[extropy-chat] when will computers improve?

[Robert J. Bradbury]

On Sat, 20 Dec 2003, BillK wrote:

> I have Win98, 256MB memory,
[snip]
> I have resources available of about 83% GDI, 80% USER and 80% SYSTEM.

> Try different software?

That isn't it Bill -- I used to run into similar problems on 95 and 98
running a very different set of software.  Part of it simply has to
do with how many windows you have open.  Microsoft didn't design those
OSs so they could handle lots of windows.  Mike is also right that it
depends to some extent on how many processes you are running.  It isn't
entirely fixed in Win2K but it is a *lot* better.  I can generally get up
to 4-5 full task bar lines of the smallest window icons before things
start to go south.  And then it doesn't really crash -- the stupid
Msft scheduler keeps going round-robin between all of the windows
giving them each little time slices (I've never been able to get
them to confess how one could tweek this to lower the amount of
CPU time that non-active windows get).  So your response time goes
through the floor essentially forcing you to cleanup your tasks.
(I'll admit I'm only on a 200Mhz machine -- but still...).

I've got 256MB of main memory and 384MB of paging file space and
I can have occasions where Netscape goes into some infinite loop
allocating memory.  If I wait long enough the system will give
me a very nice error message -- and recover's nicely once I kill
the Netscape (though sometimes it will kill Netscape for me...).

But 2K is much more stable for a much longer period.  NT 4.0
is pretty good as well.  I've got the server version and it
will run fine for months.

I will openly admit that I probably don't push the systems as
hard as someone like Eugen does so I may not be stressing them
enough to make the flaws show up.

Robert