Writes: Windows 10 will launch in less than a week and it is supposed to work flawlessly on devices already powered by Windows 7 and Windows 8.1, as Microsoft struggled to keep system requirements unchanged to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Device drivers all the way back to Windows Vista platform (WDDM 1.0) are supported.
This all-in-one touchscreen PC is beautiful to look at and lovingly designed, acer aspire z5600 you can get more powerful all-in-one computers for a similar price. It looks acer aspire z5600 and is incredibly easy to use.
Softpedia performed a practical test to see how Windows 10 can run on a 7-year-old Acer Aspire One netbook powered by Intel Atom N450 processor clocked at 1.66 GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB mechanical hard disk. The result is surprising to say the least, as installation not only went impressively fast, but. I have about the same netbook, and I've never used the Windows 7 that came with it, but want to put it back specifically so I can put Windows 10 on it to play with it. I lost the Clonezilla image I made of it years ago and am on the verge of ordering the backup media from the Acer website - I've come up empty on a WIndows 7 Starter ISO. I've loved my little Acer, I've had three bike wrecks with it, one of which my entire body weight went up and down the thing twice as I rolled over my backpack, not a scratch.
I double the RAM from 1 to 2 GB the day I bought it and put an SSD in later. The SSD was incredible when it came to increasing the battery life and performance. I've told people it's the laptop Fischer-Price made, and I say it in a bragging manner, I still love my little netbook. I bought my first-generation Acer Aspire One in 2008, back when the 'netbook' segment was still new. It even became my main computer for some months, and was quite happy with it — Except, of course, for the 9' 1024x600 screen.
Two years ago, I upgraded to a Acer Aspire One 756. Better processor and more memory allow me to virtualize whenever I need to do some Windows stuff (twice a year or so). That and a 10.5' 1366x768 screen, with mostly the same weight became godsend. Having a computer that allows me to upgrade once every five years, and that can be bought at US$300 at the supermarket. That's what I call convenience. I was upset when Microsoft decided they didn't want Netbooks to exist anymore and used their clout to force the reputable companies out of making them. I laughed my butt off when they came back in the name of Chromebooks - the first Acer Chromebooks as far as I could tell were basically a repurposed Aspire One anyways.
These are actually seeing some real adoption, schools in particular in this area require kids to have a Chromebook, that they will issue, or something that will do the same things as a Chromebook if a parent will provide (my buddy sent his daughter with a first gen Surface tablet with Chrome). I see the entire Chromebook phenomenon as a fuck you to Microsoft for the bullying they pulled forcing manufacturers out of that market anyways. The fact ChromeOS is Linux they pushed them right back where I thought they should be (mostly) anyways. On that note - Chrome does horrible full-screen, which is almost a requirement on a netbook. I went back to Firefox over it on my netbook, and went back to it everywhere as a result.
Glad I did, I'm not happy with the current state of Chrome. With (upgraded) 2GB of RAM and Linux/KDE using the Netbook desktop and an SSD for what it's worth mine does Youtube just fine, since it's WebM, I don't go to CNN but it manages with other Flash based video that needs to die. The fact is as far as Windows is concerned I hit the power button when I bought it to make sure it could boot, upgraded the RAM, did it again, then I plowed it and put Linux on it so I've never really seen how well it works with Windows. The fact that Windows 7 Starter qualifies for t. In fairness, Word is merely a program that displays a mixture of text and graphics, that can be formatted in numerous ways, with or without style sheets, viewable on a variety of different media types, with a turing complete scripting language that's capable of controlling every facet of how each document is viewed, including interacting with the user via forms, and modifying the document on the fly. Whereas a web browser also has to be able to download those documents via HTTP, which totally justifies it needing several hundred times as much memory. I have it on a Compaq C306US with 1 GB of RAM and a 1.73 GHz Celeron.
It seemed impressive at first, but the daily Defender signature update brings the machine to its knees. Seriously, the mouse pointer will not even move, and when I was actually able to bring up Perfmon, CPU and disk were both at 100%. That's unusable.
I guess the answer is to install another security package, but that's a serious WTF. In 2015, it would be nice if Microsoft had heard of I/O throttling.
The audio also doesn't work unless you disable it, then re-enable it in device manager. I reported this bug with every previous build to no avail. I wouldn't complain, but Microsoft claimed that every Vista-capable PC could run Windows 10, and that appears to be false. Granted, it is a little beefier specs-wise, but I have the Win 10 Pro 64-bit Preview installed on a Dell Inspiron 530 from mid-'07 and it is running great.
