Check out SmolXP [1]. The one I setup had a 340MB qcow2 image, took about ~10 sec to boot to desktop with qemu, and used only 58MB ram idling on desktop.
Windows XP Professional
181–190 of 227 posts
Re: Windows XP Professional
#182I got stuck in the serial number part
Re: Windows XP Professional
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could tell instantly in the loading screen because the three blocks in the progress bar move smoothly across it.
Yup, and on just about every system I used there was a stutter in it about 75% of the way through.
Windows installers and upgrades seem to like to reach 100% and then continue working for a few more minutes.
Re: Windows XP Professional
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's just moving, it gives no actual indication of progress.
Back in the dark ages, "idiot dots" or "idiot marks" was a phrase I heard for the various text terminal equivalents. It would cycle through a small number of text values with some kind of backspace/overwrite to keep things localized to where the cursor ought to be. One version was a variable length ellipses: . .. ... that would grow and reset in place. Another was an expanding "dot": . o O that would cycle in place a…
Also back then the movement of the symbols was kind of proof that the program was still running properly and not crashed because it had to be updating the symbols. But nowadays, waiting animations are independent of the thing they're waiting for and their movement isn't a sign of life but just a puppet made from a corpse.
Re: Windows XP Professional
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would imagine that progress bars generally represent the progression of the task state and not time, for that very reason. Or is that not the case in practice?
It is, but traditionally progress bars were often paired with labels showing estimated remaining time. That said, back in DOS era, this kind of thing was much more straightforward because most operations that would warrant a progress bar involved some kind of disk I/O, which - if you amortize it - is fairly linear, so one can estimate the completion time relatively well. In more complicated cases - e.g. Win95 install…
And of course...
Re: Windows XP Professional
#186Win XP remains my favourite OS till date. I was in college and getting hands on a pirated copy back then makes me so nostalgic. There was a cambrian explosion of tools to customize the look and feel. TweakXP pro is the one I remember. All pirated off-course.
How was it better than Win2K?
Win2k Pro was peak Windows.
Re: Windows XP Professional
#187I got stuck in the serial number part
Huh? I thought the serial numbers are available for free in the internet.
Re: Windows XP Professional
#188Win XP remains my favourite OS till date. I was in college and getting hands on a pirated copy back then makes me so nostalgic. There was a cambrian explosion of tools to customize the look and feel. TweakXP pro is the one I remember. All pirated off-course.
How was it better than Win2K?
Vectored Exception Handlers.
Better support for dealing with "we never tested outside of windows 98" apps.
early version of SxS.
Various small enhancements.
Re: Windows XP Professional
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know talking about progress bars, it takes a lot of confidence to program a linear progress bar. You think you know when loading will be complete and think you know can break down the incremental progress made during loading. Instead we get these spinning wheels that are like "maybe in the future this wheel will stop and we will have a return value." No confidence whatsoever. I know this is true because Apple tri…
> I know this is true because Apple tries to implement progress bars in IOS like real chads. Back in The Day, Mac OS X Tiger just faked it by measuring how long it took to boot to LoginWindow, writing that number of seconds to a file, and displaying the next boot's progress indicator as a percentage of that time. Power words: `/usr/libexec/WaitingForLoginWindow` and `/var/db/loginwindow.boottime` - https://daringfire…
Measuring the time it takes to complete a process and using that for the progress bar on the next run seems like the opposite of faking it to me.
Re: Windows XP Professional
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
I love reading about old UI interface guidelines, and how much research was done to make it useful to the user. Now it's all about how to make it useful to the company. Anyway, the links in that post have deteriorated. Here's the link to Raymond Chen's blog: https://web.archive.org/web/20190218080905/https://blogs.msd... (shame on MS for redirecting you to another page when showing you a 404, which make it harder to…
There was an economies of scale back then with OS-level UI components. If Microsoft spent money on UX research that improved its UI controls, it would benefit a lot of people. Essentially the cost of that research was bore by all application developers. The problem now? Every company is designing their own UI components. Every company has to bear the cost of UX research individually. It’s a lot of wheel re-inventing.…
I work on design systems for an enterprise software company. I was talking with one of the engineers on the team about how great it would be if there were better built in browser-based solutions for things like autocomplete, select and multi-select.