Others prefer Unity

I find that hard to believe..

Generally those that probably were not Linux users before. So maybe “prefer” really means “don’t know anything different”. Latest one does let you move the tool bar apparently.

Might grovel under the desk tonight and plug the M$ SSD back in and have a fight with UEFI secure boot nonsense to see if I can get both W8.1 and Arch Linux booting. If W8.1 doesn’t complain, I’ll upgrade to 10 at the weekend, and hope that doesn’t complain either.

Others prefer Unity

XFCE FTW

An option for 32GB in the high-end model would make the XPS line feel a bit more future-proof, especially given how RAM hungry Ubuntu’s Unity interface is. Doing absolutely nothing but displaying the desktop and running terminal window with the “free -t -m” command, Unity manages to use more than a gigabyte of RAM

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/06/the-xps-13-de-dell-continues-to-build-a-reliable-linux-lineage/

Nice laptop, that.

I’d take no notice of how much RAM is being used by any application or program or GUI. That goes for any OS. RAM is there, and it’s there to be used. If something else memory hungry comes along, the OS will dynamically dish it out more fairly. No point having 32gig if 28gig is sat empty, so Unity/Firefox/IE/whatever will ask nicely if it can use it as buffer space.
Unless of course it has a massive memory leak.

edit: oh and that XPS13 got pretty positive review on Bad Voltage podcast, although tbf the firs thing he’d do is reformat it and use a distro where that power would (a) be overkill, and (b) with a GUI that would use naff all resources.

Was going to play with the upgrade last night (or at least preparing for it).
Drank some beer instead and watched telly.

OpenLook master race checking in.

The bad: spent four hours updating a Vista PC with an unused v8 which was fine, followed by auto updating to 10. Could it find the NVIDIA driver? 🙁 SOoved eventually at 1 AM this morning with 353.63 for 32-bit and a manual driver update. Otherwise I really like Windows 10. Now to work out how to disable the auto updates.

And I couldn’t find the 353 driver on the NVIDIA website 🙁

Now to work out how to disable the auto updates.

just been trying to google disabling of pretty much everything
half the results are “install our app”, half the news stories are “there’s lots of phoning home but it’s not all that bad”. one news story says “don’t install those apps – you don’t know what they might do”… instead install “this app” 🙄

arstechnica and howtogeek seem to actually include some content. jeez there’s a lot of things to disable.

seems you can set any network connection as metered and it won’t download updates. that’s what I’m going to do. presumably there’s a way to force it to block updates on a single app/driver?

@TiRed this is what drives me nuts with Windows vs Mac, just like Coldplay said;

Nobody said it was easy, no one ever said it would be this hard

Oh take me back to fhe start

seems you can set any network connection as metered and it won’t download updates

… until you connect it with Ethernet as it won’t allow you to set wired conenctions as metered.

Why don’t you want updates?

Why don’t you want updates?

Some people have apparently had issues with updates breaking software so would like to be able to choose whether to sintall as per Win 7/8/8.1.

Most of the updates seem to be Windows Defender updates though and I wouldn’t want to be without those.

until you connect it with Ethernet as it won’t allow you to set wired conenctions as metered.

hmm in that case, I’ll solve the issue by not having it booted. it’s currently solved for Win8.1 by having the SSD unplugged right now.

and then no doubt be forced to apply updates every time I boot.

and then find one spacks the entire system.

Why don’t you want updates?

in my case, because I want to choose when they happen, and when reboots occur.
and in the case of potentially breakable drivers, whether they happen at all.
zero day patches make sense to fix promptly. driver updates just for the sake if it are ones I want control over.

Windows 10 running well on our old laptop that was very slow running Vista. In the end only cost £30 to upgrade…bought Windows 7 off Amazon for £30 then did the free upgrade to 10 straight away

When does the free upgrade finish? Our aging desktop is dying, but we’re hanging on for now with 7 as I’m not sure it will be happy with 10.
Q6600, 8gb ram,

29 Jul, apparently.

I’d be surprised if Windows Updates of drivers break legacy hardware. The biggest problem there is that there aren’t certified drivers in the first place, you’re unlikely to suddenly get a driver appear in Update that’s both newer and unsupported.

