I read the same thing about the lesser resource consumption with Windows 7 somewhere, as did one of my Tech friends.

But as far as speed and efficiency go, I think my Vista OS is far more efficient with its use of RAM than when I had XP on there, even if it wants more of it. Its not bloat when its put to good use.

I hate to say it, but I think you're right Ozzfan. I've upgraded both my Vista rigs with external gpu's & 4gb ram on each. Now finding it harder to keep returning to my XP rig.

... and I think Windows 7 will bring some great usability enhancements to the Windows NT 6.x architecture. There's a few features in there that I'd already like to have.

I was a diehard fan of Win2k for the longest time, and refused to go XP for as long as possible. Finally got irritated at a few games that looked interesting and absolutely had to have the kernel hack that SP2 gave XP, but I found DX9 workarounds for it that seemed to mostly work. Finally just decided to go with XP. I don't like all the built-in security, and I've got most of it turned off, but there's just some things you can't get rid of.. like that stupid warning about opening certain files. I went in and put the common extensions into the exception list for that, but it's still annoying.

The only Vista feature I like is when you are moving/copying files, you can see how much is remaining and how fast it is going. If I can get that in XP, I see absolutely no reason to upgrade for like 10 years.

[edit: Oh, the other reason that kind of pushed me to upgrading to at least XP was 2k's lack of NUMA.]

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Windows 2000 was a great OS. The first "clean" interface brought to the NT architecture, and brought a lot of the features of Windows 98 to NT. XP may have been the solidifying OS between the 9x and NT lines, but 2000 was a milestone precursor.

I can't really say what I like about XP over 2000 other than the fact that I do enjoy fresh new UIs and XP brought a fresh look to Windows. There weren't very many differences between XP and 2000 other than greater plug 'n pray support, and more built-in drivers for devices, including many USB devices. Other than that, most things that will run on XP will run on 2000, with the exception of a few games (ran into this while trying to play an older Win98 game that I tried getting to run on Vista x64 [which wouldn't work because of its 16bit installer] and wouldn't install on 2000 because the installer kept crashing, but ran fine on XP).

Heck, I still enjoy breaking out Windows 3.1 and WfW 3.11 every now and again.

Windows 2000 was a great OS. The first "clean" interface brought to the NT architecture, and brought a lot of the features of Windows 98 to NT. XP may have been the solidifying OS between the 9x and NT lines, but 2000 was a milestone precursor.

I can't really say what I like about XP over 2000 other than the fact that I do enjoy fresh new UIs and XP brought a fresh look to Windows. There weren't very many differences between XP and 2000 other than greater plug 'n pray support, and more built-in drivers for devices, including many USB devices. Other than that, most things that will run on XP will run on 2000, with the exception of a few games (ran into this while trying to play an older Win98 game that I tried getting to run on Vista x64 [which wouldn't work because of its 16bit installer] and wouldn't install on 2000 because the installer kept crashing, but ran fine on XP).

Heck, I still enjoy breaking out Windows 3.1 and WfW 3.11 every now and again.

I'm beginning to think about transitioning from Windows 2000 to XP, partially because I've got my XP machine to where it really matches my Win2K desktop.

What the transition really means is pulling the plug on this Athlon XP, which is still running flawlessly after two standard-eternities.

But since it is 4 to 6 times slower than my laptop, I think I should put the laptop to good use.

The biggest issue is the keyboard. A genuine IBM 102 key keyboard should work with the right adapter.

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Wow, I ran an Athlon XP 3200+ with 98 for about a year and then put 2000 on there instead. Benchmarks went up 400% and I was sold. A few of the DX7 games I was playing nonstop at the time got about a 4x boost in framerate, as well. That was my primary rig before my twin Opteron rig I'm using now, but I took that previous system and put XP on it, and after spending 2 hours fine-tuning and tweaking XP, I got it down to about 5% slower than 2000 ran.

I have to say though, that's the slimmest XP I've ever seen. 13 processes using a massive 71MB of RAM. Oh, the loading time was fast, as well. The scrolling bar on the splash screen does 2 and a half passes and then the desktop shows up. 2000 took about 3 seconds longer, but I had that slimmed down to 12 processes and 43MB of RAM..oh, and 325MB of HDD space used. The XP install could only get down to about 1.2gb. That's as much slimming as I could do.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

read yesterday that windows 7 will have minwin and support for 256 cores

From what I've read in the latest MS Partner & Technet newsletters, Windows 7 & later will be Cloud Computing based. I think that will be a big mistake. Have all O/S, Office software etc, stored on the web? What happens if Web Servers go offline or get hacked?

I prefer my software where I can instantly access/change/repair/delete at my leisure, not on someone else's computers so that I can be held to ransom!

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From what I've read in the latest MS Partner & Technet newsletters, Windows 7 & later will be Cloud Computing based. I think that will be a big mistake. Have all O/S, Office software etc, stored on the web? What happens if Web Servers go offline or get hacked?

I prefer my software where I can instantly access/change/repair/delete at my leisure, not on someone else's computers so that I can be held to ransom!

Are you sure you aren't thinking of Windows Azure?

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- Luke.

From what I've read in the latest MS Partner & Technet newsletters, Windows 7 & later will be Cloud Computing based. I think that will be a big mistake. Have all O/S, Office software etc, stored on the web? What happens if Web Servers go offline or get hacked?

