-------------------------------------^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I stumbled on this:
"A Vista Business license allows you to use either XP Professional or Vista Business. The Windows 7 Professional license allows you to use Windows 7 Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista Business."
So, downgrading to XP Pro shouldn't *cost* a license! (though stepping up to 7, would!)
It becomes the same as XP: The only problem is when I'm half asleep, not paying attention, or am doing something dangerous, I don't get a warning that maybe I don't want to erase the entire hard disk, or something equally devastating. A few toolbars and well hidden junkware sometime sneak by when I'm not paying attention. Also, there's a stupid warning that UAC is turned off that appears in the system tray erratically. The main benefit of killing UAC is that on slow machines, the amazingly long time it takes for the OS to dim the display and display the permissions prompt is eliminated.
As near as I can tell, disabling UAX has no effect on permissions. It's only a warning. However, I haven't bothered to verify if there are any other subtle "features" in UAC:
Oh, that's easy. Just supply it totally stock, with the latest and greatest, updated to the current release. Include necessary add-ons such as Acrobat, Flash, and Java. No way can you be accused of giving away obsolete machines with an obsolete operating system. If they want something "special", charge for your time. Install Teamviewer or other remote control software if you want to avoid home visits. Make an image backup (Acronis) of the machine and keep it for about 2 months. If the machine blows up (usually it's the HD), then it's easy to restore to its original condition.
Incidentally, I also donate machines to impoverished friends and organizations. I've learned that if I give them anything that's in any way inferior or defective, my phone will be ringing immediately. That's because they know I won't charge for fixing a "free" machine. The same is not true for my paying customers, who know that I will charge for anything that is not obviously my fault. For a time, I was charging $1.00 for every phone call, allegedly to support my coffee habit. That slowed down the freeloaders a little. I stopped that long ago, but I am still finding letters in my mailbox with a dollar bill attached. Money is no object if you have none to spend.
The downgrade is official. I see plenty of Dell machines with Vista COLA's but with XP installed. For a time, Dell was charging $50 extra to have XP installed. Dell also supplied both Vista and XP recovery CD's, for a price of course. The Optiplex 960 that I'm now using has a Vista sticker in front, no COLA at all, and has XP installed. The difficult part was that later Dell machines were Vista only mostly because the XP drivers were not MS tested and approved. Some drivers required a bit of hacking to install, but worked just fine. When Dell went to chipsets that hever had XP drivers, it was over for the XP downgrade.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
We bought a Dell Vostro laptop a few years ago, in the day of Vista. Dell offered an "XP downgrade" option which we chose, receiving full O/S media for both and XP installed as our selection. Machine has Vista CoA.
Dell were apparently the first to buck MS and offer this "fsck Vista I want XP" option, and some other manufacturers followed their example.
We never used the Vista media or any machine with Vista, so have no first-hand experience with it. SWMBO's current laptop is a Win7/64HP Lenovo and no dramas. In your position I'd be leery of the XP end-of-support (as in, more work looming for Don) and go with Win7. As Jeff points out, your stock of XP licences is about to be worth small change at best.
64 bit Windoze also has a giant memory hole from 8FEF0000 to FFFFFFFF mostly for the video memory maps (with support for multiple video cards).
Also, one can recover some more RAM in a 32 bit system with PAE: Note that the amount of RAM added varies with Windoze OS mutation. Also, most current Linux mutations have PAE compiled into the kernel making booting on old machines problematic.
Top the best of my limited knowledge, only the new ultra thin laptops have soldered in memory. Most everything else has DIMM sockets. However, the maximum amount of RAM that can be added is carefully controlled by the manufacturer, being limited to only what is needed to survive until the next OP update, where more RAM will be needed than the motherboard can handle.
I've always wanted to design a thermite bomb in a PCMCIA/CardBus card. Five wrong passwords and the laptop, table, house, and hopefully the laptop thief are reduced to easily recycled charcoal. However, my attorney advised me that there were certain liability issues which might make such a product unprofitable.
That's an open question. Microsoft is doing everything possible to promote upgrades to Win 8 via FUD (fear uncertainty doubt) and vague announcements. For example, they have never clearly stated that security updates will actually cease for XP. MS has postponed the demise of XP enough times to make me wonder if they are serious. It's also somewhat suicidal for MS because many large organizations are still running a substantial number of XP machines. Users will also not be thrilled if their machines are suddenly declared obsolete and just might be looking at Linux or OS/X as an attractive alternative. Extra credit if something blows up on April 8, 2014, just before income taxes are due (great timing MS).
