OT: Windows 2000 Pro to XP Pro upgrade without having to reinstall applications?

[polygonum]

Didn't the 80286 have an MMU in at least some incarnations?

[Tim Streater]

That reference was talking about OSX Panther (10.3), which must be 10 years old now. I'm running 10.8.

[Vir Campestris]

LOL! Not even WinCE!

Andy

[Vir Campestris]

All variants of the '286 had a sort-of-MMU. It couldn't handle invalid accesses by re-running the instruction (which you must have for virtual memory), and there were no pages anyway - just relocatable segments. There's a good reason why Bill Gates called it Brain Damaged.

Andy

[Huge]

Who mentioned Intel?

And my statement still stands. Unix won - get over it.

[John Rumm]

All incarnations as far as I am aware... it had a protected mode not that dissimilar from that of the '386, but with just enough missing features to be a right PITA to actually use ;-)

[Vir Campestris]

I though Unix was pretty much dead, except for Apple. Linux on the other hand has a pretty good share of the server market.

But if you assume that a computer is something with an MMU you have to include all those Windows desktops, because every single one of them, all the way back to Windows 95 (and some before) has an MMU.

Andy

[MM]

Yeah, but they have always shot themselves in the foot there by charging too much money to upgrade. If I could have bought a legal copy of Windows 7 Ultimate for, say, £50 and not £170, then I would have done so yonks ago. It's Microsoft's constant price gouging that persuades many Windows users to stick with their current version. I expect there are millions still using XP, as I do, and are perfectly happy with it, as am I.

From what I've heard about Windows 8, it could be another own goal for MS like Vista was. Not many people seem happy.

Same with women...

MM

[dennis]

Its you that claimed NTFS fragments and I that asked which version as to me it obvious that the OS can write to the same file system in many ways and it will still be NTFS.

There have also been versions of NTFS BTW.

So the question stands.

[dennis]

Maybe its because other computers of the day didn't either. The file systems on Unix machines used to fragment lots. There were real fragments in the BSD system, which worked as described. they were where the end bits of several files would be written into fragments of a disk block to save a bit of space.

It was considered more important to save the space than to worry about having to read, modify and write the block on the disk. You would have to use a code lock as you would need to flush the file system buffers carefully to make sure you did the read, modify, write operations atomically which is a bit old hat these days where resource level locks are preferred.

[Steve Firth]

Yeah, if a V12 Aston Martin is such a good idea how come Toyota doesn't do it?

[Steve Firth]

Extremely well. And fragmentation is a problem with all Wundows versions.

[Steve Firth]

No, you're not describing fragmentation. What you are describing is having contiguous files scattered over the disk surface. BTW it isn't "the Linux method". Linux will work with FAT or NTFS in which case it inherits their problems. It's just the way that files are stored in the ext(whatever) file systems that Linux defaults to and that are independent of Linux.

Fragmentation is where pieces of an individual file are non contiguous and scattered across the disk.

Because Microsoft is, and always has been, staffed by idiots. And their OSen are, in the main, used by sheep. It's largely the fault of accountants.

If formatted as FAT they will suffer from fragmentation but it won't matter because seek times are not relevant. In fact because of wear levelling files are more likely to be fragmented than not. It's just not an issue.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Er no. Unix file systems were never as bad as DOS was.

They were designed for hard disks, not floppy disks.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Unix and Linux are technically so close that its barely worth splitting hairs over which is which. there are perhaps 3-4 flavours out there. Proper sysV unix on which sun solaris is based, which is used by many mini and mainframe type computers, although there too linux is being used, FreeBSD, which is a nice public domain port of the original Berkely Unix of SUNOS 4 fame. and is at the core of OSX, and Linux. Plus legacy unixes

Solaris on Sparc - SUN - is now what Oracle will sell you to run their industrial strength databases on. It is straight up unix, hacked and tuned for massive transactions per second cluster performance, and its probably what the City runs on, as a back end server. IBMs mainframes still run IBMs own OSes, but they use AIX (halfway between System IV and System V unix last time I used it) on smaller systems and Linux.

