Windows 10 bricks

You could get win 11 on it directly - but if it fails to get updates at some point then you are no better off than staying with win 10.

The VM with emulated TPM trick might get a system that works and is also updated. Just remember to not use the native host OS side for doing anything.

(the CPU revision requirement does not (yet) actually use the extra instruction set capabilities of the 8th gen CPUs - although win 11 will fail to install on some very old CPUs (i.e. older than yours) due to some missing CPU instructions).

However at 15 years old, it probably does not owe you anything, and you would find the massive jump in performance from a new platform quite a revelation.

Colin Macleod snipped-for-privacy@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote in news:1746210205-7 @newsgrouper.org:

The neg I can see is that browsers will look at the basic OS level and refuse to update an older one leaving the user unable to view content from sites that insist on employing bleeding edge features.

I think I can live with that :-)

VMWare has SWTPM.sys as a TPM emulation for Guest OSes like Windows 11. There are still VMWare products available free for hobbyists.

When you compare old hardware to new hardware, there is some improvement, but it isn't like my first machine, where a hardware upgrade was 4x faster. The difference today involved "percentages".

Host Hardware SuperPI 1.5 XS 6 Minutes 39 Seconds 5950X, 2023 vintage 64MB L3 5.05GHz turbo Host Hardware SuperPI 1.5 XS 7 Minutes 53 Seconds 5700G, 2023 vintage 16MB L3 4.65GHz turbo <=== Daily Driver Host Hardware SuperPI 1.5 XS 10 Minutes 17 Seconds 4930K, 2013 vintage 12MB L3 3.9 GHz turbo <=== Older hardware

The cheaper new processor gives an improvement.

Paul

Using this entry, I have added one more line to the table.

That's to give some idea how much improvement you could get, if you had liquid nitrogen laying around the house. The KF, the K means "unlocked" so the multiplier can be varied, and the F means the iGPU is missing, which gives slightly more thermal headroom.

At room temperature then, maybe somewhere between 4 minutes and 5 minutes (using ordinary DRAM and so on). A doubling easily possible.

Paul

I've bought one. In fact I've bought two, plus a conventional 128 GB USB stick. I've transferred all the user data I can think of to one, but there's still only 45 GB free. Most of the stuff is in C:\Windows, plus C:\Program Files and C:\Program Files (x86). What from those can I transfer to an external flash stick?

Not transfer as such, but applications can be removed then installed on drives other than C:. They will all ask during installation. There is an option to clean up drives somewhere, but I've never found that removes more than a few hundred megs at most.

Windows will grow relentlessly, there's no user options like apt clean and apt autoclean as in Linux, and you need to know quite a lot to know which old files can really be safely deleted without causing trouble. I've recently scrapped a Win10 installation in a 32GB SSD because it didn't have enough space left on C: to do an upgrade, and wouldn't even do a factory reset for the same reason. I didn't waste too much time as it only had a few months to live anyway, and I don't use it much nowadays.

I can see how that will reduce the space used by the program code, but what about the data? A lot of program data is under C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming - mainly Thunderbird which has 2 GB or so. I'm not aware that the program lets you choose where its data is stored.

"there's no user options like apt clean and apt autoclean as in Linux"

There is actually.

Now, before you get all excited, let us say your C: drive is five years old. and has never been cleaned. Running that command might remove 1GB of files. If you wait ten minutes and run it again, it removes 0 bytes, because all the crap that could safely have been removed, is now removed. After the next Patch Tuesday is installed and done, you could run it again. For some tiny saving or zero saving again. You're removing obsolete packages no longer being used on the machine (determination method unknown).

There are two potential savings. One is the size in bytes (the improvement only being valuable to a person with a really cheap tablet). But the other potential improvement, is maybe the next Windows Update installs a bit faster. The OS could afford to lose more weight than that, but the fact the command even exists, is better than nothing at all.

It's been a long time since I've tested this, and it would be a lot of work to test it properly.

Sometimes Windows Update stops, when there is no reason for it to stop. If you were attempting to bench with a stopwatch, you could easily reach the wrong conclusion. The OS has some mistaken impression "about its carbon deposits". Some idiot thinks leaving a computer running and not using it, and making the user wait for some updates to complete when they're good and ready, is saving the planet. I fail to see the humour in this. One thing you can do, is if you shutdown, and an update starts to install, then it just stops doing anything and the power remains on, pull the network cable, and maybe, within about two minutes, it will go back to work on finishing the update and allowing the computer to shut off. It's pretty hard to bench software that is *this stupid* .

Paul

If you examine "profiles.ini", it has available to it, relative and absolute path references. In this example, the profile uses an absolute path, and the absolute path is in my Downloads folder. It is located there, to save time finding it :-)

*******

That's a custom setup, from back in the days when Thunderbird was a bit simpler. Reading the file today, you can't figure out what all the entries are for. But I'm running it that way right now, as I type this.

If I wanted to move that to another partition, I could do it.

It is most efficient, when it is stored as MBOX files.

$ file Drafts Drafts: UTF-8 Unicode text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators

If messages are stored as .eml files, that can create thousands and thousands of files in the profile, which can take additional time when doing brute force searches. In the year 2025, there likely isn't much you can do about that. Certainly putting the profile on another partition/drive-letter, is about as good as you can do (as some of your searches, won't be looking in there).

Email can have GLODA enabled. USENET posts are not in the GLODA inverted index. But your email can be searched. Turning off GLODA, might yield slightly better performance (as now your messages are not getting indexed).

Paul

It doesn't look easy, or especially safe:

What kind of data is the TB stuff? I'm fairly sure the email can be archived to a file anywhere, I haven't used TB for many years, so I can't be more specific.

To keep the email online is harder, the way I'd do it would be to use something like a Raspberry Pi running an IMAP server, set up an account for it in TB then just drag and drop, making IMAP folders as necessary. This obviously needs a bit of technical knowledge.

But, in the long term, Windows just keeps getting fatter...

Redirecting user data looks like something MS should have made a simple user option, but they didn't. Forcing users to keep their data, email, logs and system software all in the same partition ('drive' in Windows terms) is not sensible design.

Would you really describe that as a 'user option'? In Windows, buttons in GUI dialogs are user options. MS prefers that untrained users don't leave the walled garden.

There were complaints at one time, that a cleaning method did not exist.

It's a miracle they made one of those. I know that some VM herders used to make an awful fuss about container size, and that's really the audience they were helping, is the VM people.

Regular users with decent sized storage, don't bother with that sort of thing. A tablet owner could use the relief, but the thing is, any space saved is soon wasted again, on something that's not as easy to clean. The eMMC chip put in the first generations of tablets, was miserably small. They did try keeping a compressed OS image on the tablet (maybe 4GB) and then do updates as a delta against that (an overlay file system). But the tablet still eventually had too many files for its own good. You hardly even hear them mention "tablets" in any web pages, as if not talking about them, solves the problem.

Paul

Thanks to Bob and Paul for information on how to do this. I've saved