Why should I care if they stop support for Windows 7 pro 64-bit in 1-2020.
I have had all updates shut off for over a year. I also use ESET Smart
Security. I really don't want Windows 10 on my computer. I do regular
maintenance and use Sandboxie EVERY time I go on the internet. This
and others should protect me from Microsoft's threats.
Your thoughts would be appreciated.
Hi shankle,
Windows XP is still usable today so Windows 7 will survive for a long time as I guess. In the future, virtualization applications like Oracle VirtualBox can be useful to keep alive the old operating systems. Me too, I don't like Windows 10 :
https://betanews.com/2018/10/04/windows-10-october-2018-update-deleting-documents-photos-and-other-user-files/
and if for some reason you want to try a newer windows that is not windows 10 crap, you can try windows 8.1. It's very usable, friendly and manageable... :idea:
Or you could try Linux Ubuntu.
It is very stable and they are not sneaky like Windows. :-)
Thanks guys,
Think from your comments I will stick with Windows 7 pro 64-bit :biggrin:
I am stuck in a funny world where the current box is a Win10-64 box as I just could not buy another retail version of Win7-64 Ultimate. You can tidy up Win10 if you are patient enough by blocking the spyware and a settings tweaker but to get it under control, you also need to know where all the settings are which are all over the place like a mad women's sewerage. It is a better OS than Win7-64, faster, less eye candy, more facilities etc etc ....
I have Win7-64 on my last box which gets used on a semi regular basis and I have XP SP3 on the previous Core2 Quad but the real advantage is I have TightVNC on all of them so I can use any of them from my main Win10 box. I recently built a NAS box out of my junk and with left over disks, I have a useful 5 tb remote storage that is only ever turned on if I need to back something up and it does not even need a monitor, keyboard or mouse, it just has a power cable and an ethernet cable so it only needs the space of a small can.
RE : Microsoft support, do yourself a favour and turn it off on XP and Win7 and secure them yourself, Microsoft security is lousy at its best.
sounds a nice environment hutch. are you using a good ethernet cable? (for connecting with the nas)
Windows 10 sounds like a nightmare. With all the stops I have on Windows 7 maybe i'll
survive for a few more years.
All I ask for Christmas is for Microsoft to leave me alone :biggrin:
Thanks for your reply Hutch
felipe,
Gigabit ethernet hs been built into motherboards for a very long time now so all you need is a few unmanaged switches and some cat5e and you can routinely move data around at the nominal 1 gigabit. I have under my work table a 300 meter box of cat6 ethernet cable and use it for longer runs as I have the tool for attaching the rj45 connectors. I have looked at what is available for 10 gigabit as cat6 will handle that if the cable is not routed near mains cables but it is still too expensive and you may in the future get optical connections between computers.
It would be wasted on old boxes and the bus speed and disk read/write speeds are too slow for real high speed data transfer. Where I need the extra speed is in backing up complete partitions and its here that a 1 gigabit network is not fast enough. Disk to disk on the same machine is far faster than ethernet and for hundreds of gigabytes, its often faster to use a portable disk.
Nice info hutch, thanks :icon14:. But i have a question related with this:
Quote from: hutch-- on February 22, 2019, 11:42:51 AM
Disk to disk on the same machine is far faster than ethernet and for hundreds of gigabytes, its often faster to use a portable disk.
You mean as in the same machine like from one partition to another? and the portable disk will be a usb attached external disK?
Depends how the machine is set up, if you have USB3 the speed is useful enough to be used with a USB3 portable can. I regularly back up data from one drive to another and this is really fast. A USB3 is much the same speed so in many cases its worth doing the big copy from the computer to the USB drive then copying the USB drive data onto the other machine.
You notice the network overhead when doing network transfer, big file move much more data but large collections of small files really slow down the data transfer rate. If the portable disk is fast, you reduce some of the overhead and you still have a fast data transfer rate to the portable disk. I have an old 250 gig SSD in a USB plugin that works like a USB pen drive but generally faster, sad part ws I bought another 1tb SSD as the price has dropped a lot and it was defective so I sent it back and the post made a mess of it and sent it back to me. After the 2 week delay I sent it back again and instead of replacing it, they refunded the money. Shrug !
