Unknown Windows OS?

[gore]

If you really want to screw with it; Get DooM working on it! Not DooM 3, but the originals. They don't play nice with 7 so I'm assuming 8 will probably be about the same.

From what I understand about the Windows Kernel, the "hybrid" is basically something they came up with when they hired the guy who worked on VMS to get Windows NT going WAY back in the day. I don't read to much into it, as verifying this stuff would be next to impossible, but apparently the guy from VMS was actually complaining about the "working conditions" he was given...

I find this to be funny. The guy worked on VMS and complained about how Microsoft wanted him to do Windows NT. VMS is one of the shittiest OSs ever done so the fact that he complained about NT I thought was just funny lol.

I mean seriously; Who the **** wants VMS?

[nihil]

@gore,

If you really want to screw with it; Get DooM working on it! Not DooM 3, but the originals. They don't play nice with 7 so I'm assuming 8 will probably be about the same.

Good Thinking!!!

That is where I was going with trying to install the game controller hardware.

Now, I don't know if any of you know of this stuff as it is pretty much last milennium, but there is this series of games called "StarWraith". I tend to use them for testing audi/video installations. They are free and are only around 10MB so really suit that usage.

I actually like the intro ("cutscene"???) and music, which are all I really need for testing purposes.

http://www.starwraith.com/main/others.htm

Now, if you are having old games problems with Vista and later I recommend that you Google for d3drm.dll and install it into the Windows root folder there may well be others, but I am not a serious gamer so I wouldn't know

Windows 8 seems to have a program compatibility system that I haven't seen before............... I shall have to wait for wife to go to bed to try it on Windows 7, as she uses that one to watch videos. It isn't in Vista I am pretty sure? Windows 8 also asks you if a program has installed properly, and when you run it, if it has worked properly.

I have just installed "Serious Sam" and it seems to work OK ................. hell, I haven't played that for years................... it has "Gigabyte" on the box, so it must have come with my Radeon 9700Pro............. which kinda dates it?

"Warheads" is totally fascist as usual and demands Windows 95...........

VMS? take it from me that VMS has bugger all to do with Windows from Windows 2000 onwards at least. I also don't think that one scroat would have had that much influence on Microsoft, even back then.

I have personally seen hundreds of VMS deployments that worked perfectly.....you have not, as you weren't even born then

I would actually question whether it is an "operating system" though........ In the way that you and I would understand the term these days?

All the installations I ever saw were on process control type equipment, so I kinda looked on it as some sort of fancy "firmware" rather than a proper OS?

It was very popular and succesful in its day as it ran DEC/VAX boxes.

//Me?............... I will quote my SE of the day : "Johnno, VMS is MVS that has been installed incorrectly"................ yeah, I worked in IBM shops back then

Now somewhere I have "Soldier of Fortune" and "Duke Nukem", I wonder.............. then there's "Freespace" and "Star Wars X-Wing"

...................................

[gore]

Nihil; I think you may have taken what I said wrong; Microsoft told the guy basically what they wanted, and the guy from VMS complained a LOT about how they wanted it. They basically told him like most companies would, exactly what they wanted him to do. And he did do it, but he's said to have complained a lot about the conditions. He didn't want to do some of it because of what exactly they wanted.

I don't think Microsoft would publish exactly what happened because he was trying to make them look bad in the process, but again, since neither party has verified any of it, it's hard to really take it at face value.

VMS I do know a fair amount about, since I'm one of those Unix people who rubs in their faces that "we won" lol. I know the guy who founded Digital was once quoted with saying "Unix is Snake Oil" however, the problem with that quote, is that it was taken TOTALLY out of context; I can't remember the whole thing, but he was saying quite a bit, and someone decided to pull THAT one piece out, and the anti-Unix people ran with it, not really knowing that he didn't mean it the way they used it.

Digital / DEC for the acronym lovers, made a LOT of stuff. And it wouldn't be possible without IBM either way. The founder of DEC said he could beat them at their own game, and set out to do so.

If you ever run across "A Quarter Century of Unix" BUY IT! I've known you for like a decade, and I know you'll love it. It's a great book, and even this story is in there. It also talks about a Certain inventor of Calculus It also has a bit about the invention of OSs in general which is well done albeit quick. Not that I expected a book about Unix to be a book about the History of the OS, it shouldn't be long and tedious. I think they spent the appropriate amount of time on it.

Either way, I suggest buying it online if you can't find it where you live. It's well worth the hassle. I collect books about OSs which I doubt you'd find shocking since you know me pretty well.

I once had a chance at a book that was .... Mmm, it was great; It was one of the original Unix books from AT&T, and I didn't have enough money to buy it. MAN I wanted that book. It was pretty old, obviously, but WOW.

Makes me wonder why Berkeley didn't Publish more and earlier; I'd LOVE to have been able to track down some old BSD books from the 70s.

[nihil]

Aother thing to remember about "back in the day" was that most sites didn't reall care what OS the computer ran.

You bought a computer and support contract and every now and then an SE would come and update it. All you needed to know were some of the utilities like command language and query.

Anyways, back to Windows 8. I now have an answer for ua549 and a SATA III SSD.

This is now running on a Corsair Force Series 3 solid state SATA III drive, and scores 7.5/7.9. This is 27% better than SATA II at 5.9 whilst in theory it should be 100% and even comparing SATA II and III transfer rates it is claimed to be 92%.

Although the Windows Experience Index says data transfer rates, it seems as if there are other factors built into the equation?

I have another one to install into a Windows 7 box so it will be interesting to see if the results are the same?

[nihil]

Well, I have been using a standard 17" LCD monitor so far, so I connected a Philips 22" Hd widescreen.

