The PC I built specifically for 4K video editing runs a Ryzen 7 - 3800X and a GTX 1660 card. That combination was about the limit of my budget at the time. All my other PC's run cheap video cards or on CPU graphics. The graphics in an Intel CPU are typically not bad in their 2D performance and do OK playing TV type video (YouTube and the like) but fall short in 3D performance, which does not affect me since I don't game and have yet to do any serious 3D modelling. Note that my newest PC runs an 8th gen Intel 8700 CPU so I have no knowledge of the later chips.
I'm running a Ryzen 9 3900X with a 5700XT card. It works quite well for anything I try. I can compile GIMP from source in under two minutes and I can play games in 4K if I don't expect to use "Ultra"... I'm not much of a gamer anyway.
My next upgrade will be major again I think. No sense upgrading the CPU this time. When AMD releases their next generation, it'll be a new socket and DDR5. The generations after that will stick to that for a couple of generations if the past is anything to go by.
I just can't get over how much faster everything has gotten. My first machine used a Z80 chip at 4MHz and 64k of RAM. I figure it would take on the order of a year to decode an MP3 song with it if you could even do it. It would only take about 10 hours to download at 1200 baud though🙂 That one song would fill the 5MB hard disk that was an option for it. I had dual 8" floppies so you would have to use like 12 discs for the one song, too.
I can do it now in less than a second. Amazing 🙂
My next upgrade will be major again I think. No sense upgrading the CPU this time. When AMD releases their next generation, it'll be a new socket and DDR5. The generations after that will stick to that for a couple of generations if the past is anything to go by.
I just can't get over how much faster everything has gotten. My first machine used a Z80 chip at 4MHz and 64k of RAM. I figure it would take on the order of a year to decode an MP3 song with it if you could even do it. It would only take about 10 hours to download at 1200 baud though🙂 That one song would fill the 5MB hard disk that was an option for it. I had dual 8" floppies so you would have to use like 12 discs for the one song, too.
I can do it now in less than a second. Amazing 🙂
Too late! Now my Raspberry Pi 4 is booting to Microsoft Bob!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Bob
Agree 100% with the "still a turd" part. 🙂
As for being a lot better, Windows is certainly a lot more stable; I remember Windows 95 having about a dozen Blue Screens of Death every day, but those became rare by the time Win 7 arrived. So agree, definitely better in that regard.
But that is setting a very low bar. Just before being forced to use Win95 at my first job, I had been using Solaris (Unix) in college. It was rock stable, and never crashed unless there was a power outage or a hardware failure. We literally ran those computers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 12 months a year.
So Win10 is better than Win95 when it comes to crashing daily. On the other hand, the amount of invasive spying from Microsoft has increased dramatically. IMO, Win10 is pretty much one gigantic collection of spyware. "Can we listen to your microphone? Can we track your computer's location? Can we view what your webcam sees? Can we read through all your documents looking for keywords so we can send you spam? Can we confuse you into creating a Microsoft online account just so you can log into your own da*n PC?"
Spying and tracking aside, USB on Windows is still flaky in 2022, just as it was in Win 98. I help keep about 30 Win10 PCs running at work, and we constantly have USB-related headaches, such as USB-to-serial converters that won't work if other USB devices are plugged into the same PC, even after choosing the right port, etc. Even the mouse is flaky and slow to respond in Win10, compared to Linux on the same hardware.
Speaking of which, Win10 is still very good at slowing powerful PC hardware down. It amazes me how much faster Linux runs on the same hardware.
Thank goodness for Linux! (or should that be, thank goodness for Linus Torvalds, and all the hundreds of thousands of people who've contributed code!)
-Gnobuddy
Shudder!
Someone has actually made it possible to boot Win10 on a Raspberry Pi 4 (the ARM version of Win10, of course.)
More on this here: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/202...sh-to-put-windows-10-or-11-on-a-raspberry-pi/
Why anyone would actually want Windows on their Pi, when Linux is so much better in every way except public popularity, is beyond me.
I currently have three Raspberry Pi 4s - all running Linux, of course - doing various chores around the house. One is the bedroom PC, one is for online video conferencing (Zoom/ MS Teams/ Jitsi), the third is our home file server. They are an incredible bit of hardware, and paired with Linux, they are almost unbelievably versatile.