It is a Core 2 Quad 6600 (2.4 GHz), has 6 GB DDR2 RAM, a 120 GB Crucial SSD (hacked BIOS re-enables AHCI that Dell removed), 1 TB WD Blue HDD and a 1 GB Radeon 6450. It works fine, plays 1080p video with no issues but is loud and puts out a lot of heat (105 watt processor).
I am looking forward to replacing it with an Intel NUC later this year when the S. Is it just me that feels that this isn't a win for Windows 10, but actually a degradation of Windows Vista/7 and - to some extent - 8 in terms of performance losses at those points? I know that XP - Vista and XP-7 felt like backward steps at times in terms of performance, and were accompanied by a similar ramp-up in terms of realistic minimum specs.
It just seems that in 8 (which is as fast as 7, if not faster, as far as I can tell) and 10 are actually coming back to what they should always have been? Just junk like Superfetch services and Windows Search - I feel if you were to optimise those more efficiently that they'd easily show a performance improvement. I know that disabling them certainly does (fun fact: Disabling Windows Search on Windows 8 stops you installing new keyboard languages!). Windows 8 has been my last two mass deployments and, with a few third-party-cured interface problems, is just as good to the users as 7 was, but actually boots, resumes, etc. And the amount of sheer built-in hardware drivers is phenomenal. I no longer need several images to image dozens of types and models of computer, laptop, all-in-one, etc.
Just one image will do with maybe a tweak if something requires the very latest graphics drivers. Windows 10 appears to be continuing this trend of a RETURN to performance, rather than performing miracles. Hardware hasn't got much faster since the Windows 7 days - maybe a core or two more, maybe a graphics card upgrade, but the base CPU/RAM/disk are pretty much in the same area. I mean, it's good either way.
But it shouldn't be shocking. Optimised versions of 7 were sold with netbooks for years, and their hardware was severely limited for a long time. It was just a matter of turning junk off. My min spec of 'Dual or-more-core anything with 4Gb RAM' has held for several years in a row now for business systems, and can be satisfied for a virtual pittance. Only very recently have I contemplated enhancing that to 8Gb of RAM and maybe an SSD as a luxury, but the rest is pretty static. I know that XP - Vista and XP-7 felt like backward steps at times in terms of performance, and were accompanied by a similar ramp-up in terms of realistic minimum specs. It just seems that in 8 (which is as fast as 7, if not faster, as far as I can tell) and 10 are actually coming back to what they should always have been?
Do note that XP only needed 64 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended). The last XP system I supported was a couple years back, but the requirement had bloated to about 128 MB (256 MB recommended) because anti-virus software had gotten so much bigger (usually takes 30-50 MB of RAM). For decades, software companies hadn't controlled bloat. They counted on performance gains in hardware to compensate for how much slower their software was getting due to bloat. This began to change after Prescott (around 2004), when the clock speed wars came to a screeching halt due to heat generated by power leakage at those higher frequencies, and for a time Intel lost the fastest CPU title crown to AMD. Intel and AMD began placing a greater emphasis on power efficiency rather than pure performance, and as a result the bloat in software began to outstrip increase in hardware speeds.
That's a large part of the reason Vista (2007) was such a dog. It was coded assuming the performance level of generally available hardware would be higher than it actually turned out to be. Consequently it felt like it ran a lot slower than XP (compared to when XP was new), and most users opted to stick with XP. Around 2010 we hit the point where all but the discount CPUs were 'fast enough' for most people's needs, and advancements in CPU design since then have been directed mostly at reducing power consumption (a Core 2 Duo system at idle burns about 75 Watts, a Broadwell system burns about 20-30 Watts idle). Software companies have had to come to grips with this performance stagnation, and are finally beginning to get bloat under control.
Since they can no longer count on their newer software 'feeling' faster because of hardware upgrades, they're forced to go through and optimize their software to make it actually run faster. Which is resulting in this curious inversion, where newer software actually runs better old systems than the previous versions of that software. The industry is in for a major shake-up because of this in the next decade (arguably it's already been experiencing it the past 5 years). As the need to upgrade your computer every 2-3 years decreases, computers will be used for longer times.
That means on an annual basis, hardware companies will have reduced sales (if people go from replacing their computer every 3 years to every 6 years, that means half the annual sales even though the same number of people are still using computers). And software companies will be expected to support their products for longer. Mobile (phones) is the one area this hasn't really taken hold because the sector has been developing so quickly you feel obligated to upgrade your smartphone every 1-2 years.
But eventually it too will plateau. Long-term, we're probably looking at computers having to last 7-10 years before being replaced. Which interestingly enough is about the timescale for console systems (6-7 years between refreshes). They are rectangular/square, just like the taskbar icons in Windows 7 that everyone I know loves. Take a closer look.