However, the real effect will be the loss of support by hardware and software vendor for XP. Since they can't purchase support from MS for XP, they will probably not be willing to provide support for their customers. I don't know how this will play out. Somehow, I don't see my customers buying new systems because their bookkeeping software vendor refuses to support XP. They'll continue to run XP until something irreparably breaks.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
A bit more on XP. From: "It means you should take action. After April 8, 2014, there will be no new security updates, non-security hotfixes, free or paid assisted support options or online technical content updates."
When I asked why no new security "updates", but there will be security "hotfixes", I was greeted with confused silence. Most MS announcements are like that, where it's not really clear exactly what will happen.
My big fear is that MS will introduce some kind of last minute, heroic, catch all, patch job, service pack, to fix as many outstanding bugs and security holes as possible. Then, after April 8, refuse to fix any problems with this last minute mess, resulting in chronic problems for continued users of XP. I'm also afraid that MS might remove various KBxxxxx update files from their web pile, making repair and reinstallation of existing XP systems difficult. There's also a question as to whether Windoze Update will continue to function for XP, or if each KBxxxxx file will need to be installed manually.
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
That's what I would guess. Most PCI+ devices show some memory region; my video adapter shows three blocks. I forget what all the others have, but it's a reasonable bet the sound has an audio buffer, network card has a data buffer, etc....
Good old seg\\\selector based memory. ;-) The processor can easily virtualize a (still to this day) ludicrous amount of memory, but even as lazy as MS might be, it surprises me that they've never even thought of touching it. Especially these days, though that would be more for legacy systems now that 64b is taking over.
That, or selectors are monstrously more difficult to deal with than I think. (I already don't like thinking about MMUs, so that could very well be. And why did Intel have to be... well.. Intel, and make their memory system three levels of misdirection? Isn't one enough? Disclaimer: I've only read about 386+ operation, never implemented.)
It's my understanding that all 32b OSs use a selector of 0000h. Would be easy enough to illustrate (mov ax,ds / mov var,eax) for some typical test cases.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
Although oddly enough, NVidia seems to be doing exactly that. Last time I updated drivers it was a 100MB download.
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
Hi Jeff,
[Apologies for reply> >Did you expect to know what was doing? Or, that there even *was* a righthand??? :>
I've been trying to keep an offline set of updates up-to-date Of course, that means defender definition files daily, etc.
My hop[e is to catch the latest just before their site eventually goes dark. It's already sluggish -- waiting for "the machine" (in question) to fetch its own updates is a fool's game! :<
*Each* nVidia download is 100MB!! :>
Full set of downloads for this laptop I'm building appears to be ~2.5GB! And, does not include any of the 100+ updates from MS!
AND THE OS ITSELF wants to reside in that same memory space as the devices, userland, etc.!
What's frustrating is that it really isn't *that* hard to do. OTOH, it *can* be a performance hit (depends on the architecture and implementation) and you *know* it would be a source of bugs -- esp if it wasn't wrapped in some "safe" interface. Folks would invariably try to microoptimize some *particular instance -- only to discover that it doesn't work in all cases ("Gee, what are the odds that this would happen?" Um, 100%?)
Reading one of your URLs suggests you can do Admin things with it turned off -- but, your *programs* can't. Not sure how happy I would be about that...
That's essentially what I've been doing -- just no Java (I feel that's a whole 'nother can of worms). OTOH, I figure they WILL want to go to YouTube, etc.
So far, I've kept images of the systems that are "stationary" -- i.e., that I can revisit at my choosing. The laptops will end up "scattered" so I will have to create recovery media for each system. I've already started fleshing out a solution that should work regardless of OS installed (looking ahead to what may come -- as well as to address some of my own needs... store ISO's of images instead of bits and pieces)
Exactly. If *it* was free, the support should be, too? (no) Hence the "restore media". I.e., system is screwed up? I guess you've LOST everything on it. Insert restore disk one and follow the instructions... (no, you don't need *me* to do that FOR you! :> )
I figure I'm already donating a fair bit of time. If you don't want to use the thing responsibly, YOU should be the one who is inconvenienced.