-Gnobuddy
A Ryzen 9 chip and 5700XT card might be a significant upgrade for my current video machine, but I would not likely get enough extra performance to justify the cost. A next gen CPU, motherboard, video card and DDR5 memory is definitely not in the budget until they are not "the next big thing" any longer. I built the Ryzen 7 machine to save a few hundred $$$, since the AMD / Intel price gap was significant at the time. It was the only AMD machine I have ever built. Looking back I realize that my dislike for AMD was really a dislike for Hector Ruiz even though he is no longer there. He trashed two divisions at Motorola before leaving for AMD.
My first machine used a MC6800 chip at 921 KHz. It came with 2 K of static RAM, which I upgraded to 48 K with some DIY SS-50 bus boards. The slow clock frequency was chosen by SWTPC to save the cost of one crystal, since they just divided the baud rate clock by two. An early "overclocking" hack was to rig a 2 MHz crystal onto the CPU board to get the chip up to 1 MHz. Those of us who had friends in the right places at Motorola got some unreleased 2 MHz MC6800 chips for a significant overclock. The MC6809 chip came in a 2 MHz version, but the good gradeouts didn't make 3 or 4 MHz so they were never offered to market. I had made a crude R-2R ladder DAC on an 8 bit parallel port board for some 1976 vintage "chiptune" music. "Real music" would come later with a Soundchaser board in a DIY Apple II clone in the early 80's.
Since there has been some discussion of both SSD life, and Raspberry Pi computers, I want to mention a very useful bit of Linux trickery.
Raspberry Pi computers use an ordinary micro-SD card as their "hard drive". These tend to have much shorter lives than proper SSDs. Modern flavours of Linux write a lot of log files to the hard drive, including frequent writes to keep the status of the journaling file systems current. These frequent writes hammer the life out of micro SD cards if you leave the Pi running around the clock, as I do with my little Pi home server.
Enter a very clever little package called "log2ram". It is a set of scripts that sets up a virtual drive in RAM, and moves log files there. By default, once a day the log files are copied from RAM to the SD card (you can change this if you like). Much better than being hit once a second with file system journal updates.
Installation is pretty simple. There are good directions on the log2ram Github page: https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
-Gnobuddy
Raspberry Pi computers use an ordinary micro-SD card as their "hard drive". These tend to have much shorter lives than proper SSDs. Modern flavours of Linux write a lot of log files to the hard drive, including frequent writes to keep the status of the journaling file systems current. These frequent writes hammer the life out of micro SD cards if you leave the Pi running around the clock, as I do with my little Pi home server.
Enter a very clever little package called "log2ram". It is a set of scripts that sets up a virtual drive in RAM, and moves log files there. By default, once a day the log files are copied from RAM to the SD card (you can change this if you like). Much better than being hit once a second with file system journal updates.
Installation is pretty simple. There are good directions on the log2ram Github page: https://github.com/azlux/log2ram
-Gnobuddy
No. Win1x does not ask permission. You have to troll through dozens of "settings" wondering which hide spyware, then go to Google/Duck (not Bing!) and find tip-sheets where to look for more-hidden sneaks or more-powerful blocks.
While I agree with the issues around Windows' telemetry and bloat (there are github scripts to fix both), I can't understand the instability and crashes that keep coming up in the thread. Yes, XP was notoriously unstable and W7 was only a bit better, but I can't remember many times I've had Windows 10 crash on me that couldn't be traced back to faulty hardware (sometimes just wrong XMP timings in the SPD) or user error.
I personally was quite peeved with their decision to stop supporting some of my older hardware - most notably my beloved e-Mu 1212m, but an alternative method emerged soon afterwards and it works reliably on every single release since. I agree that Windows isn't the best operating system out there. The prehistoric codebase has something to do with it, and also the unwillingness of Microsoft to do anything beyond oil changes and some spit and polish on old kernels to make 'new' ones.
I personally was quite peeved with their decision to stop supporting some of my older hardware - most notably my beloved e-Mu 1212m, but an alternative method emerged soon afterwards and it works reliably on every single release since. I agree that Windows isn't the best operating system out there. The prehistoric codebase has something to do with it, and also the unwillingness of Microsoft to do anything beyond oil changes and some spit and polish on old kernels to make 'new' ones.