No doubt someone’s going to prove me wrong and say it happened to them, but the risk of enforced updates is generally far outstripped by the risk of not updating (Conficker, anyone?), it’s one the best thing that’s happened to Windows in years.

You’re bang on about the RAM comment on that ArsTechnica site BTW Andy, I was going to say the same thing myself. That entire paragraph is ludicrous.

Our aging desktop is dying, but we’re hanging on for now with 7 as I’m not sure it will be happy with 10.

Upgrade, if you don’t like it you’ve 30 days to roll it back, and you’ve then “qualified” for W10 if you change your mind in the future.

ike it you’ve 30 days to roll it back, and you’ve then “qualified” for W10 if you change your mind in the future

Good point. Will have a look cheers!

the risk of enforced updates is generally far outstripped by the risk of not updating (Conficker, anyone?), it’s one the best thing that’s happened to Windows in years

Totally, for every hundred users who want to control when updates take place only a handful will have any idea what the risks are of turning them down. MS is trying to push the user base as a whole towards a degree of herd immunity.

And I do remember Conficker, it took weeks to clear it out from the outstations where local sysadms had clearly had an “unenthusiastic” approach to patching.

We’ve got a laptop running Windows 7 that’s starting to slow down a bit. When at home we also use an external monitor connected to the laptop via a HDMI cable.

Did the upgrade to Windows 10 and the laptop no longer recognised the monitor, so had to roll back to 7.

Bit of a disappointment

We’ve got a laptop running Windows 7 that’s starting to slow down a bit

That’s not due to W7 itself.

CPU just feeling a bit tired?
Or just psychologically feels slower since newer things are faster?

And I do remember Conficker, it took weeks to clear it out from the outstations where local sysadms had clearly had an “unenthusiastic” approach to patching.

Indeed. And home systems were arguably worse.

A slightly more recent reason, from yesterday:

BadTunnel: a vulnerability all Windows users need to patch

We’ll have to agree to disagree – yes RAM is there to be used by your programs. I don’t count the GUI as a program, I count it as an overhead.

Unity has been criticized elsewhere as bloated. If it’s eating 1GB just to run the WM/GUI then good luck getting that 1GB back for another program to use. On a 32GB system this isn’t a big deal, but on an 8GB one? I want that RAM free for something useful, thanks, hence XFCE installs on my systems which boot with <1GB RAM in use.

I am also going to go on the record as saying I disagree with several of you about “Windows doesn’t slow down after years of use” – it absolutely does!

Windows, whether through it’s own patches and/or through user installed software, gradually accumulates extra background tasks as the whole ecosystem is biased towards installing extra programs/features and NOT towards enforcing system cleanliness rules eg correct filesystem and registry cleanup. Things get left behind, things get added “just in case” [eg HOW MANY programs now want to run/load at boot in msconfig ??!]

The longer you’ve had a windows install the more crap you’ll find it’s trying to do. As a reasonable example we have a 3year old Win7 install in the house which can’t be messed-with as it’s the only reliable way to drive the scanner and printer. It’s actually not had a lot of software added to it, and much of what has been installed has been uninstalled again – it now uses >1.5GB of RAM to boot [up from circa 900MB on my usual fresh win 7 config] and takes about 5 minutes to hit the desktop. The HDD light stays jammed on for the first 15 minutes after boot, and you have to go and find something else to do after you ask it to open an explorer window if you insert a USB drive.

Now, it may be that 90% of this is from programs the user has chosen to install, or from bad choices made by software authors – but to the end user it doesn’t matter. In a typical Windows environment, for whatever reason, after a year or two your machine will have collected pointless threads that take away your foreground processing power and waste RAM or HDD seek priority that should be in use by your tasks.

