutdown speed, way cooler theme, performance and resource usage.

Some of my friends prefer ancient XP. But it's really getting old. For example Adobe Photoshop CS7 wont support it. Back when I had XP, I got a lot of errors, not BSODs though. Windows 7>Windows XP>Windows Vista

And the new Windows 8: why to spend time on trying to improve perfect Windows 7? Why not to go new way? I can't say bad things about 8 after some updates and new drivers... oh wait, that theme xd

 

[Nuclear]

I shall post something about Win8. Note; I haven't used Modern UI (aka Metro) since I installed, I've set it to boot right to the desktop and I haven't needed it. So using only the desktop is possible.

In the following pictures you can see the task manager, how it has been improved to show more information about the processes and resource usage.

image1

image2

In this picture, I'd just like to show the new "ribbon" kind of thing which appears on top of the view. It shows some basic options related to the files and stuff.

image3

I haven't ran into any compatibility issues, even the age old Deus Ex ran well. As you can probably guess, I use this as an improved version of 7, it's faster and some things are easier to access.

I bought the Win7 -> Win8 upgrade for $15 and I think the offer still exists, and I can recommend it.

 

[RED BARON]

Hmm yea, I had heard there was extra info with windows 8 and looking at the pictures I see what was meant. But given me, I think I'll stick to my old one some time yet so whether bugs/driver problems there is should be fixed by then.

 

[Nuclear]

I suggest downloading the "Windows 8 Upgrade Assistant" which I think checks the system and tells you the possible compatibility issues.

http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/upgrade-to-windows-8

 

[Deleted member 219079]

I shall post something about Win8. Note; I haven't used Modern UI (aka Metro) since I installed, I've set it to boot right to the desktop and I haven't needed it. So using only the desktop is possible.

In the following pictures you can see the task manager, how it has been improved to show more information about the processes and resource usage.

image1

image2

In this picture, I'd just like to show the new "ribbon" kind of thing which appears on top of the view. It shows some basic options related to the files and stuff.

image3

I haven't ran into any compatibility issues, even the age old Deus Ex ran well. As you can probably guess, I use this as an improved version of 7, it's faster and some things are easier to access.

I bought the Win7 -> Win8 upgrade for $15 and I think the offer still exists, and I can recommend it.

I guess you have SSD for OS, how much did that cost? And how much does it give performance to you? Just asking

 

[Nuclear]

I guess you have SSD for OS, how much did that cost? And how much does it give performance to you? Just asking

I bought a decent 64GB SSD (I've shrinked the volume, that's why it shows about 36GB), it was on sale for 40€. I have Windows, Steam and some frequently used programs installed on it. The performance increase is huge, I've never had to wait for any Windows action to complete, especially boot time has been dramatically shortened. Let's just say I could never go back to HDD after getting used to this SSD.

 

[RED BARON]

Let's just say I could never go back to HDD after getting used to this SSD.

Understandable Running a hybrid between SSD and HDD - With my windows startup stuff is on the SSD and the HDD stores my programs and all the other random crap.

 

[Nuclear]

Understandable Running a hybrid between SSD and HDD - With my windows startup stuff is on the SSD and the HDD stores my programs and all the other random crap.

I have pretty much the same, everything that starts on startup is on the SSD and pretty much rest on the HDD. A free tip in case you didn't know: If you use Steam, you can install the Steam itself in a different location (=SSD) and games to another (=HDD).

And if someone is considering buying an SSD now, I'd recommend one of the brand new Samsung 840 series.

 

[Dr Super Good]

And the new Windows 8: why to spend time on trying to improve perfect Windows 7?

Because the Windows 7 kernal is dated? Windows 8 added many much needed features to the kernal such as dropping legacy hardware support for speed.

 

[Deleted member 219079]

Because the Windows 7 kernal is dated? Windows 8 added many much needed features to the kernal such as dropping legacy hardware support for speed.

No no no! I didn't mean that. Windows 8 went the new way introducing new features such as modern UI. I know OSs will be outdated some day.

 

[Vengeancekael]

Hmm so apparently Warcraft 3 isn't compatible with win8.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Hmm so apparently Warcraft 3 isn't compatible with win8.

I doubt that seeing how the kernal is so similar to W7 and it works fine there.

 

[RED BARON]

Hmm so apparently Warcraft 3 isn't compatible with win8.

Well there is one good example of problems - and I already have problems running some wc3 tools on windows 7.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Well there is one good example of problems - and I already have problems running some wc3 tools on windows 7.

What problems?

 

[RED BARON]

What problems?

Well basically that oinkwinklers tools refuses to work, which they did on my old vista (not that there is anything good to that one ).

 

[Dr Super Good]

Even in compatibility mode?

 

[RED BARON]

Even in compatibility mode?