Silicon graphics ditched Unix and now runs Linux. HP SUN and IBM still do Unmix workstations based on HP-UX, Solaris and AIX...all Unix..

In short there's a lot of Unix as well as Linux competing in the professional and technical workstation arena. People will but whatever the software they need will run on. And Unix or Linus is te de facto choice of pwople running medium to enterprise class servers. Only in seriously big applications, especially legacy COBOL ones, does IBM stillsupport its old operating systems to run on 'big iron'

unix and linux now spreads from the smart phone and appliance right up to challenge mainframes. Only one sector or perhaps two does Microsoft have any serious share of, and that's workgroup servers and corporate and home cheap desktops.

It made its choices when it ditched OS/2 - a technically quite good operating system - in favour of NT, and thereby pushed itself into a consumer and unsophisticated user niche.

That made it a lot of money, but it held back computing for years.

how many are still used though?

And who cares? I think a computer is a processor with broadly a von neumann architecture that can modify data in memory and act on instructions in (possibly different) memory.

Even an arduino is a computer. And if yuou looked at chip sales versus windows licence sales I bet you would find that that less than 20% run windows. You oly haqve to look at ARM SPARC POwer PC and dozens of other chips that windows cant run on at all, (but Linux and unix can) to see where the balance lies.

So in that sense, Linux Unix and friends are in fact the overall winners hands down,

Linux in its android guise has dominated the smartphone and smart appliance market completely, and that's a huge growth area.

Even in terms of people sitting in front of 'PCs' Windows share is shrinking. As I said upwards of 38% of people who hit my website, don't do it from a windows PC any more.

A friend of mine gave his daughter, then at university, a linux equipped laptop. It broke 4 years later and she asked 'for another one like it' . Essentially it dd all she needed. Of course you cannot BUY a laptop easily these days that comes with pre-installed linux, so every one that is bought,and has linux installed on it subsequently allows Microsft to claim it as their own. Same for all the mass slaes of HP., DEll and so one machnes. All preinstalled with OEM windows, to make sure that no one installs anything else without good reason.

Microsoft tax every mainstream PC sold regardless of whether customers want Windows or not. And claim it as another system 'running windows'

[dennis]

The 286 had a segmented MMU. It was better for some things than a paged MMU.

The 386 was designed to run Unix. It was the 386 that fixed the page size at 4k as before that different Unix variants had different page sizes.

[polygonum]

At least one operating system of the 1970s had considerable and interesting features to help reduce fragmentation. In the days when moving a head from one track to another was a really slow operation, fragmentation was, in some ways, even more important.

For example that OS allowed you to set up allocation unit sizes equivalent to a part of a track, track(s) or cylinder(s).

The OS encouraged defining file sizes when they are first created, allowed specification of the increment by which files grew when they needed more space, and several other things.

At the same time, the handling of index-sequential files was dreadful and could incur horrendous overheads because of the internal overflow mechanisms. So it was definitely not all roses even if the file was not externally fragmented at all.

[dennis]

Oh and Windows does run on ARM too.

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think most people regard that as more of a one legged hop than running... And really what's the point? the only point of windows is that yu can run windows apps on it.

THEY wont run on ARM

-- Ineptocracy (in-ep-toc?-ra-cy) ? a system of government where the least capable to lead are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers.

[Vir Campestris]

On 18/06/2013 19:31, dennis@home wrote:> > The 286 had a segmented MMU. > It was better for some things than a paged MMU. > Really? Give me an example.

I've written code for the bloddy thing, and I'm glad I'll never have to do it again.

Dunno about the page size - but the way I read it was that they bolted

32 bit extensions onto the instruction set, added a 32-bit bus to match, and stuck a decent MMU running under the broken one,

The '386 and its children still have a segmented MMU. Not used much.

Andy