The taskbar icons in Windows 7 have glass effect, nice diagonal gradient and rounded corners. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor, and the color of that effect matches the application icon. Also the icon of the active application has brighter background than others. These kind of small touches are missing in the Windows 10 UI. 10ft UI works differently from mobile UI works differently from desktop/laptop UI. Microsoft making a mistake in their desktop/laptop UI doesn't mean that the same thing wasn't a mistake in their 10ft UI, as well. It's my opinion that the current look of the dashboard is vastly inferior to the blade UI that the system had when I bought it, and the functionality went down the crapper with it.
It was easier to find things that I wanted before, and there weren't multiple ads on every single screen of the damne. Try hovering the mouse cursor over icons of running applications: there is even a sleek little lamp effect which follows the cursor These incredibly shallow, self-serving afterthoughts, which don't show coherency with anything else, make me disappointed. It's not even that the 'sleek' little lamp effect looks bad (which it does) or that it's useless (which it is).
The little lamp effect is not diegetic, that's the problem. It is the shallowest possible thing to do on a UI. It is an after-effect, implemen. They're also ugly as hell having absolutely horrible color schemes that make me want to rip my eyes out every time I see them. Neon Orange on Smoke Gray transparency? Also, there's no dimensionality.
It's all flat. The quick bar isn't so bad and I can get used to it.but those damn tiles all over the place in the start menu itself? Ugly as damn sin. I grant that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but what I behold in Win10 is ugly as shit to me. If you like it, fine.
I'm happy for you. And is that so wrong? I liken it to your favorite grocery store changing up where all the products are located every few months. They may have all the studies in the world that say it's a better flow of people to have Product A and Product C right next to each other, but if nobody is looking there, because that's never where it's been before, it's a poor design. 'But you can change all the options.' If you can find them.
Changing the finer points of the visuals such as Icon Spacing and Title Bar font used to be behind Desktop / Properties / Appearance. Now it's Desktop / Personalize / Window Color. That's.less intuitive. Every new version of Windows since 2000-XP has suffered from the unnecessary moving of options and screens.
They've all been focused on the dwindling number of people who have never used a computer at the expense of the other 99%. Maybe the new layout makes more logical sense if you have no muscle memory or expectations. Then as soon as everybody gets used to the new layout, they go and fuck it all up again. Personal opinion, the stock Metro Tiles that are there the first time you fire up your computer or Surface tablet are just too much, literally there are just too many of them there.
I like the concept of the live tiles, and actually find them useful, but having to scroll through 10 horizontal pages of apps to find what you want is incredibly off-putting. After spending a significant amount of time paring them down to only the ones I find useful, it's actually a usable launch pad. The 'Apps' View, their a.
I think that tiles wouldn't be bad, and the emphasis on typography doesn't have to be bad either. But the execution, as with pretty much anything Microsoft, is botched. All the colors are overly bright and flashy, and when everything competes for your attention through dense, opaque colors, and large, fairly uniform tile sizes, then your attention isn't properly directed. Also, with the emphasis on bold background colors and typography, the rest of the presentation, i.e. Icons, pictorials, graphs, take a bac. Yes, I feel like I'm in preschool with the big, bulky Legos when I want the cool small ones. And the big bulky Legos have all this crap in them reporting everything to Microsoft.
Also, they are less versatile than small legos. All I want are executable programs that do what I want them to do and no more and don't share my personal data. This reminds me of recent questions, can anyone build a car that can't be hacked?
Well, yes, all the cars built 2 decades ago can't be hacked and contain all the features I want in a car (drives from A to B, air conditioning, heater, radio). Take me back to 1984. So it sounds like VMware Player is exactly what you want. Virtual Machines live as a file on your system, not a drive, they are VIRTUAL machines running under your machine.
It is like running Windows 10 in a Chrome session rather than directly on your system. There is no dual booting happening, no partitioning.
It is as safe as safe can get to uninstall, you just delete the files. The upgrade process is reversible just as any installation is reversible. You can just reinstall Windows 7 from the original. I advised mine not to install Win10. I don't want to get the calls 'X has changed how do I do Y now?' , 'I was working on this critical thing and something (ie: patch) happened, how do I get it back?' , 'We're trying to watch Netflix like you showed us but it keeps shuddering in the middle of it (due to 'background' updates screwing with the framerate on their slow system)' The fact is the current regime works perfectly well, people like yourself can schedule the download/install to automatically occur in the.
Unfortunately, I agree with you. For technically minded people. Unfortunately now that the vast majority of PC's are in the hands of people who are only semi-technical and will happily disable the update service, firewall and anti-virus cause their buddy Steve said it made his PC run faster. Steve also recommends plugging the network cable directly into the cable modem as that router thing just causes parity errors. It's almost like the should sell a 'Home' version for the vast majority of people, then have some sort of 'Enterprise' or 'Professional' version for technical people. The PC have improved.
