Hello again, > Probably if you get a brand new Windows machine and turn off system > backup, virus scanning, all resident programs, make sure it is > up-to-date with patches and disconnect it from the internet, etc., etc., > you might get it to quiet down enough to give it a go. I remember Jason > Moxham spent days trying to get a Windows machine to quieten down > enough. I don't think he was ever successful.
I can give you a way that you might be able to get closer to quiet than with consumer Windows. If you get a brand new Windows machine you'll get Windows defender whether you like it or not and a bucketload of things that are hard to turn off :) One of them is to run measurements on Embedded Windows. At least when I used Windows XP Embedded you could add and remove Windows components to your heart's content, including getting rid of explorer, MSI and much of the UI. This makes it quite challenging to use, but the core APIs are there and what you want is a kernel + execute your native code, so you should be OK. The second suggestion is the same thing via a different route. Use the Windows ADK to make a custom WIM (I believe customizing embedded windows is essentially the same thing). These custom WIMs are used to build things like the Windows Install CD (they call it the Windows Preinstallation Environment for this reason), for many rescue CDs etc. You can actually persuade modern bcd bootloaders to load WIMs instead of your hard disk for experimentation and then you could create an actual disk with your code on should you be worried about a ramdisk affecting performance (essentially, extract the wim to a clean hard disk having set up some filesystems and run bcdboot to install a bootloader). You'll need to be able to find drivers for installing into the WIM if you care about access to some more specialised hardware or want to make full use of your GPU. This is mostly straightforward though, there are tools for doing this. A WIM file is essentially a CAB file with mutiple streams that bcd knows how to load as a ramdisk, if you're wondering what I'm on about with WIMs. Windows is shipped in WIM images these days. In both cases you can strip out quite a large amount of Windows and still have a functioning asm + C or C++ application (or anything you can compile with standard Windows dependencies). Whether you can get close to zero load, though... well as you say this is a hard problem. In any event a cut down environment like this would be same windows kernel, less noise than a desktop. The downside to this approach is that you'd need dedicated hardware (or at least to boot the WIM on your PC instead of your main Windows OS) and you'd not be able to use that hardware as anything resembling a sensible desktop. If you've ever installed Windows server "core" this is kind of what to expect, with less features. --A -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mpir-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to mpir-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mpir-devel@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/mpir-devel. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