Regular reinstalls are the simplest and most complete way to reverse this, and this is also part of why people jumping from W7 to W10 find it so much faster – they’re also ditching most of the unnecessary crap when they make the leap.

PS if your WM using more cycles+RAM really doesn’t bother you, then why are you chuffed that W10 is leaner and has less overheads? Smaller load times, less competition for cache and RAM and less wasted cycles is a good part of the reason W10 feels faster. This is what happened when they slimmed the codebase down and targeted the RAM use towards lower end systems [and mobile devices too]. Less overheads – more user cycles available – “Win., win.”, you could say.

We’ll have to agree to disagree

That’s fine, I have zero issues with you being wrong. (-:

Y’know, Windows memory management is one of the biggest areas of assumption, misinformation and downright wrongness on the Internet. ZOMG IT’S USING RAM!!1!

Here’s the thing. As Andy said, having empty RAM is pointless. If you get a half pint in a pub and pour it into a pint pot you’ve not actually gained anything. However, if you ask the barman to fill it up, yay, more beer!

As hardware technology has improved and costs fallen, we’ve gradually moved from systems constantly starved of physical RAM being the norm to systems commonly having surplus memory. Those clever people at Microsoft realised this, and they took their half empty pint glass and started filling it up with lemonade. It will load things like file caches to make disk access faster, and try to anticipate what you’re going to do next. Your memory usage goes up. This is normal. This is good.

What everyone misses whilst they’re obsessing about numbers and crying about bloat is, when demand on the system increases and RAM starts running low, Windows will actively start dumping all those clever caches and temporary information in order to reclaim that space; out goes half a pint of lemonade*, in goes more beer.

(* for the purposes of analogy, it’s magic lemonade that doesn’t mix with the beer. Or oil or something. It’s not important, roll with me here.)

I know considerably less about Linux memory management, but I believe that recent versions behave in a similar fashion. You may know better than me here though, I’m a Linux dabbler is all.

Back to the subject of caching for a moment, regular reinstalls can actually counteract this. Windows learns usage over time. It learns when you regularly access data / files in a particular order, and adjusts its caching accordingly. If you wipe it, you lose all this history (but hey, surprise, you have more empty RAM, woo!)

As for the comments about files and registries and the like: So what? In and of itself files don’t make the system slower any more than they make the disk heavier. Despite what “cleaner” vendors will tell you, your registry isn’t dirty, leave it alone.

Slowdowns over time: Whilst “anecdote” is not the singular of “evidence,” my primary laptop started out life as a Vista machine, survived a faulty hard disk that caused it to lock up until it was replaced (by cloning the original), was upgraded in situ to Windows 7, survived an overheating problem which caused random shutdowns, and was still running as sweet as the day it was born (eight years ago). It wasn’t rebuilt until the day I bought an SSD and it then got its first reinstall from scratch. And the only reason I did that then was because I wanted to go from i386 to x64 when upgrading to Windows 10, there was nothing wrong with it.

I agree completely that it was a problem historically. The best thing you could do to a Windows 95 box was wipe it and start afresh every six months. But I reject absolutely that “Windows slows down over time” on a modern NT6 family OS. There are plenty of older Server 2003 installs still in active service even, which is the same beating heart as Windows XP; if that were true they’d all be on their knees by now. And yes, that’s arguably an unfair example as the desktop is a different environment, but the biggest difference here isn’t the architecture but rather what’s sitting in front of it. A PC can slow down over time, sure; but it’s not the foregone conclusion you’re suggesting.

I’m speculating, but from that limited description your 20 minutes-to-boot PC suggests either a dying HDD or RAM starvation to me. Assuming it’s not got some sort of infection, ofc.

20 minute boot sounds like my old work laptop. According to the logs it was waiting for something over the network, and the timeout was something like 1200 seconds. I just didn’t turn it off.
I suspect it was something poorly configured by our (external) IT people. All they seemed to be able to do was run a virus scan.

that article was a useful review until let down by that one paragraph. then it stank of someone who doesn’t know how a modern OS works, but by dropping in a command line command makes them look clever to the lay person.

free -t -m on this very PC… whoa jeez, Chrome and Cinnamon are using a whole 3.6 Gb RAM between them!!!! Bloat-tastic 🙄 Crikey! That’s more than the available RAM on my work Windows 7 laptop (32 bit so ca. 2.9gig usable out of 8gig installed) !!!

