Do we have way more computer power than we need?

[saturnv]

I sometimes wonder if they just spent the last 30 years just refining Windows 95 would things be better? I suppose people would argue that is exactly what Windows 10 was and 11. Maybe it would have been worse, but I suspect that there's loads of data mining services taking up resources and silly things that are mostly cosmetic that nobody notices.

Unfortunately no. Windows 95 was severely limited in a few major ways. It had no concept of users and the memory model was limited. Any running process could access and modify any location in memory. This was terrible for security and one of the reasons that 95 was so prone to crashing.

Windows NT replaced it and still forms the basis of Windows up through 11. It added support for multiple users and multiple processors. It also added a more secure file system and a new hardware driver model. Some of the increased resource usage of NT was very necessary to add the modern features that we now take for granted.

Microsoft did actually attempt to keep developing the 95 line of technology with 98 and ME, but they were even bigger pieces of crap than NT and were eventually discarded.

 

[MildredHubble]

Unfortunately no. Windows 95 was severely limited in a few major ways. It had no concept of users and the memory model was limited. Any running process could access and modify any location in memory. This was terrible for security and one of the reasons that 95 was so prone to crashing.

Windows NT replaced it and still forms the basis of Windows up through 11. It added support for multiple users and multiple processors. It also added a more secure file system and a new hardware driver model. Some of the increased resource usage of NT was very necessary to add the modern features that we now take for granted.

Microsoft did actually attempt to keep developing the 95 line of technology with 98 and ME, but they were even bigger pieces of crap than NT and were eventually discarded.

That makes sense. I do remember reading about some of the points you made and the big buzz about Windows XP being a consumer orientated version of Windows 2000/NT and how it would be a huge leap forward. Until then everyone used to say to stick with Windows 98SE. To be fair it was fairly stable provided you didn't try to run too many DOS applications from within windows, at least in my experience.

I built computers quite a lot from around the turn of the century for 5 years, but then I became less interested in tweaking around with the hardware and more interested in using it for the reason I built them which was recording music.

The problem was that Windows was so flakey and I was regularly reinstalling and optimising the hardware. I got sick of it and bought a Mac. From that point on I didn't really need to know what was going on "under the hood". So I fell behind with my knowledge of PCs. Sure Macs became "PCs" too but since I didn't need to have much knowledge about the hardware I had no incentive to keep up to date. I'd only need to read up when "Hackintoshing" a laptop.

I kinda leap frogged over Vista/7/8 and on to Windows 10. Windows 10 started off much better but I still was using OS X Mountain Lion for years before I got around to updating. Windows always turns into a slow chugging mess in the end. It's the one constant it has had through the years. I guess that superfluous processing power comes in handy when that happens!

Once running the MacOS is no longer viable, I will probably run Linux full time and make myself get used to it. That is of course unless someone manages to patch the MacOS to run on x86 when Apple drop support, or if the Apple Silicone Macs drop into my price range.

 

[Outdated]

To be fair it was fairly stable provided you didn't try to run too many DOS applications from within windows, at least in my experience.

Gamers got pretty upset about the change to the NT system because with Win95 and 98 you didn't have to run Windows, it was optional. You could just start up in DOS and your games didn't have to try and share the resources with anything else. That was pretty important when the latest and greatest video card had 4 megabytes of ram.

Security became an ever increasing threat though, and it became a lot more complex as the battle wore on between scammers and spammers and the rest of us normal people. Microsoft never really took security seriously though, except for being able to make broad sweeping statements in press releases. A large source of revenue for Microsoft is the marketing information they gather from several billion computers around the world, introducing authentic security measures in to their operating system would cut that flow of information.

Windows 95 and 98 both came with some Norton proprietary programs preinstalled but they were unlicensed and no permission to use these programs had been granted. Nortons took Microsoft to court over it. Microsoft ran a series of stalling actions on the court case that lasted long enough for them to buy out a controlling portion of shares in Nortons, after that they were no longer going to sue themselves.

As the owner of one of the world's better known antivirus programs, does Microsoft have any real interest in preventing viruses? There's a very definite conflict of interests there.

That is of course unless someone manages to patch the MacOS to run on x86 when Apple drop support, or if the Apple Silicone Macs drop into my price range.

