Windows 7 or vista..?

[Geek]

Originally Posted by Luke

this is interesting but not that surprising.

Microsoft denies it built 'backdoor' in Windows 7

There's been one since XP:

Microsoft Discloses Government Backdoor on Windows Operating Systems « News Worldwide

[nigelwright7557]

I have just moved up to Win 7.

Tried to upgrade from Vista and it failed with error messages.
So had to start with a clean hard disc which was a nuisance.
Since it installed had to go through the repair process three times !

Seems to be similar t oVista with the pain of upgrading but seems to have less bugs than Vista did, this is not surprising as WIn 7 is basically Vista with a few bells and whistles.

Got a bit upset when ebay wouldnt allow me to sell on my Vista !
Still sold it now privately so got there in the end.

[MJL21193]

I've been using 7 pro for 3 weeks now and I haven't had a single problem. Everything installed just fine and my old programs run perfectly.
Much better than XP.

Certainly worth the bother.

[DigitalJunkie]

Originally Posted by nigelwright7557

I have just moved up to Win 7.

Tried to upgrade from Vista and it failed with error messages.
So had to start with a clean hard disc which was a nuisance.
Since it installed had to go through the repair process three times !

Seems to be similar t oVista with the pain of upgrading but seems to have less bugs than Vista did, this is not surprising as WIn 7 is basically Vista with a few bells and whistles.

Got a bit upset when ebay wouldnt allow me to sell on my Vista !
Still sold it now privately so got there in the end.

Yea,I've heard that "upgrading" is a major pain,and it's best to just nuke the drive,and do a fresh install. Upgrading also seems to take longer than a fresh install,sometimes alot longer.

[Illusus]

Originally Posted by star882

Burger King selling a Windows 7 Whopper in Japan
I think I'll stick to Linux.

Yes!! That's exactly what makes Japanese people "the coolest and craziest" people we know . The iGeneration is getting on my nerves (get a load of me!, I sound like 'grampa' ).

[planet10]

Originally Posted by slam

I am not familiar with how MacOS implements/support PAE though.

I can't tell you the detail, but it is FreeBSD running on a Mach kernel.

dave

[PB2]

Read and see where many of the 32 Bit Server versions address more than 4GB as phofman mentioned earlier:
Physical Address Extension - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Basically no page can be larger than 4GB, but any serious operating system uses paging for memory protection and to support virtual memory. No single process can be larger than 4GB which is not a serious limitation.

I believe that you can hack XP and Win7 to support more than 4GB with a fairly simple registry change:
Make Windows 7 and Vista 32-bit (x86) Support More Than 4GB Memory » Raymond.CC Blog

[planet10]

Originally Posted by MJL21193

It's been quite a while since I thought about this stuff (high school)

In high school the closest thing to a PC i ever saw was the 1st HP calculators -- and that only because Gulf Oil figured the office needed one (which meant it was more or less my Dad's).

1st year uni i worked on an IBM 360. Algol W & assembler (4k memory segments)

dave

[PB2]

Star, any general purpose computer supporting floating point is going to support single and double precision (64 bit). Even the early Intel 8087 that was used with 16 bit processors supported both formats. You don't need a 64 bit processor, indeed the 32 bit VAX super mini supported quad precision (128 bit) floating point.

The 8087 had a microcoded 80 bit ALU to do the math, and it had fairly graceful roundoff and underflow behavior as compared to brute force array processors that were much faster (usually single clock per operation) but less graceful:
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/i.../754story.html

and:
http://stillwaterscience.ning.com/fo...adedFi58%3A741

I've worked in CPU design, and array processor design for a good part of my career: http://www.linkedin.com/profile?view...30&trk=tab_pro

64 bit machines were classified as Super Computers years ago, such as the Cray:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer

From the above link:
"Supercomputers are used for highly calculation-intensive tasks such as problems involving quantum mechanical physics, weather forecasting, climate research, molecular modeling (computing the structures and properties of chemical compounds, biological macromolecules, polymers, and crystals), physical simulations (such as simulation of airplanes in wind tunnels, simulation of the detonation of nuclear weapons, and research into nuclear fusion). A particular class of problems, known as Grand Challenge problems, are problems whose full solution requires semi-infinite computing resources."

I don't see home or most business users having any real need for 64 bit systems. They are not necessarily faster unless you are doing 64 bit arithmetic which most software does not use. It probably will become mainstream due to marketing reasons - sell another OS = more money for MS.

[MJL21193]

In high school the closest thing to a PC i ever saw was the 1st HP calculators -- and that only because Gulf Oil figured the office needed one (which meant it was more or less my Dad's).

1st year uni i worked on an IBM 360. Algol W & assembler (4k memory segments)

We had something like ten TRS-80's in my HS (running on the Z-80 processor) and I had a Color Computer at home with a 6809E processor. I had the assembler cartridge that plugged into the "expansion" port and could do quite a number of things in machine language at the time. The opcode set was very basic and it took FOREVER to do the simplest thing but boy was it fast (at least faster than BASIC).
The good old days...