Now if that author had had the decency to show both RAM used and RAM that is shared and buffers/cache, I’d believe how bloated things are a little more.

Oh 1.7Gigs buffer. Those numbers might not come under the “free” column, but every last byte there is available for other things if needed.

Now why is about 3.5Gigs of my RAM sat there, unused, and hasn’t even been touched?

Sure it’s sold as a developer machine, and a bit more RAM than a standard laptop is nice or even essential, and more CPU cores too, especially once doing huge compilations over multiple cores and running multiple VMs.

But right now I have 2 applications that a typical user would think are massive bloat, and only 8Gb RAM, but more than half is effectively free.

Swap space. 4Gigs. 0bytes used. I’m happy with that RAM provision and usage.

I appreciate your writing, however I fear you have missed the ponit I am actually making – I am talking about GUI overheads.

Yes I understand how windows cashes files, and even makes quickboot images. It is also possible to observe what the memory is actually being used for as well, and I have observed growth in threads and non-cached memory in all older installs I have ever observed.

Maybe it’s not a forgone conclusion, but it’s certainty a trend in my experience 🙂 You can also contrast your Server 2003 example with the vast majority of users who will at some point install crapware or utilities which begin to complicate the system. RE the registry – yeah it doesn’t get heavier, but it [and other files used by windows in a similar way] will accumulate cruft and complexity, incompatibilities and patches [even from M$ themselves] leading to longer processing and read times when consulting and reading/writing to/from it. Overheads, scribbled notes and crossings out.

I suspect the only reason Linux seems better at this is there’s less code, and less badly written programes installed by clueless users.

SMART status of the HDD in the other machine is OK, it’s just trying to concurrently process a huge number of items after boot. Ram is 1.5GB in use for boot from 4 installed on 64b OS. All unneeded items are uninstalled, it’s just a really messed-up install that needs leveling. It’s also a dual boot with XFCE and takes about 1 minute for the HDD light to go out and the system to be fully responsive with Mint.

Well, we’ve got two separate issues here haven’t we.

Users installing crap is a moot point, a distraction even. This isn’t the fault of the OS, and the solution is glaringly “stop doing that then.” A ten year old car will probably have more dents a brand new one. Do we conclude that cars dent over time, requiring periodic resprays?

GUI overheads is a more interesting subject. It may well accumulate “cruft and complexity” but I say again: so what? Any performance hit due to registry growth is as close to zero as makes no odds to anyone outside of benchmark software writers. This is simply out of date thinking; it was relevant on Windows 95 machines that shipped with 4Mb of RAM and no L2 cache, but if a modern PC is on its arse because of registry issues it’s far, far more likely to be because someone has hosed it trying to “clean” it. Compatibility issues with old file versions? That’s what WinSxS is for.

If you eat an apple, does it take longer to eat if you’ve taken it out of a fruitbowl? And even if it takes you a moment to find it amongst all the oranges, does that matter in the grand scheme of things? Do you find yourself thinking “wow, I really must throw away all my fruit, finding an apple when I’ve already got three bananas and a mango in there takes ages”? Or is it actually more efficient to think “I fancy an apple in a bit, so I’ll go and grab one now”?

All this talk of “crossings out” and “overheads” sounds good I grant you, and there is a logic to it. But the bottom line here is that it simply doesn’t apply any more. And I hate to say it, but it’s the same arguments employed by the anti-Windows folk who still think “M$” is hilarious. Most of it was probably true at one point, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away but as I said at the outset, times have changed. If you’ve got performance issues due to “overheads,” then you’ve got wider issues than overheads.

