Originally posted by Stryke 9
It's taking up more than 100Mb, which is obscene. If I had 100Mb of RAM less, I'd probably never see the ends of some renders. To put that in perspective, WinAmp, the fattest program made for timesharing I have, takes up about 200Mb of RAM, and it's like ****ting a watermelon for the computer to play a song and run a 3D program at once. And I have two CPUs, and quite a lot of RAM. Windows 98/2000, with all the peripherals, takes up some 14Mb at a time on mine, last I checked. For shame.
Linux-Mandrake 8.x eats up more hard drive space than any Windows install. I suppose you consider that obscene as well? Lets face it, as the OS evolves the system requirements go up. Not everyone is running some POS p133 with a 2MB Cirrus Logic video card with maybe 32MB of SIMMs, so there is no reason to keep the OS so low-level anymore. Most businesses have systems atleast in the 600MHz range or more (which is where MS makes more of its revenue by comparison) with atleast 10gig hard drives so they can afford to plop in a few more things here and there.
And I don't know where you learned your counting, but 300 vs. 1000+ in one or two "upgrades" isn't just bad, it's horrendous, particularly when XP really doesn't do much of anything more than any of its predecessors, just sticks some fancy graphics and one of those horrible "intuitive" interfaces. It's all that recursive coding- they don't actually have people do this **** anymore, it's one of those AIs writing the code that ain't much smarter than the one making bad guys run into walls and keep walking into them when you're shooting at them in a game- the code's all snarled, with functions that never are needed or used going on and off over and over and over again, burning up your memory... About two months ago, someone installed Office XP on a five or ten-year-old box I've got access to, computer with a crotchety old motherboard/CPU hookup but a ridiculous amount of memory. The computer just stopped working. Like that. Took fifteen minutes to open any light program, like Notepad, could literally wait all day for it to open Photoshop. Took XP off, thing was running just fine, almost as fast as the average comp nowadays. It was like a virus.
Funny, I don't recall you ever working for MS so how would YOU know what they do? I seriously doubt you've had ANY programming experience WHATSOEVER. See, when you do programming as a job, there are these things called DEADLINES. You know, this thing where you have to be finished by a certain date or else? They write it as fast as possible, and with MS setting such tight deadlines, they don't have time to go back and refine/tweak the coding to slim it down. Why do you think MS is releasing patch after patch all the time? Why do you thing Outlook has more security holes than the MOAB has blubber? As for Office XP on an old system like that, what the hell did you expect? Even Office 2000 (which isn't near as bloated as XP, that I will admit freely.) would run rediculously slow on an old system like that. Thats like expecting a Geforce 4 to work perfectly in a 486. Its not gonna happen.
XP isn't the worst OS ever, but it's an almost imperceptible improvement over 2000, and if you factor in the obscene price tag and all that tons of system resources it's hogging, it's worse- and since when you put them together, the cost really includes the cost of upgrading all your hardware right away for another thousand or so, it's just surreal. Why the **** would you ever blow all that money- hell, I haven't updated my graphics card or CPU in years, and my comp's quite a lot faster than any brand spanking new XP box I've run. It'd be nice if I could get it to accept any of the new memory cards I've got sitting around, let me do fullscreen minute-long animations like I'd like to (and which no stock XP setup can do without thousands of dollars of upgrades- and which you probably couldn't work out without tens of thousands in software to boot), but that's a hardware issue.
Funny, I can get it for under $50 (legally mind you). I posted a link here a long time ago to a section of their site where you can order XP Pro for like $34 or so. Do a search. As far as XP being an improvement over 2000, XP has fixed
of things that were frelled up in 2k. For one, in XP you can actually auto-dial out in anything other than a program that uses the IE shell as a base. You can't do that in 2k. Furthermore, the compatability modes work a hell of
better. The memory management is slightly better (though with a dualy box, you won't notice that anyhow.) The loading time has been dramatically improved. On my 700MHz Duron, XP only takes 15 seconds to load, vs 45 with 2k (SP2). (For the record, I have half a gig of PC133.)
I dunno what your problem is, but I've had no problems at all with doing full-screen animations.
Now, if you compare XP to the mythic Palladium, you might find some nicer things to say. But that's about it right there as far as things XP is actually preferable to.
True, but you can bet they'll try to sneak Palladium in, in a future XP service pack. (not that it'll work without it enabled in the hardware mind you... If you plan on upgrading, I'd do it soon before intel or AMD has a chance to plop it in the current CPU lines.)
