XP Virtual Machine in Win 7 - strange happenings

[BillW50]

In news:hv7e7p$bmp$ [e-mail], dennis@home typed on Tue, 15 Jun 2010 09:37:56 +0100:

What kind of computers are you running Windows 7 on? I ran Windows 7 Ultimate RC on three different computers. One on a Gateway MX6124, a Gateway M465e, and an Asus 702 netbook. All three uses Celeron CPUs with

2GB of installed RAM. All three has Intel graphics (915 and 945). And only this machine here could run Aero.

And it was always the same. Much higher CPU usage and much higher average core temperatures (up by 20°F) than it was when compared to XP on the same machines. If you didn't monitor the CPU usage and/or the core temperatures. I can see how somebody wouldn't even know that Windows 7 is working very hard in the background.

As Windows 7 is very clever in appearances. But that is all it is, just an illusion. Even the minimum specs for high powered PC games are higher for Vista and Windows 7 than they are for Windows XP. That should tell you something wrong right there. As why would you need a faster processor and massive more memory for the same game if Windows 7 really didn't slow things down?

And as for the two unopened Windows 7 copies, right now they are holding my books up straight on the shelf. And I am thinking the DVDs might also make some pretty nifty drink coasters too. ;-)

[Bob Eager]

Wow. Which is where this thread started....see the subject...!

[dave]

I know there is a work round, but try telling that to a total computer illiterate :-(

My easiest escape route was to teach her how to change the file format to RTF. This is a computer user that has to ask how she attaches something to an e mail, be it a text file, or even worse, a photo that wants re-sizing.

Regards

Dave

[Mark]

Indeed. Fancy a thread drifting back to the original subject ;-)

[Andy Champ]

You don't need Aero.

I put Win7 on my old laptop (1gig ram, Pentium M 1.8GHz) and find it better than XP. Primarily because I don't have to reboot it every time I want to use the wireless. It's got some nice picture handling stuff too.

Vista, OTOH, sucks.

Andy

[BillW50]

Yes bad drivers can make or break an OS. But you don't need to change the OS to fix that problem. And I am not sure I follow you about the nice picture handling features. As it didn't seem very special to me. And all of that security under Windows 7 drives me nuts.

As Windows 7 doesn't want you to have control over itself. But it rather control the user instead. And Windows 7 does stupid things like grabbing My Documents off of my flash drive and merging it with My Documents on the hard drive. Makes it very confusing. Worse, it also renames folders too on it's own. Like it grabbed My Favorites on my XP partition and renamed it to just Favorites. Unbelievable!

It is like Windows 7 was designed to use by idiots. You make something so idiot proof, only an idiot would want to use it. That is were it is heading Andy. Maybe you like that idea, but I sure don't.

[geoff]

In message , Mark writes

You can in win7 pro, but not in win7 home

... as has already been stated

[The Natural Philosopher]

I did the same trying to make XP work like 98..

Then I went Linux :-)

[The Natural Philosopher]

hah! its all in the pretty graphics mate.

I can get almost 100% utilisation here (Linux) by moving a window round the screen very fast..

Older Macs simply couldn't keep up with flash videos..

I would say that in most cases 97% of all CPU power goes into eye candy.

The only other things that really stress my machine are manipulation and doing operations on seriously large and complex graphic objects.

[Andy Champ]

I agree I shouldn't have needed to change the OS - but I wanted to try it anyway! Security doesn't seem to hit meon Win7, it did on Vista until I turned it all off.

Haven't met anything like this either. But then I did a clean install. When I put my camera's memory in it asks me what to do.

Ah, now _that_ was Win ME!

Andy

[Steve Walker]

Graphics and IO (or waiting for IO) take the time. As a student 20-odd years ago, I used graphics terminals on a multi-user system. Sometimes (lunchtimes) when it was busy it would take 20 minutes to compile a program, but we found that it took only seconds if run as a background task with no screen IO. By the end of the year I had amassed stats along the lines of 650 hours logged in, 2.5 minutes of io and 8.5 seconds of CPU time!!!

SteveW

[C.Joseph Drayton]

Hello Roger,

You might consider using a different VM manager. I am using portable VirtualBox (Oracle's second maintenance release) and I have had no problem with it under WindowsXP, Vista, or Windows7, Server 2003.

I like using VMs for testing. I also have one 16GB (fixed size) VDI that I have installed Acrobat, and a few other commercial pieces of software that I don't use often enough to have take up space on my production computer.

With portable VirtualBox, I can run those applications literally on any WindowsXP or newer Windows OS without having to do a real install of the app. Since most commercial software doesn't want you running multiple copies of it, I am not (as far as I know) in violation of the software's EULA since I only have them installed on the VM. I do of course keep backups of the VDI and do not loan/give the VDI to anyone.

Sincerely, C.Joseph Drayton, Ph.D. AS&T

CSD Computer Services

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