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Windows XP source code has leaked

gizmodo.com.au

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Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#311

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Shared404 wrote: post #308
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You say that as though everything above the Linux kernel isn't a nightmarish hodge-podge of software with interconnections ever increasing in complexity that creates conflicts so readily it needs third parties to carefully maintain specialized builds of each component to keep it all from blowing up.

There's also the FL/OSS BSD's, although I don't know how viable they are for desktops outside of ThinkPad's.

They suffer from the same problem of requiring third party maintainers to keep software working.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#312

Post by stnmtn »

bisby wrote: post #55
codegladiator wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss

yes. most of the things I see about windows vs linux involve "well you can just turn all the spyware stuff off, all you have to do is dive into these 10 menus and flip these switches" "Its easy to disable the ads in the start menu" etc etc. Even if you can turn the stuff off, the fact that you have to feels a lot like the OS working against the user.

I agree with you but you could say the same thing about a lot of linux installations.

"Its easy to install arch, all you have to do is run these 10 arcane commands"

With some linux distros is definitely feels like it is hostile to entry-level users. Which is probably by design, but I'm just saying that Windows isn't the only OS where you have to do a bunch of weird hostile setup stuff when you first install it

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#313

Post by bbatha »

sumtechguy wrote: post #283
xyproto wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Windows 7 came along and nobody said Vista was the good one.

7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished. The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB…

I'm convinced if they had set a higher minimum system requirements and hid the pre-loaded memory from the task manager or labeled it more clearly Vista would be a lot more fondly remembered. Most of the people I met with negative experiences were running it on walmart "vista ready" computers that should have never certified in the first place or upgrading their old pentium 4 machine with 1GB of ram and expecting a good time.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#314

Post by asveikau »

dx034 wrote: post #100
asveikau wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows 10 is a resource hog and contains adware. macOS ... Is special. Some of the most notable changes in the last few years have been to try to restrict what an app can do.

I agree with Spyware but resource hog? Everyday performance is certainly better than on earlier Windows versions.

My experience is that windows 10 spends more time on scanning for viruses and serving ads than useful work. Maybe your experience is different.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#316

Post by Shared404 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #311
Shared404 wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the FL/OSS BSD's, although I don't know how viable they are for desktops outside of ThinkPad's.

They suffer from the same problem of requiring third party maintainers to keep software working.

I guess I've just given up on having a sole first party maintaining a sane system. It makes more sense to me to have something like Linux/BSD vs a first party system that falls apart worse while still being closed, despite being a consistent maintainer.

Which I guess brings me back around to where you started.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#317

Post by sumtechguy »

bbatha wrote: post #313
sumtechguy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished. The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB…

I'm convinced if they had set a higher minimum system requirements and hid the pre-loaded memory from the task manager or labeled it more clearly Vista would be a lot more fondly remembered. Most of the people I met with negative experiences were running it on walmart "vista ready" computers that should have never certified in the first place or upgrading their old pentium 4 machine with 1GB of ram and expecting a go…

And the 5400RPM drives most of them had. There was a lot of clearing out of old stock going on. Also sp1 fixed a lot of issues too.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#318

Post by sumtechguy »

Dork1234 wrote: post #297
sumtechguy wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished. The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB…

When Vista came out I bought a new machine with AMD A6 4600+ and 2GB of RAM with Vista 64bit and it ran great. I had no driver issues or performance issue even with default install. You didn't need 4GB of RAM, you just needed new hardware. Limited RAM and drivers for the older hardware were the biggest problems, Microsoft drastically changed the driver DDK and many hardware venders had poor quality or no drivers whic…

For my use case 2GB was borderline. 4GB was the sweet spot with Vista. 8GB was great but on the pricey side.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#319

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

optimiz3 wrote: post #135
kasabali wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't prove anything. People said it was crap because it was. Then SP1 was released with 1+ year and it became pretty good. By SP3 it was rock solid because that's 7 years of bug fixes keeping other changes to minimum. That's what giving bugs does to software, no surprise here.

Microsoft made a big security pivot during XP. Gates put his foot down and forced the company to reprioritize secure engineering over everything else during the SP(2?) timeframe.

Yep, the whole Trustworthy Computing initiative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustworthy_computing There was a huge investment in training, tools, and creating security specialists. It took a long time to turn the ship around but security issues started trending down a few years after that.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#320

Post by ThrowawayB7 »

Flockster wrote: post #79
cblconfederate wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think the consensus is that windows 95, XP, 7 were the least troublesome versions. I still think 7 > 10

And all forget that 8 even existed.

Windows 8 is fine, _if_ you actually know how to use Windows. (Protip: Win-D takes you to the desktop from the app grid.) I would go so far as to say it's good, if you're using a touchscreen or tablet; the live tiles were useful.

Always amused me that the OS X Launchpad is also a ugly grid of huge app icons that takes up the entire screen, just like the Windows 8 start screen, yet nobody says a word about that.

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