On Wed, Apr 19, 2017 at 5:51 PM, Gregg Eshelman <g_ala...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Microsoft has done such things deliberately. I had a Compaq server with dual > slot Xeon CPUs. XP (with a 1-2 CPU license) could be installed but no matter > what, was only going to be allowed to use ONE CPU. Manually forcing the > multi CPU HAL to install during setup (or after) would make it crash. > Microsoft apparently told Compaq to fix their server BIOSes so that only > Server versions of Windows would be allowed to access the full hardware > capabilities. So I put 2000 Server on it and got rid of it. That's not a surprise. Desktop systems with dual CPUs were uncommon. The assumption was that a dual-CPU machine was a server, and would require a server version of Windows. Finding a dual-CPU system in current days of multiple cores pretty much requires server hardware. I dealt professionally with Dell 1u rack mount servers. They came with dual CPUs, we installed 32GB RAM (the max it would take), and spun up VMs under VMWare. (Mostly CentOS, but a bit of Windows in the mix.) With multiple cores per CPU, the *need* to have more than one CPU drops. > One thing I've been liking about 10 is that just about any Core 2 Duo or > dual core AMD AM2 and later can run it pretty well, even with only 2 gig > RAM. A socket 939 AMD, even dual core? Not so much. 10 is the first release > of Windows to have lower minimum hardware requirements than its predecessor. > Just got done putting it on a 2.4Ghz Thinkpad T61 with 4gig (and a BIOS > modded to remove hardware whitelist and de-hobble SATA from being limited to > version 1 speed), which I'd seriously be thinking about keeping if it had > the 1920x1200 instead of 1680x1050 display. I'd be reluctant to try to run Win10 in 2GB, though it's nice you can. 6GB RAM seems to be the sweet spot. The current desktop has 8GB, but can be expanded to 32GB by swapping in higher capacity RAM sticks. > I doubt any previous version of Windows would run well, if at all, on > hardware originally released 8~9 years prior. Depends on the Windows flavor. I have an ancient notebook - a Fujitsu p2110 from 2001. It was a pass along from a friend who had upgraded, but didn't want to just throw it out. It came to me with Windows XP SP2, and took 8 minutes to just *boot*, and longer to do anything. No surprise. The machine had a 787mhz Transmeta Crusoe CPU (an early attempt at a power saving design), an IDE4 HD, and a whopping 256 *MB* of RAM, of which the CPU grabbed 16MB off the top for code morphing. XP wanted 512MB, minimum, to think about running. I swapped in a larger HD, repartitioned, reformatted, and installed Win2K SP4, Ubuntu Linux, Puppy7 Linux, and FreeDOS, multi-booting via grub2. Win2K actually ran on the machine more or less acceptably, especially after I stripped out everything loaded in startup that *could* be dropped, and turned off the Windows Update service (saving 10MB RAM) because the machine wouldn't *get* updates. Ubuntu was installed from Minimal CD to get a working CLI system, and then pick-and-choose via apt-get. Lxde provided a lightweight GUI. Large apps were problematic, but that was disk I/O issues caused by IDE4. I didn't even try to run Firefox. Puppy was intended for low end hardware and ran well, but with the same caveats about big apps. FreeDOS flew. :-) It was mostly an exercise to see what performance I could wring out of ancient hardware *without* throwing money at it. Actual work happened elsewhere. It hasn't even been turned on in months. > Need USB 3 and/or eSATA? Pop in an ExpressCard. That's a future upgrade here. The current machine is USB2, but there's a four port USB3 card from about $25 that ill plug into the mini PCI-e slot. Little I currently do really needs USB3, but it's an easy add down the road. > Put Classic Shell on, turn off all the stuff that phones home, set the > window titlebars to a color instead of white (which Firefox ignores) and > it's good to go. I run Classic Shell here, and turned off the telemetry as well. > If you've ever done anything with Windows 1.0 you should notice some > similarities between it and the "Modern" UI. They both have non-overlapping > tiles with active content, and there's this black bar across the bottom. > Square corners everywhere (excepting the round ended buttons Apple sued MS > over, square cornered buttons were made to satisfy Apple). Flat, saturated > colors with a heavy emphasis on white, magenta, cyan and black. "3D" > effects? Not there, just like Windows was through 3.0. > > Someone at MS has a bad case of nostalgia for Windows 1.0 running on a CGA > monitor. <grin> I avoided the Metro UI, reasons why. MS had the same dream that Ubuntu Linux had with their Unity desktop - the same UI on any device the user ran. But a UI suited for a tablet where screen real estate is the scarce resource falls down in a big monitor. Win10 brought back the Start Menu, but fixed what wasn't broken and moved stuff around. Classic Shell to the rescue. ______ Dennis ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ Freedos-user mailing list Freedos-user@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-user