It has been patched already, since 1997. The only catch is it only comes with drivers for Intel chipsets. Buy any PC with pure Intel chipset and your OSX will install without a hitch.

If you want to install it on a PC with other brands of chipset that's already patched too. Everything you need to do that is in the Extras folder on the OSX cd.

 

[MildredHubble]

Windows 95 and 98 both came with some Norton proprietary programs preinstalled but they were unlicensed and no permission to use these programs had been granted. Nortons took Microsoft to court over it. Microsoft ran a series of stalling actions on the court case that lasted long enough for them to buy out a controlling portion of shares in Nortons, after that they were no longer going to sue themselves.

I had no idea about this! To be fair the late 90s was a time when just about everyone seemed to be suing Microsoft If I remember correctly, they had stolen code from Apple too and I seem to remember Adobe. I think in the end Microsoft agreed to buy shares in Apple and that helped prop them up long enough to rebuild their business. So Apple fans owe a lot to Microsoft, even if it came off the back of some dodgy practices.

 

[Outdated]

So Apple fans owe a lot to Microsoft, even if it came off the back of some dodgy practices.

Microsoft are nowhere near as philanthropic as their media would suggest. I don't think it's this way in the US but in most countries around the world we have very strict laws concerning monopolies. If you are the sole provider of a necessary product or service you come under very strict government regulation and supervision regarding pricing and quality.

 

[Outdated]

For any that doubt my story above, the Nortons program that Microsoft gave to all of their customers was called Dr Watson. It was a diagnostic program for helping to keep Windows running as fast as possible.

I couldn't remember the name of the program, had to boot up Win98 to check.

 

[Princess Viola]

^Dr Watson wasn't a Norton program nor has Microsoft ever owned any controlling shares in Norton. Norton's been owned by Gen Digital (previously called Symantec Corporation and NortonLifeLock) since 1990.

Also I feel that saying that Microsoft doesn't have any real interest in preventing viruses is kind of weird to me? It's like when people claim companies like McDonald's don't care if their customers get sick from their food. You can criticize these companies all day long for all the bad stuff they do do (and there is obviously tons of it) but they very much have a vested interest in not doing something that will lead to a serious negative reputation of what they provide to people.

Microsoft wants to keep Windows secure because they don't want people to move to other OSes and McDonald's doesn't want people to get sick from their food because they don't want people to go to Burger King or Wendy's.

Spoiler

Also tbh the fact that all you really need these days on Windows to be safe from viruses and malware is Windows Defender (which just comes with the OS as a core component), some form of adblocker in your browser, and common sense (and MalwareBytes for an occasional deep full-system scan to be 100% safe) really does say a lot about Windows and virus prevention.

 

[Judge]

It was interesting to hear Chris Titus' blase comments on antivirus programs in general and then proceed to rank them accordingly. Not what I expected.

However some of his peers seem to have other ideas. Where their presentations soundly frankly more like a corporate commercial.

I'm not sure what to think these days. My uptake was that no product is going to totally neutralize all forms of malware and that most of the more well known products out there aren't significantly different from one another. Maybe Titus might be right.

 

[The Pandector]

As others have pointed out, it’s not so much about needing all the power we pay for, it’s more about the way we blow the power we get. When I was handling large graphics files I could see both flops and memory being used. Nowadays, it seems the icon has to bounce around, grow and turn bright before it gets around to launching. I’m not impressed with eye candy, but that’s where most of our power goes.

 

[MildredHubble]

Nowadays, it seems the icon has to bounce around, grow and turn bright before it gets around to launching. I’m not impressed with eye candy, but that’s where most of our power goes.

MacOS had that covered more than 20 years ago I like the cute flourishes in OS X/MacOS To be fair Apple managed to do this all without sapping the CPU of all its life. It didn't use much in the way of GPU until Leopard (10.5.x) at which point they made a big song and dance about the dock being a real 3D Object. It seemed a bit silly as it looked no different to the last one. It had realtime reflections too, but again I didn't see the point.