Windows 8 correctly identified the make and model and loaded "drivers" for it. It defaulted to the 16:9 aspect ratio at the native resolution of 1920x1080.

The only problem I can see is that the "StarWraith" games now take around 2 minutes to load. However I guess it has to close down Aero and adjust the screen settings?

Even more surprising is that it loaded Freespace 2, which won't even load on Windows 2000 or XP!

Hmmmmmm ............... G-Skill RipjawsX DDR3 1600MHz .............. I wonder what it will make of that?

[nihil]

Well, increasing the RAM speed from 1333 to 1600 didn't seem to make much difference.

You might recall some discussion on the forum about Windows 7 and its 100MB "System Reserved" partition that seems to appear automagically when you install it?

Well, Windows Explorer doesn't show that in Windows 8 but I have noticed a 350MB "reserved" area with no assigned partition or drive letter that is described as "bootable". I have only seen it using HD Tune 2.55 as Explorer just shows a regular C:\ drive. It is also reported as being empty unlike the one in Windows 7

Some sort of security measure perhaps?

EDIT:

Looks like the public beta will be available end of February.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/artic..._February_2012

Microsoft report 3,000,000 downloads of the preview.

[romanticcowboy]

If you really want to screw with it; Get DooM working on it! Not DooM 3, but the originals. They don't play nice with 7 so I'm assuming 8 will probably be about the same.

From what I understand about the Windows Kernel, the "hybrid" is basically something they came up with when they hired the guy who worked on VMS to get Windows NT going WAY back in the day. I don't read to much into it, as verifying this stuff would be next to impossible, but apparently the guy from VMS was actually complaining about the "working conditions" he was given...

I find this to be funny. The guy worked on VMS and complained about how Microsoft wanted him to do Windows NT. VMS is one of the shittiest OSs ever done so the fact that he complained about NT I thought was just funny lol.

I mean seriously; Who the **** wants VMS?

ive ran the original doom using vm ware with win xp pro on 7 64 bit also dos box will allow you to run most dos games without having to use vmware

[Cider]

Nihil, anymore insight?

I am ashmed to say I havent gotten around to testing.

[nihil]

Hi there Cider, happy New Year mate!


As you know, I only started into this with the intention of testing hardware requirements and possible issues with legacy hardware and applications. I will certainly go for the public beta at the end of February, as that should give a better idea of user "feel".

My general vioew of the pre-beta is that it is Windows 7 with go faster stripes

There is an obvious emphasis on sub-pc devices with touch screens, which I personally interpret as Microsoft wanting to make the experience of users of sub-PCs and desktops similar and familiar.

Me?..............I'd need a long finger on a stick ...... or a new pair of eyeballs?

Anyways, I have been testing it on 3 machines:

A] 4 core (Phenom II BE) @ 3.4GHz with 8GB DDR3/1600MHz {64bit}
B] Single Core (Sempron) @ 2.8GHz with 4GB DDR2/1066MHz {64bit}
C] Legacy Single Core (Athlon 3000+) @ 2.17GHz with 1.5GB DDR1/ mixed 400/333MHz {32bit}

I have been using the two 64bit machines on a daily basis almost since the preview release came out, and have not managed to crash either of them so far.

Performance is excellent, although the Sempron is noticeably slower than the Phenom II and works harder, as I had expected. It is appreciably faster than XP Pro on a 2.8GHz Pentium 4 with 2GB of DDR1/400MHz.

Having said that, the Phenom II box boots from a SATA III SSD, and the Sempron's HDD runs @ 118.6% faster than the Pentium 4's

The 32bit legacy machine did have problems, but I think that most of those stemmed from the fact that it has a crap video card and doesn't like 22" HD screens at 1920x1080.

I am using it right now, having attached a 19" CRT monitor, and it seems just fine. It certainly plays my legacy games a lot better; presumably because they are designed for 4:3 aspect ratio?

I guess that if I were serious about these sort of games, I would create a profile with Aero turned off for a start; and a decent, modern, video card.

My conclusions so far:

1. It is just a re-badged Windows 7, so there is no real incentive to upgrade unless you have the money and are into fondle pads.

2. It works with legacy peripheral hardware that works with Windows XP. Anything older than that and you should treat yourself to a new one, unless you are a collector, or can run a legacy machine. OK, "VM" I can hear you saying..........sure, but where are the 25pin parallel and 15 pin game ports, not to mention stuff for which there are no drivers after Windows 2000 Pro?

3. I would upgrade from Vista ............. except that I would have already gone to Windows 7

4. For an average user new build, I would go:

(i) Quad core processor.
(ii) 4GB DDR3/1333
(iii) 60GB SSD
(iv) Conventional SATA HDD to suit budget and usage.
(v) Budget video card with GDDR5 memory.

Obviously, it all depends on what you are going to use the machine for, but this does seem to be a multicore OS.

It doesn't seem to be that fussy about RAM, as going from DDR2 800 to 1066 and DDR3 1333 to 1600 didn't seem to have any effect and didn't change the WEI score. However, there is a significant improvement in going from DDR2 to DDR3, almost 30% on the WEI.

Hmmmm, I haven't tried it with a dual core, and I think I have one somewhere..................................

[Cider]

Happy new year to you as well Hope it was great.

Thanks for the input.

I am now sceptical as you say there is no use upgrading from Windows 7. The guys in my marketing department love this sort of eye candy and there have some tech knowledge which is very dangerous, they are going to harass me for a license at work ...

I will most likely have to move up given the nature of my job but at home I will probally stay on W7. I too will be playing with the public beta.

Thanks again!