But with Parallel processing. And most programs are not coded to take advantage of the multiple cores. So the speed of any one of your programs has more or less peaked.
However you can run more at the same time. Until we can come up with easier methods than threads hacks added to most languages, we will still be mostly programming for a single CPU and not parallel processing. It will also help for more colleges to have Parallel processing as part of its undergrad program. Most introduce it in Grad School. Yes, Amdahl's Law says that if 50% of a procedure's steps must be run in sequence and 50% can be dispatched among a pool of workers, then the speedup from having an infinitely large pool of workers is the reciprocal of 50%.
Or two times. Two time improvement for an infinite number of CPU cores. After Gene Amdahl coined his law on parallel processing he immediately went back to work on developing CPUs with faster clock speeds, because this is a much easier problem than identifying which steps of a proces. I am sorry to be the baron of bad news, but you seem buttered, so allow me to play doubles advocate here for a moment. For all intensive purposes I think you are wrong.
In an age where false morals are a diamond dozen, true virtues are a blessing in the skies, and are more than just ice king on the cake. We often put our false morality on a petal stool like a bunch of pre-Madonnas, but you all seem to be taking something very valuable for granite. So I ask of you to mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there.
Although there is some merit to what you are saying it seems like you have a huge ship on your shoulder. In your argument you seem to throw everything in but the kids Nsync, and even though you are having a feel day with this I am here to bring you back into reality. I have a sick sense when it comes to these types of things. It is almost spooky, because I cannot turn a blonde eye to these glaring flaws in your rhetoric.
I have zero taller ants when it comes to people spouting out hate in the name of moral righteousness. You just need to remember what comes around is all around, and when supply and command fails you will be the first to go. Make my words, when you get down to brass stacks it doesn't take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once. It's clear who makes the pants in this relationship, and sometimes you just have to swallow your prize and accept the fax, instead of making a half-harded effort. You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error but I swear on my mother's mating name that when you put the petal to the medal you will pass with flying carpets like it's a peach of cake.
It isn't that older CPU couldn't support multi-threading, but the fact it was a single CPU, And threading similar tasks will not offer performance increase per coding complexity. So most programs were not multi-threaded, to do parallel processing, they were multi-threaded as to not hinder the User Interface, or to handle multiple interface requests. (Such as having many users login to the same port). Most Desktop applications didn't even bother going that far.
Now with multi-CPU cores, you can have each CP. Now if only OS X would was allowed to work on my 3 year old system which is more than powerful enough for it based on hacked installs, and if only all the software wasn't updated so it won't work on the last OS. Thanks Apple!
Meanwhile I can install Windows 10 on a 10 year old system and play a 16 year old game just fine. Boo Microsoft for being horrible people that don't give away your amazing product for free and don't have a penguin or a fruit as a logo. What three-year-old Mac doesn't support the latest version of OS X? OS X 10.10 'Yosemite' officially supports Macs dating as far back as 2007 (or 2008 or 2009, depending on the system), and I believe El Capitan will support the same. This is merely the result of Apple being primarily a hardware company and Microsoft being primarily a software company. AFAIK Acer is also a Hardware company and their laptop update just fine.
If Apple want to goes on with the crapwagon that OS X is it's their decision, but it doesn't excuse them. The fact that WINE exist and installed on 90% MAC (the other 10% simply boot in Windows) is proof enough that Apple shoot themselves in the foot. If they created a 'Windows ready' desktop that is modular (looking at you Mac Pro) they have the power and the money to buy hardware at super discount and wipe most competition.
No 'at least' about it. Windows 8 and 10 support secure boot but don't require it. Windows 8 specifically requires that secure boot be optional in the BIOS for Windows Logo Certification. The only change for Windows 10 is that this requirement is no longer there leaving it up to the vendor to decide if they want to lock your PC down. However for Windows Logo Certification on Windows 10 there is a requirement that OEMs support SecureBoot and have it enabled out of the box. Windows does not require it.
Windows will run even if you disable it. There is no UEFI SecureBoot requirement in Windows 8 or 10. At least I have been able to install to any kinds of machines just fine. The requirement has been for the 'Designed for Windows Version' program, if you want to ship with the sticker, be an OEM partner and get the best pricing it's compulsory but it's not an install requirement. That would be stupid of Microsoft, since most pre-2012 machines wouldn't be able to update. Also for Win8 OEMs are required to give you a way to turn it off, for Win10 they're merely permitted. I'm sure some of them will be encouraged by Microsoft to disable it completely, to see if that'll draw anti-trust lawsuits.
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So not yet, but I bet it's coming soon.