Samsung just released an "endurance" version of their MicroSD designed for dashcams... They say it will record for 16 years. They only write at 30MB/second though.
https://www.engadget.com/samsung-pro-endurance-dashcam-memory-card-132222760.html?src=rss
I was also quite annoyed when Creative abandoned the E mu products when Vista arrived. I had an Emu-1820m with a turntable plugged into it as part of a PC based music creation system. It refused to work correctly under Vista. I also had another Emu system that I had forgotten about. I sold the 1820m for far less than I paid for it and have not purchased a Creative product since. I have been digging through boxes of stuff to sell at an upcoming hamfest and I found a pair of boards, a EM8810 and an EM8820. Google tells me that this pair make up an Emu 1212m. If so did you make yours work on a modern version of Windows, like 7 or 10? If so, how? If I can make them work I'll keep them. If not they go in the sell box.
I am still successfully using a 15 year old Delta 1010 8 channel system on W7. It doesn't work right on W10 because W10 doesn't fully support all old PCI (not PCIe) motherboards. Success seems to be chipset dependent.
For those brave souls who have upgraded to windows 11. How do you you feel about the tpm 2.0 ? It’s main ‘security’ features include possible hardware restrictions and Microsoft (sole?) access to a hard coded encryption key.
Personally, I don't care. I figure it's more of a feature than a burden though.
My laptop doesn't have TPM but Windows upgraded to Windows 11 when they relaxed the requirements.
My laptop doesn't have TPM but Windows upgraded to Windows 11 when they relaxed the requirements.
I don't get it. I run Windows 10 and MacOs daily. MacOS is a little easier to use, but not whole lot. Both have quirks. (OK MacOS, why are you not showing that file I just saved?)
Recently put new hard drives into this Dell laptop and installed fresh Windoze 10 on the SSD. Super easy install, the software did most of the work for me.
Linux is fun, but there is sooooo much more software for Win. Yes, I have run exe software on Mac and Linux, but why? FWIW, I ran BeOS for a few years and liked it, but just not enough software. Same old problem. 🙁
Recently put new hard drives into this Dell laptop and installed fresh Windoze 10 on the SSD. Super easy install, the software did most of the work for me.
Linux is fun, but there is sooooo much more software for Win. Yes, I have run exe software on Mac and Linux, but why? FWIW, I ran BeOS for a few years and liked it, but just not enough software. Same old problem. 🙁
Why? So you don't have to run Windows but can still use that one obscure app like LTSpice... 🙂
That and the fact everything basically just works without needing to visit 17 websites and download a bunch of installers for the various crap needed.
My printer for instance? I can print to it without effort using the drivers built into the OS or associated packages like hplip. In windows, I need to install 2 gigabytes of bloatware to make the thing print.
That and the fact everything basically just works without needing to visit 17 websites and download a bunch of installers for the various crap needed.
My printer for instance? I can print to it without effort using the drivers built into the OS or associated packages like hplip. In windows, I need to install 2 gigabytes of bloatware to make the thing print.
Yeah, but choice is still limited. And the why not cover the fact that I have no more problems with Windoze than any other OS. This ain't 1997.
But I do have to keep an old XP laptop to communicate with some old BSS and similar audio processors. You do what you gotta do.
But I do have to keep an old XP laptop to communicate with some old BSS and similar audio processors. You do what you gotta do.
My last frustration with Windows was Microsoft wanting me to PAY 1.29$ for the codecs required to HEIC when it works out of the box with Linux, Apple, Android etc... I finally found a "free" alternative, but it's not ideal and wasted 20 minutes of my life.
How about when Microsoft depreciated floppies? It was years ago, but I still used a PCIE RAID card called Revodrive. I had the drivers on a floppy. Windows wouldn't see the drive. It wouldn't even read a USB floppy. I had to go to a library to put the files on a USB key. Windows is garbage IMHO. Nevermind how many time a Windows update overwrote GRUB even though it's been aware of Linux for years now! Grrr.
How about when Microsoft depreciated floppies? It was years ago, but I still used a PCIE RAID card called Revodrive. I had the drivers on a floppy. Windows wouldn't see the drive. It wouldn't even read a USB floppy. I had to go to a library to put the files on a USB key. Windows is garbage IMHO. Nevermind how many time a Windows update overwrote GRUB even though it's been aware of Linux for years now! Grrr.
Personally I gave up on Linux (ubuntu) when I realized it was about a 50/50 split on time spent keeping it updated/getting stuff to work correctly and time spent actually using it.
Nowadays I use an android tablet. I don't even know if my other windows and Linux machines even work, it's been so long.
Nowadays I use an android tablet. I don't even know if my other windows and Linux machines even work, it's been so long.