Quote from: Magnum on February 22, 2019, 09:43:04 AM
It is very stable and they are not sneaky like Windows. :-)
Yes, Linux is very stable. As a server operating system, it's far more advanced than Windows. Linux provides very powerful tools like rsync, rdiff, rdiff-backup and tar.
The impact is......taaa daa... 32 bit is officially dead.
Hutch now needs to rename the site and all our hard work
in 32 bit over the years is now obsolete. Think about it for a minute though....
All OS's after '7' are friendly to 32 but emphatically 64. Now
what ? Well nothing, 32 bit native code is still close to fast (when you wrote it) and potentially still now faster than 63.5 bit. Still, it does toll the proverbial (I am over using this word lately) bell.
I am much of the view that 64 bit is the future but 32 bit will remain in the present for a very long time. Among other things Microsoft needs it for their own software so it will not go away any time soon. When Microsoft stop supporting an operating system, there is a term that few use, it becomes STABLE at last. I have a box or 2 running XP SP3 and a Win7 64 box and the gain with both of them is they will never be modified by Microsoft again.
My last box was built out of my junk, a NAS box that has XP SP3 installed on it, everything not required turned off and nothing that tries to send anything on the internet and it only uses the standard firewall as it does nothing else that store my backups.
I agree with Hutch. The 32-bit system will stay alive for a long time. We have yet very good software coded with 32-bit development tools. No reason to waste those efforts at the moment.
Visual Studio is still only a 32-bit application ?
I am still receiving updates for XP :biggrin:
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/slot02zy1r9k1dv/winxp.jpg?dl=1)
Quote from: hutch-- on February 23, 2019, 11:09:55 AM
I am much of the view that 64 bit is the future but 32 bit will remain in the present for a very long time.
Agreed. 64-bit is better for a handful of applications that need to address gigabytes of memory - but that's a very rare case. Speed-wise, 32-bit code is often better, see 64-bit vs 32-bit benchmarks (http://masm32.com/board/index.php?topic=5375.0)
In a handful of cases, the availability of more registers with a larger width can speed up an algo.
I many cases, the longer instructions can empty the instruction cache and thus slow down the algo.
People tend to compare the 32->64 transition with the 16->32 transition, but:
memory 16:640kB 32:2048MB 64:^^^ (much higher but irrelevant)
speed 16:1 32:6 64:6 (absolutely no improvement, often slower)In short: 16->32 was a quantum leap, both speed- and memory-wise, but 32->64 is
no leap at all, unless you are specialising in applications that regularly need more than 2048 megabytes of memory. Open task manager, sort by working set:
152 MB thunderbird.exe
101 MB whatsapp.exe
52 MB slimjet.exe
23 MB explorer.exeNone of them needs 2048 MB. And btw, 13 64-bit processes running, but 24 are still 32-bit.
P.S., I forgot to mention one real gain from the 32->64 transition: Hundreds of Millions of users could be convinced that they absolutely needed new hardware 8)
Quote from: jj2007 on February 23, 2019, 08:39:49 PM
Agreed. 64-bit is better for a handful of applications that need to address gigabytes of memory - but that's a very rare case. Speed-wise, 32-bit code is often better, see
This is an urban myth, you can't find any serious proof, you do not link to anything that proves it, and every evidence shows that 64-bit is almost always much faster, sometimes multiple times faster. :shock:
Something to read: Why do 64-bit applications work faster than 32-bit ones? (https://www.viva64.com/en/k/0003/)
I just shoved a test together and with as close as possible, duplicate the code in both. Results are ambiguous on this middle aged Haswell. You have to unzip this test and run the batch file "testme.bat". The code design of the pair of algos should favour 32 bit code.
Quote from: hutch-- on February 23, 2019, 11:57:52 PM
I just shoved a test together and with as close as possible, duplicate the code in both. Results are ambiguous on this middle aged Haswell. You have to unzip this test and run the batch file "testme.bat". The code design of the pair of algos should favour 32 bit code.
It is difficult to find an example where 32-bit performs a little better than 64-bit.
This is exactly the mentioned case of (https://www.viva64.com/en/k/0003/):
However, the other side of the move to the 64-bit version is a two-time increase of the size of pointers and some other data types, which might result in an increased demand of the software to the system's physical memory. In some cases, it might slow down the speed of a 64-bit application in comparison to a 32-bit one. However, it occurs rarely and such cases are usually determined by an unsuccessful choice of the format in which data are stored in the program.
i think i have not found a difference in speed with both (32 and 64 bits). but i think that microsoft will still maintain 32 bits support for a while. anyway, 64 bits is a lot of fun to program... :t
M$ don't care about a the speed.