Two things:

On topic –

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/07/27/1714213/you-cant-turn-off-cortana-in-the-windows-10-anniversary-update
…more bullshit, more overriding of users’s settings and wishes. Been here before haven’t we?

Off topic – my gods you should see how much faster W7 is on that laptop since I replaced the drive* and did a reinstall. I appreciate your technical know-how Cougar, but most users will install piles of stuff onto their machines, many of which will try to load at boot creating more HDD thrashing. Memory in use has dropped a bit too, because there are less threads running. Yes yes, disk cache etc, but memory in use is related to how many processes/threads are running and that’s the real problem with old installs.

*with a slower one, because that’s what I had.

So, is it worth installing Windows 10 ?

Today!!!

I can’t say it’s been beneficial in any way compared to 7, for work.

Multiple desktops? Not that I use it, and I think you can hack that on W7. Boots a little faster, but then a clean W7 boots pretty quick and you can always suspend.

Finally installed it, purely to qualify while it’s free.
It functions. Looks like 8.1 to me, but without the need for the “go back to desktop mode” tile.
Disabled everything I possibly could (Cortana etc., and as much phone home nonsense as possible).

Then swapped some SATA cables about and went back to Arch Linux. And yes it does all work fine with all the UEFI BIOS secureboot nonsense turned off 🙂

I guess if Cortana turns itself back on, it’s no big deal, I just need to remember not to search. I’m sure there’ll be some way to force it off again (especially as the educational version of 10 removes Cortana and the Store).

W10 won’t support IR without some (minor) cmd prompt fannying about. Not a concern to most but I’ve an old(ish) Polar bike computer I’ve no intention of replacing until it breaks so it mattered to me. Seems to work fine now.

On an older laptop running 32 bit W10 it crashed every 5-15 minutes or so with an IRQ message implicating dbgmsg.sys. I couldn’t work out what that was associated with but removing the registry entry seems to have fixed it.

Other than that it was just a matter of spending 5 minutes deleting pointless tiles and various bits of foistware and it seems all good.

Other than that it was just a matter of spending 5 minutes deleting pointless tiles and various bits of foistware

yup that too.
clearly see how it’s designed to be a phone environment, what with a zillion “apps” for stuff like weather and stuff.
all gone, where they can be deleted. annoyed that there are a load that cannot be deleted, but I’m not going to waste any more time.

the start menu thing too. delete the lot, and add in what I want (which is not very much).

Oh and the 1 program I use, is the Polar App. And that is only there because while the Android app lets you do all the day to day syncing etc. you still need the Windoze/Mac app and a USB cable to register a device and flash new firmware. Mine fortunately is one of the newer devices which is supported in 10, but I did see that some older devices are either not supported at all any more because of 10, or are supported by means of faff.

Looks likes it’s not worth the bother for marginal benefits. Everything works OK on my W7 box. I dont want a headache today so I’ll leave it.

If it was not for a couple of Windows specific programs I’ll would be using Linux all the time. WiNE will get them working, but it’s just not the same.

I just need a computer to do jobs, like a hammer. Not to rule my life and be permantly connected for ever to a corperate giant.

I did it a couple of weeks ago. Took a while but everything works and it’s definitely quicker. My next plan is to do a clean install to get rid of some of the crap I’ve accumulated in the years since I installed Windows 7.

At the moment the conversion rate is down on what MS were after – the plan is to get rid of old versions so they can stop supporting them – support costs money.

Having swapped all 4 boxes over to 10 from 7 I’m pleased. It’s been painless, 10 works well and just about does what it needs to. My work machines get used hard and they are standing up to it They are faster than they were on 7 and the updates are even less of an issue as most things go through without a restart.

I think we’ll give it a go . . . What’s the worst that can happen 😉

I did it to my home laptop a few months ago, no issues.
To my back up workstation a few weeks back, no issues, actually much more stable.
To me everyday mobile workstation on Monday, really good for 2 days, some good improvements over 8.1 but now have the start button / edge not responding issue.
The powershell fix doesn’t work, grrrrrrrr