OK, call me fickle

[johnridley]

I'm moving back to Windows XP. The experimentation with Linux helped me make this decision. To decide to move back away from Linux, I thought along the lines of "What does Linux give me that I can't get in Windows, and vice versa?" The answer was that I got nothing from Linux that I couldn't get with Windows (though there are a few minor things that are somewhat easier under Linux, but there are things I simply can't do under Linux, or which are a significant pain in the butt).

One day with Windows 7 after a month away, and the niggling things that were bothering me a little before started really winding me up. So I applied the same logic; What does Windows 7 give me that I can't get under XP, and vice versa? Again, the answer was that Win7 gives me nothing apart from a little eye candy, while taking away some admittedly possibly minor things, but things that just bother me almost every time I do ANYTHING on the machine. Microsoft is just going in a direction that I don't like, in most ways. And I certainly won't miss the eye candy; I spent a few hours with Windows 7 trying to figure out how to turn all that irritating crap off.

The only real concern here is that XP is really at the limit of what it can handle with this machine; 4 CPUs and 4 GB of RAM. But I guess I can live with that. I really don't have any intention of expanding past that anyway. It can handle HD video just fine, and apart from HD video, I was actually OK with the old single core, 2GB RAM machine. In fact, it seemed to me that HD playback was maybe just a touch smoother and cleaner on XP when I tried it just now than it was under 7. My trial a few weeks back didn't seem to indicate that, but I did get a newer video driver under XP this time around so that may be the difference.

I think I do need to install a hotfix to get XP to hibernate successfully with > 2GB of RAM, but even if that doesn't work out, I can live without hibernation.

EDIT: I think I found the source of the previously felt slowness in XP: Don't allow BOINC to use the graphics processor to run computations while the computer is in use. This isn't a problem under Linux or Win 7, but in XP it makes the GUI just freeze for a second or three at a time. The rest of the normal CPU computations can run while active, but not the CUDA (graphics processor) one.

Comments

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

The one thing W7 is going to be giving that XP won't in the not-too-distant future is security patches.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Meh. I don't really care. I don't run anything from Microsoft that actually touches the internet anyway.

I think it'll be a few years yet anyway. They were issuing security patches for W2K something like 3 or 4 years after they stopped selling it, and I'm not sure that they've even now totally stopped selling XP. They keep saying they are, then saying "well, maybe just one more..."

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

If the machine is attached to the net, you're running software that touches the net. Not just the tcp/ip stack, but the "Generic Host Process" (which no one knows what it does, but the PC won't run without it), and DNS stuff (always a happy attack point), "LSA Shell", and IE. Yes, you're running IE, unless you've totally disabled the Update processes.

I may have to do a dig here. I see that a "Microsoft Korean IME" has been granted the right to look at the net. I don't recall doing that, and I'm not really sure what an IME is anyway.

I agree you've still got 2-5 years before the updates cease.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I'm behind a hardware firewall that does DNS proxying, so that should be OK. I do run update processes, but unless DNS gets hacked, it's reaching out to MS servers so should not be attacked. I used to have update processes turned off, but recently I've turned them on. If MS stops generating updates, I don't see any reason to leave them on.

I also run a software firewall and don't generally let anything but known apps out.

[jennlk]

Yeah, I had to disable that setting after you put the new graphics card in my machine. It was really annoying to have the screen freeze while I was doing layout.

I thought I'd mentioned it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I wasn't sure if it was inherently problematical or just on your machine. That machine has so much gunk installed on it I didn't know what was interacting with what, and on the Win7 install, it caused no trouble at all.

You mentioning it is the reason I tried it pretty quickly this time.