For example: to compile + link uasm with native tools
32bit 15 s
64bit 20 s
There was that guy that has done a routine with a superior compiler. The code was very likely great but could not be zipped to less than 500 KB and uploaded to the site.
If I remember well, I produced the same thing with crappy Visual Studio in less than 3000 bytes. <sighs>
Hi AW,
You probably turned off the C run-time library of Visual Studio making bigger the executables. A very good method.
Quote from: hutch-- on February 23, 2019, 11:57:52 PM
I just shoved a test together and with as close as possible, duplicate the code in both. Results are ambiguous on this middle aged Haswell. You have to unzip this test and run the batch file "testme.bat". The code design of the pair of algos should favour 32 bit code.
Core i5, Win7-64:
1591 ms duration 32 bit
1576 ms duration 64 bit
1575 ms duration 32 bit
1576 ms duration 64 bit
1576 ms duration 32 bit
1575 ms duration 64 bit
1576 ms duration 32 bit
1575 ms duration 64 bit
1576 ms duration 32 bit
1575 ms duration 64 bit
1576 ms duration 32 bit
1575 ms duration 64 bit
1592 ms duration 32 bit
1591 ms duration 64 bit
1576 ms duration 32 bit
1576 ms duration 64 bit
A very long time ago (1994) I was still writing DOS 16 bit apps and for a while with early 32 bit, I could get faster apps (usually small tools) using 16 bit DOS but it was only a matter of time until 32 bit was well enough understood that the DOS apps had run out of puff. Something that lingered for a long time after was the number of people who never made the transition and kept writing 16 bit DOS apps.
Win32 has had a good run for over 20 years but it is in its twilight and nothing much new will ever be available and it still faces the memory limit when apps just keep needing to deal with ever larger data, more graphics and the like. If you have ever tried to work on 32 gig of memory and use algorithms from the win32 era, you will sit there waiting with the Ho Hum, Pigs bum, Why is it sooooooo sloooooow !
Win64 is the future and if you don't adapt you will become eligible for the "Old Fart's Club", just like the guys who kept writing 16 bit DOS apps. :P
a) Win64 isn't faster
b) I have yet to see one app on my PC that needs more than 2gigs of address space
If that makes me an old fart, so be it :P
If even M$ have difficulties with x64, they even publish slow application using it, so who to trust ?
The WOW64 slows only 2-4% win32 applications, but it takes 1 GB disk space.
Win64 applications are usually 20% bigger, but speed is usually same.
Most growing area is ARM64? Cheaper and need less power ?
For M$ WinRT is important ?
What is UCRT speed effect ?
If we play DirectX games, do graphics or movie edition or use big databases the performance difference between 32 and 64-bit are huge.
If the software is doing scientific calculations, encryption or serving a large number of web pages 64-bit is necessary these days (and I don't think they are still producing 32-bit servers).
If our requirements are rudimentary we will do well with the 32-bit and can bash the progress to our heart's content. But progress will continue despite our rage.
:greenclp: :greenclp: :greenclp:
Someone who I will not mention once said something about "Who would ever need more than 640k of memory on a PC ? Win16 had 16 meg, win 32 had 4 gig and current win64 has 128 gig. There is no doubt that Microsoft want you to keep buying ever bigger computers so you can buy ever larger software from them but the general trend with modern software is big, bigger and even bigger than that.
Some of the software I use with video turns up as 90 to 100 megabytes and expands to much bigger again when installed and when you look at the installation on disk, it is full of extra DLLs that perform a wide range of tasks. Like an ever growing list of user applications, 32 bit versions tend to drop dead when they hit big files where the 64 bit versions can slug it out with far larger files.
Have a look at the size of Android apps as you download them from the Google store, it would make a PC programmer blush, for some piddlingly trivial app you often see 16 meg or larger. Everyone can hide behind old apps that use old OS versions architecture but sooner or later that approach gets left behind. Win32 is in its twilight, win16 died long ago and only the old farts keep writing MS_DOS 16 bit apps.
Slightly off topic, but I don't want to open a new thread: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2019/03/calc-exe-is-now-open-source-theres-surprising-depth-in-its-ancient-code/