Hi, On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 2:36 AM, dmccunney <dennis.mccun...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 3:03 AM, Michael C. Robinson > <plu...@robinson-west.com> wrote: > >> The latest version of Windows always seems to need more computing >> horsepower than the last one... > > Not just Windows. I run FreeDOS ...
Heh, I did have one guy tell me the other day online that FreeDOS was a memory hog. I think he means for his old 186-ish emulator (compared to really ancient MS-DOS 3.3 or whatever). It's funny that we're running FreeDOS which (without extenders) maxes out at 1 MB but most new-fangled OSes nowadays need 1 GB minimum!! > on an old notebook with an 867mhz > Transmeta CPU, an IDE 4 HD, and 256MB of RAM (of which 16MB is grabbed > off the top by the CPU for code morphing.) I still say that's a rare gem you have. It probably belongs in a museum. Definitely quirky, that's for sure. ;-) > It came to me with WinXP > SP2 installed, and was frozen snail slow.. I swapped the original > 30GB HD for a 40GB from my SO's dead laptop, repartitioned, and looked > for Linux distros to install. I wound up with Puppy Linux (intended > for lower end HW) I run Puppy, but it hasn't been nearly as lean as back in the 2.16 days (or such). "Lean" for Linux means 128 MB minimum, even with swap, unless you run a no-longer-supported kernel and tools, e.g. old Slackware 11.0 / kernel 2.4.x. (Like I said, OpenSuSE and Red Hat seem to want almost?? 1 GB just to install.) > an earlier version of Ubuntu, and Win2K Pro SP4. > Once I had it properly installed and tuned, Win2K took *less* memory > (I got it down to about 80Mb), booted faster, and was quicker in > operation than either Linux distro. Win2k is allegedly leaner than XP. I know CWS (of CWSDPMI) loved it to death. I don't know the details. But I did, for a few months, run an XP machine with only 128 MB of RAM. XP was quite lean (compared to later Windows), e.g. the kernel only seemed to eat about half of that. So I could run DJGPP or Opera but not much else (e.g. no Firefox without major swapping, which was unusable). >> I suspect this is on purpose to boost computer sales. > > Nope. Well, if you think they don't purposely delay releases or put features and fixes only in newer products, you're naive. They all definitely have powerful marketing teams, and surely those demand they keep something to advertise as "new!". > *All* new OS releases need more hardware than prior ones, > because they are expected to do more, and host larger and more complex > applications. They all seem to, but do they really have to? I doubt it. Though it's unfair to say since it depends on a billion things, I suppose. I read online (Phoronix?) that Win8 supposedly did NOT regress with regards to speed or RAM, which is surprisingly good (and probably took real effort). It supposedly boots up much faster and allegedly can combine 4 kb RAM pages (or whatever) for better memory use (dunno the details beyond that). EDIT: Almost forgot the new MSVC 2k10 is supposedly much better, and I blindly assume the core OS itself was recompiled with it. No idea if that makes a difference, and maybe I'm wrong in guessing that, but that should bring some speedups, in theory, esp. since SSE2 is allegedly targeted by default now. >> Someday maybe, ReactOS will fix that problem. > > I recommend not holding your breath while waiting. ReactOS is a difficult task and much more ambitious than it probably should be. I guess it's a "success" that anything works. Anyways, they did (a while back) actually decrease the RAM requirements a lot, possibly down to 32 MB, dunno, didn't try it (ask Bernd, heh). BTW, I've not heavily tested it, but their MSVCRT.DLL clone does "partially" work under HX, so that's good for us, at least. ;-) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