I prefer my software where I can instantly access/change/repair/delete at my leisure, not on someone else's computers so that I can be held to ransom!

Sure, the .exe and supporting libraries will be on your local machine. They really need to be for execution. But when you startup your programs, they must "check-in" to Microsoft in order to be "authorized". Are you familiar with the Steam client platform? It will probably just be a more complicated version of that with a lot more features.

From what I've read in the latest MS Partner & Technet newsletters, Windows 7 & later will be Cloud Computing based. I think that will be a big mistake. Have all O/S, Office software etc, stored on the web? What happens if Web Servers go offline or get hacked?

I prefer my software where I can instantly access/change/repair/delete at my leisure, not on someone else's computers so that I can be held to ransom!

Are you sure you aren't thinking of Windows Azure?

Azure is a software plus services aspect of cloud computing. From what I can understand from MS at the moment, I think they are preparing to go to subscription services, which will probably suit companies more than individuals.

For home users, at least here in the UK, web services will be too slow. Finished building a new rig yesterday & it took 81 minutes to download MP11 from MS.

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Azure is a software plus services aspect of cloud computing. From what I can understand from MS at the moment, I think they are preparing to go to subscription services, which will probably suit companies more than individuals.

That's my take on it as well.

For home users, at least here in the UK, web services will be too slow. Finished building a new rig yesterday & it took 81 minutes to download MP11 from MS.

Ouch! Why don't you download the larger stuff like .NET 2.0 and WMP11 and leave them on your file server? That way you can install them on all your new builds and just download the updates to those programs from Microsoft.

Ouch! Why don't you download the larger stuff like .NET 2.0 and WMP11 and leave them on your file server? That way you can install them on all your new builds and just download the updates to those programs from Microsoft.

Yeah, that's what I do every couple of weeks. I go through the download center on the MS site and manually grab the hotfixes/updates and offline redistributables (think 'network installer for IT professionals'). I have about a gigabyte worth of data on a storage drive and that's all it is. My local repository for MS updates.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Ouch! Why don't you download the larger stuff like .NET 2.0 and WMP11 and leave them on your file server? That way you can install them on all your new builds and just download the updates to those programs from Microsoft.

Yeah, that's what I do every couple of weeks. I go through the download center on the MS site and manually grab the hotfixes/updates and offline redistributables (think 'network installer for IT professionals'). I have about a gigabyte worth of data on a storage drive and that's all it is. My local repository for MS updates.

If you're not building machines like Sirius B does for other people (i.e. they are all your permanent machines), why don't you consider deploying WSUS? Windows Software Update Services will only run on Windows 2000 Server, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Server 2008, but it can be extremely helpful if you have a large LAN. Its got a web-based management interface that allows you to approve updates before they are sent out to your other Windows boxes.

The only thing you need to do then is either set a local system policy or if you have Active Directory, use group policies to tell your Windows machines to use your WSUS server as the Windows Update server. That way only your server downloads updates once, you approve them, then they download to all your other Windows machines at LAN speeds instead of internet speeds.

Thanks Ozzfan. Will do that (Re: 828313). As for your last post, I'm in the process of building 2008 Server. Won't be complete for a month or two, as I'm getting parts whenever I have the cash to spare. Once built, will use your advice regarding WSUS.

Again, thanks for the tips. I must admit, I'm very annoyed with myself for not thinking of this.

As for the net, it's not normally that slow, just bad for the last several days.

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Just remember that if you use WSUS for updating clients and selling computers, remember to change the policy setting back to using Microsoft's Windows Update servers instead of your own, otherwise your customers will not be able to retrieve Windows Updates on their own.

Windows 7 Release Date Could be '09
Expect to see it around next holiday season....

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- Luke.

Just remember that if you use WSUS for updating clients and selling computers, remember to change the policy setting back to using Microsoft's Windows Update servers instead of your own, otherwise your customers will not be able to retrieve Windows Updates on their own.

Thanks. When server built, will only use WSUS on LAN.

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Just remember that if you use WSUS for updating clients and selling computers, remember to change the policy setting back to using Microsoft's Windows Update servers instead of your own, otherwise your customers will not be able to retrieve Windows Updates on their own.

Thanks. When server built, will only use WSUS on LAN.

In case you need more info on how to configure the clients, the Microsoft technet article is here explaining how to do it on the clients.

Set the client to your local server for updates, and before you ship the finished computers out to the client, just go back into gpedit.msc and change it back to 'Not Specified' and it will do the default of using the Microsoft web servers.

I use WSUS at work for about 1500 workstations and 20 servers. It makes things really slick, because you use a few computers to test new updates and see if they break anything, and if they do, you can tell WSUS not to deploy those updates. You can also specify computer groups ('target groups' in the gpedit config), and the server can be set up to only give certain updates to certain groups. It's really handy.

For systems that do not have gpedit.msc (XP Home, for example), there's this article that explains how to do it in the registry. My assumption is delete these keys to assume the default on those systems.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

Hey Cosmic, thanks for the tip & the links. Much appreciated, especially the XP Home one.

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Just a short article on Windows 7 Boot Speed Tests

...Do I see Windows Vista in front of XP?!

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- Luke.