This all kinda evolved and now large parts of the UI are 3D accelerated for some reason, yet it still looks as minimalist as ever?! As far as I can tell, all of this was to force the obsolescence of perfectly capable machines so that we will all hop on the Apple Silicone Bandwagon. And since I know that the obsolescence of Macs from over a decade ago is artificial, I will continue to push my machines until it's not plausible to run MacOS. Then I will use Linux until I find an ARM based Mac I can afford, then run that off into the sunset too

I just got done using my 2010 27" iMac and it's just as nice to use as ever. The screen is amazing, having all that space to organise things and I can use it as a monitor in Target Display mode. It still feels like a very modern computing experience to me, even more so with an i5 instead of the i3 it came with. I converted 4 Eddie Izzard DVDs to MP4 while watching YouTube and browsing the internet and editing a photo for my Dad. It didn't stutter or lag once and the DVDs were all converted in about an hour and 20 minutes!

I suspect that if more people were aware of how useful these old machines can be, there'd probably be a bit of a crisis in the home computer market!

 

[saturnv]

I built computers quite a lot from around the turn of the century for 5 years, but then I became less interested in tweaking around with the hardware and more interested in using it for the reason I built them which was recording music.

I still build my computers because I use linux and I need to take a little care to ensure my hardware has drivers. I am like you in not really enjoying it in itself anymore. I think part of it is the fact that there haven't really been any game-changing upgrades since SSDs came out. After that point, computers have been fast enough for my uses.

 

[MildredHubble]

I still build my computers because I use linux and I need to take a little care to ensure my hardware has drivers. I am like you in not really enjoying it in itself anymore. I think part of it is the fact that there haven't really been any game-changing upgrades since SSDs came out. After that point, computers have been fast enough for my uses.

SSDs are quite wonderful I have one installed in my MacBook and it became chock full of stuff that I got a bit behind with organising and moving for longer term storage. The fact that it was almost full and my MacBook was still very responsive shows how much of a good upgrade they are I really need to upgrade the hard disks in my other Macs to SSDs.

I had one installed in my desktop PC that I used to use as a Hackintosh but a bad PSU destroyed one SSD and then it's replacement. After I figured out that the PSU had caused the problem I decided to install a hybrid hard disk/SSD but I never got around to installing anything other than Windows on it. It's definitely a good compromise though and it tends to make access to often used files etc almost as snappy as an SSD

 

[Outdated]

SSDs are quite wonderful

I do now. It took a long time for me to trust them but I like the speed my computer boots at. I still have quite a few harddisks, they're so much more reliable in a disaster situation. Unless it's been exposed to magnetic influence you can just buy a new drive , open it up and put the old platter in the new drive. It's no longer dust free and will possibly not have a long life but plenty of time to make copies of all your gear. I had to do that for a few people up the top end, lightning strikes during the wet season.

 

[MildredHubble]

open it up and put the old platter in the new drive.

I've done essentially the same thing and switched the PCB from a dead drive that had been pinging a lot until one day it just didn't spin up anymore. It was still pinging away but held out long enough to transfer my documents. Then I put the PCB back on it's drive and copied everything back to the "new" (actually a used drive). I still have the drive as a network share.

I've only ever had one drive go so bad that I couldn't recover anything. It was a drive I had hooked up to my Nintendo Wii. I had installed the Homebrew Channel and discovered a "backup game" launcher. I was a very poor student at the time. I couldn't really afford games at all. I would rent them once in a while and copy them to the hard disk. I know, very bad of me to do that, but in all honesty, compared to the industrial levels of piracy the other students engaged in, I was a saint by comparison!

One day I got home and I could hear a pinging sound coming from the hard disk like it was being woken from sleep mode. I switched on the Wii and it didn't even report a connected drive! All my ill gotten games were gone! It was worse than that, when I tried to find a new PCB to try I discovered that the firmware was actually written to the surface of the drive! There was zero chance of getting them back.

When I graduated I bought all the games again when I was working full-time, but I still back them up to a hard disk. So far I've lost two SSDs and only one Hard Disk, well, insofar as I lost the data so for long term archival I think they are very reliable, but probably worth checking once in a while!

 

[Outdated]

I've done essentially the same thing and switched the PCB from a dead drive that had been pinging a lot.....

The autistic hypersenses are good things if you use them. I could hear when drives were on their way out, they get a high pitched whine that most people simply can't hear. Or during the wet season someone would bring their computer around my place and as soon as they brought it inside I'd get that burnt tin smell, yep, that one's knackered.

