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

[The Natural Philosopher]

because thats all they have actually seen and recognise 'as a computer'

[John Williamson]

Nor here, now I've spent time clearing it out.

Until I bought the new camera on Thursday, mine was a plugin on Photoshop.

It will run under WINE, though.

65 processes, 1.03 Gig used, The rest of the 2 Gig on this netbook is sitting empty. Firefox & Thunderbird running and a lot of stuff sitting in the system tray, including Interbase server. The single core, hyperthreading CPU's ticking over at 20-30%.

I don't think so. Mainly because it supports the programs and hardware I use.

Enough religion for now.

[dennis]

That's pretty close to what I have.

~146 processes.

1.25 G RAM.

there is another 1.3G being used to cache the file system.

And 259 M being used by the hardware.

Of course its windows and hasn't been booted for days.

[MM]

Because 97% of the world's PCs are Windows-based, not Linux.

MM

[Huge]

First you have to define what you mean by a "PC", and assuming you mean an Intel desktop, it's still not even wrong.

[The Natural Philosopher]

definitely not. At LEAST 5% are in fact Macintosh. And if you mean PCS as hardware, not as desktop computers, server side MOST of them run Linux.

just for fun I ran some stats on the gridwatch site.

vps:/var/log/apache2# grep -i linux gridwatch.access.log | wc -l

648458

In today's logs there were 648458 hits from 'Linux' machines out of :

vps:/var/log/apache2# wc -l gridwatch.access.log

3586841

total hits.

which comes out at 18% of the machines hitting the gridwatch site are in fact LInux.

Looking at OS X (which will take another 5 minutes to grep gives....after...a...long...wait...

vps:/var/log/apache2# grep -i "os x" gridwatch.access.log | wc -l

551318

so 15% are Apples* of one sort or another running OSX.

So as far as Gridwatch is concrerned Linux users outscore Mac Users, and windows (which accounts for MOST of the rest - there a few iphone and android users in there too) are less than 70%. Probably around 65%.

• there might be the odd Hackintosh in there for all I know.

So insofar as at least gridwatch is concerned, you are lying.

[The Natural Philosopher]

ITYM its still not even *right*.

AS I pointed out, gridwatch at least has more linux hits than Apple mac hits , and they together comprise 33% of all the hits

[Andy Burns]

[MM]

Mine are AMD desktops. No Intel here!

MM

[MM]

Don't believe a word of the Linux mood music! The whole band is smoking something. Take any typical town or city anywhere in the Western world (and in most other places, too) and ask everyone with a Windows PC to stick a flag out of the window. Count 'em. Then ask the same question of Linux users. Count 'em, too.

Notice something?

(And don't try to pretend the latter count would be larger!)

MM

[MM]

Here's a more believable statistic:

"1.25 billion Windows PCs running today. (That includes all versions of Windows.)

500 million Windows 7 licenses sold in the last two years. It's a safe bet that more than 80% of those licenses were sold on new PCs, which means there are at least 400 million active Windows 7 users today. (Some licenses might have been bought by corporations for upgrades, but not yet deployed.)"

MM

[The Natural Philosopher]

Ah. I had never come across that one before.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Are you saying that actual real hard data off a live server that I own is not believable?

Are you saying that I am in essence lying?

I think that says all that need be sdaid about your 'statistics'

I bet most of them are switched off. I have a machine here that had a valid windows licence and a valid windows intallation. It doesnt anymore.

Thats not very many really.

So then there are around 100 million linux and 100 million OS-X active users as well.

Of course, with Linux, no money changes hands,. so who can tell?

[MM]

That's what Linux aficionados were saying five years ago, whistling in the dark to keep their spirits up! All together now... "I remember Lindows..."

MM

[The Natural Philosopher]

someone I worked with used to say the same 'this is the year of Unix' That was in about 1993.

It never was the year of Unix, and yet, Unix gradually pushed out practically every other operating system at the minicomputer level. and is now being replaced by Linux. More multi-user computers and servers run on some *nix than on anything else.

Likewise Linux has pushed out MOST of the specialist 'almost real time' operating systems from, 'appliances'. Here also windows in in a tiny minority.

Linux just gets better, and windows just it seems gets worse.

Quite possibly because there are simply more people working on bugs security fixes and technical support in the open source community than even microsoft can muster.

The last bastion of windows is on the corporate desktop. And yet desktop PC sales have crashed. Ask anyone in the trade.

It may not be the end, nor even the beginning of the end, for Windows and Microsoft, but it is the end of the beginning..

[Vir Campestris]

Oink flap.

If I create a thousand files, then delete every other one how is it not fragmented? (feel free to send a link with explanations).

Of course with SSDs this is ceasing to be much of an issue.

Andy

[Tim Streater]

One thing unix doesn't give you, AIUI, is a guaranteed real-time interrupt response. DEC's VMS was better in that regard which is why Physics Labs (CERN etc) went for that in the 80s & 90s. But I think even they went to unix, perhaps because CPUs are that much faster than they were then.

[Tim Streater]

In the short term it may well be. But at least OS X will tidy up for you.

[dennis]

ITYM and then filled the free space with a file, how isn't it fragmented.

Of course the old way to avoid this is to reserve a huge space so there is always going to be a free space to fit the file.

However this is only true if you don't use the machine much. Its how unix used to do it but there are better ways now, the same ways that windows does it.

[polygonum]

That logic only follows if the 1000 files are placed in consecutive locations (or some such approach).

If a system uses something like "use the smallest unfragmented area large enough for the file" or "alternate between locations A and B" as placement algorithm, then it _might_ work out very differently.

In my experience the worst culprits for fragmentation on Windows boxes are the various files such as logs which grow, and grow, and grow. At each bit of growth, albeit only a few bytes may be added, another fragment appears. The simple process of copy file/rename old/rename new/delete old manages to get rid of vast swathes of fragmentation. This has been known for ages and yet Windows never had any tools for addressing the issues, or even for accessing the huge log files in a finite universe (that is, no command like tail).