Yea - but given that its my old downloads from when the programs was first released it might be the reason. They have survived transfers from computer to computer and different OS's

 

[The_wand_mirror]

Thing is i don't need this new windows for speed my computer is fucking fast with an SSD! It boots in 5-7 seconds and then i can basically click any program i want and it will immediatley load or start up if it's not a heavy one.

 

[Zakamutt]

While the new task manager does look cool, anyone really interested in computer performance will probably have some standalones - Core Temp, GPU-Z and the like - installed. It does seem to give more extensive data, and I especially like that memory usage isn't listed in bytes which makes it significantly more human-readable.

 

[Dr Super Good]

Real pros use performance monitor... That does everything since that is basicly the OS data feed that all programs use. The exception obviously is processes themselves but for that you have procexp.exe, a taskmanager on steroids (but is a bit too heavy weight for recovering from crashes so only use in stable systems).

 

[Zakamutt]

The Win7 resource monitor (accessible from performance tab in the task manager) is pretty damn comprehensive, I have to admit. Doesn't have temperatures and the system hardware info info provided by CPU-Z, though.

I'm personally biased toward coretemp/speedfan, since there are very handy g15 gadgets for them.

Off topic, woo!

 

[RED BARON]

Off topic, woo!

Not really, its part of the discussion of pro's and con's of the system - though admittedly the performance monitor is a very very tiny part of my decision as to what monitor I like - though I must admit that Win8 takes some points reduction due to appearance alone - I don't like how it looks So figure I also do judgments based on less important factors.

 

[EloTheMan]

I'm gonna stick with W7 for a long while, the amount of problems is very low and are mostly related to other stuff than the actual OS (like all the mistakes I have made ).

I've had W98, XP and Vista before and there were so many frustrating things about those OS.

XP gets a lot of error messages from time to time, built in programs to handle WLAN are so hard and time consuming to use compared to the "click to connect" in Vista and W7. The only thing I liked about XP was the decent performance it had.

Vista is more of love and hate story, error messages and the way it took so much resources out of the hardware made it expensive to game on. But it was very user friendly on several points (like the WLAN) and it looked good too (my opinion, W7 is better looking).

W7 is so easy to use, so few error messages and the hardware today has caught up to match the performance demand.

I read an article about W8 for around 2 years ago and it mentioned that Microsoft intended make such a large change to the windows series because they wanted W7 to live on a bit longer since a vast majority loved it so much.

 

[Furiion52]

Windows 7 for me! Although I have to use Vista at the moment, its so crap. I hate it, I can feel it corrupting my pc >_<

 

[Nuclear]

I wonder how much of Windows rot exists in Win 8.

 

[Ralle]

It probably still has all the crappy stuff as the registry, the winsxs folder, dll hell. Everything is still there.. For compatibility reasons of course.

 

[Nuclear]

Then again there's the new reset feature which will surely be useful after using it for a long time.

 

[Xonok]

It probably still has all the crappy stuff as the registry, the winsxs folder, dll hell. Everything is still there.. For compatibility reasons of course.

Registry is on quite about any computer that can have many programs without huge performance drops. derp.

However, I must agree that the way windows handles it's registries is just nonsense.

 

[Dr Super Good]

The registry does not alter performance at all. All those people claiming it does were refering to it on old opperating systems such as 95 where it was stored in a linked list structure (so registry opperations had a O(n) performance). All new Windows can have millions of registry entries and perform the same.

Registry is something Linux lacks apparently and is very important for ease of use. Just yesterday I had problems on Linux where an application was linked to a specific version of Python yet the version installed was different (looked for Python2 but there was only Python2.5/2.6). In Windows you can use the registry to automaticly tell the presence or abscence of an installed program which makes program to program interaction far easier. I showed this in my WC3Booster program as it could automaticly find the WC3 directory on windows using the directory (no idea how this would be done on Linux based os).

 

[Zakamutt]

It's too bad blizzard implemented the registry checking so poorly for the war3 updater. Lose the entry? Reinstall, don't pick where you know War3 is!

Well, that or just re-create the registry key, of course.

I don't necessarily see a problem with having a registry, but I wonder if the same thing can't be implemented in the folder system of linux, prefixed by a dot of course (chuck it in... /usr/ or something? Or just ~/, perhaps.). Lookups might be less effective, though; no real idea how the windows registry works now.

 

[Dr Super Good]

but I wonder if the same thing can't be implemented in the folder system of linux

Through the use of symbolic links it can be. However if you are too stupid to make them for your process than you find you need to keep every single version installed (as updates will stop other processes from working as they cannot find your process).

Python is a good example where TinyOS looks for Python2 yet all modern Linux installations have Python 2.5 or 2.6. It will thus fail to work properly as it looks for "Python2" not "Python2.5"/2.6. The only solution is to symbolicly link Python 2.6 to "Python2".