I keep 2 computers running simply for the convenience of when something goes wrong. Most of my stuff I want is always backed up on a second drive, a hard disk drive, so I can just switch to my other computer if I need to and fix the first one at my leisure. I haven't had any issues for quite a few years now though, not since leaving the tropics. That's a harsh climate for electronics.

 

[Outdated]

I was a very poor student at the time. I couldn't really afford games at all. I would rent them once in a while and copy them to the hard disk.

That went on a lot out in the bush, people with no TV or internet access wanting movies to watch. People in the city would download movies on to external harddrives for them and after they finished watching them they'd drop the harddrive in the pub for others to borrow. Sort of the same as country people do with books once they've finished reading them.

So there was harddrives floating all over the community and no one sure which one's belonged to who. It was a very poor community though, if they had to pay for all the movies they watched they simply would never have been able to see them.

 

[AuAL]

We use computers to use evolutionary meta heuristics to discover Pareto-optimal adaptations of agricultural practice under climate change. We run them on laptops. The trick is to wait until someone else runs the (multiple global) climate models over a region that includes our case study area down to 1 kilometre resolution for the next 70 years and makes the data public. We then hoover up the temperature and precipitation data, run some simple monthly approximations of reference evapotranspiration, generate monthly streamflow approximations from upstream catchment data, and push it into our optimisation algorithms. They run a hundred trial solutions for a few thousand generations across a target time window of ten or twenty years at some point in the future and we then visualise the output data to see what we’ve found.

We can do our computational studies on laptop/desktop machines. The global climate modelling, with regional downscaling models, requires high performance computing resources.

Some of my past work (in CFD) needed hours of compute time for a single trial evaluation. A computational experiment might entail evaluating thousands of trial solutions. We became very interested in developing optimisation algorithms that could utilise parallel computing resources…

Our guiding mantra was, “it’s nice to get an answer when you can still remember the question.”

 

[Jeff T]

Unfortunately no. Windows 95 was severely limited in a few major ways. It had no concept of users and the memory model was limited. Any running process could access and modify any location in memory. This was terrible for security and one of the reasons that 95 was so prone to crashing.

Windows NT replaced it and still forms the basis of Windows up through 11. It added support for multiple users and multiple processors. It also added a more secure file system and a new hardware driver model. Some of the increased resource usage of NT was very necessary to add the modern features that we now take for granted.

Microsoft did actually attempt to keep developing the 95 line of technology with 98 and ME, but they were even bigger pieces of crap than NT and were eventually discarded.

I hear you! My second computer was a 95->98 machine for analog video capture and editing. It wasn't able to do much- it would often crash without warning halfway through a project. Most times I had to reinstall the OS and all the other software etc. That was probably about the time I got high blood pressure!
After a year of this, Windows 2000 came out and I bought it. Wow, what a difference! One of my computers still runs it.

 

[MildredHubble]

The autistic hypersenses are good things if you use them. I could hear when drives were on their way out, they get a high pitched whine that most people simply can't hear. Or during the wet season someone would bring their computer around my place and as soon as they brought it inside I'd get that burnt tin smell, yep, that one's knackered.

I think that might explain a few things for me. I can hear the slightest anomaly with our cars and that helps keep them ticking over as I spot problems before they become big problems. In my previous job I could hear the telltale signs of a failing server hard disk about 3 months before anyone else would accept there was a problem. That was a very frustrating period of time, every time I pointed it out going "Cllicketyclickety...Ping PING!!!!" they kept saying I was imagining it.

I guess it's a really useful ability, but persuading others that you can perceive a phenomena that they just simply can't, makes you feel like you are going quite mad sometimes!

On the other hand, when I think of it that way, it makes some people seem slightly less vindictive in hindsight

 

[Princess Viola]

I maintain that mechanical hard drives are great if you need lots of storage space for backups just because they're a lot cheaper than getting the equivalent amount of space on an SSD.

I could go to Best Buy today and get an 8 TB external HDD for $189.99, meanwhile getting an 8 TB external SSD would cost me $599.99.

If I needed a lot of storage, you're dang right I'd get a mechanical drive.

(Couldn't imagine using a mechanical drive for an OS install these days though, used to have Windows on one until a few years ago when I finally got a new laptop with an SSD and jesus it really was 'press the power button and then wait for it boot and then wait for it to load into Windows one I get to the login screen and login to the desktop')