Or, be willing to "lose" the machine for a REALLY LONG TIME while I get around to working on it in my *SPARE* time ;-) Your choice :>
Yes, I stumbled on something to that effect. See my post elsewhere this thread.
In the case of these Vista machines, it sems I still have the option.
Finished dry run of build of firs one earlier today. Now I'll start over and do it in a more organized manner (*only* installing the things that really *should* be installed)
So, why did you go that route? Bad press over Vista? Not wanting to learn how to drive all over again? Performance? etc.
I.e., if you (below) never USED vista, you must have had a strong reason ahead of time!
The value to the XP licenses will be for machines that can't run anything newer (lackof drivers, resource limitations, etc.). If the only option is some newer license, then the machines have to go to the tip.
On Sat, 16 Nov 2013 22:51:31 -0700, Don Y Gave us:
At some point, perhaps it should only survive on closed network segments.
The donglized computers in out label room, for instance, are not on our main network. Sad how some software segments end up taking over entire industry segments. And they are still on their original win32 write up. The new stuff returns control back to the user on print jobs faster. But they took all the thermal controls and such away... idiots. The whole world has gone daft. Even then... Dongles suck. Could have been managed far easier.
Which Certificates of Authenticity (COA) stickers are on the sides of the computers already? What makes and models do they have? In order to test Windows 7 on a computer than can't handle it well, you'd have to fully register it with MS, which means that "Product Key" won't be able to fully activate Win 7 on a later machine that is more suitable. I thought you said they had some program to get free Windows for these charitable groups. Didn't that pan out? Are you actually talking about "Licenses" (With COA stickers and DVD) or are you talking about OEM DVD restore/install DVD's that don't need to have any "Product Key" entered in to install Windows on the computers?
"Two of the machines tonight claim 'Vista Business'."
Exactly.
I (they) have A FIXED NUMBER of volume licenses (and corresponding "Genuine MS" install media -- I suspect the volume license product key may NOT work with retail versions)
I, obviously, don't want to waste an install on a machine that neither needs it (because it already has a CoA FROM THE ORIGINAL OWNER/DONOR) nor can adequately *use* it!
Volume licensing is handled differently.
You get "Volume Licensing Media" (1 copy), a magic number (product key), an "authorized quantity" and a sheet for YOU to keep track of how many times *you* have installed it (and where).
Presumably, MS also keeps track -- when the machines eventually phone home (so, you want to make sure you've counted correctly lest some of the machines ultimately complain -- via WGA?)
OTOH, if I use the SPECIFIC product key on each machine's CoA (good for *that* version of Windows), then I don't waste any of the volume licenses on *that* machine!
MS had PAE all along, but restricted it for MARKETING reasons.
Probably with XP, because MS restricted PAE for marketing reasons. Win 7 on the same machine would be able to access all 4 GB of RAM. Different versions of 7 actually support different upper limits of RAM. Lots of people mistook the PAE limits for hardware addressing limits but the limits are just marketing strategy. I assume that Linux on the same machine would be able to address all 4 GB using the Linux version of PAE.
"A Vista Business license allows you to use either XP Professional or Vista Business. The Windows 7 Professional license allows you to use Windows 7 Professional, Windows XP Professional or Windows Vista Business." I searched on that text and best match was in an HP document. It would be more interesting if Microsoft actually said that!
The PAE is an Intel specific issue that have appeared in their processors at least since the Pentium II days. Various operating systems can use these features as they please.
Unfortunately Intel got this memory management hack wrong once again. Even in 32 bit mode, the code access _still_ goes through the (32bit) CS code segment register and data access through the DS segment registers. With all segment registers CS and DS etc. set to zero, those segment registers have no effect and a 32 bit virtual address is then presented to the virtual to physical address translation (possibly with PAE) to address up to 64 GiB of physical RAM.
While Intel insisted on keeping the 32 bit segment registers on board, why not utilize them for extended virtual address space, i.e. full 4 GiB for code, 4 GiB for data etc. Unfortunately, after applying the program address to the CS, the created address is _truncated_ before presented to the virtual to physical address translation, limiting the program data/code size to 4 GiB without page table changes. Thus, in practice, the only sensible values that are worth using in these 32 bit segment registers are zeroes.
A better approach would have been to allow the program address add to the CS contents _without_ truncation and let this map through a slightly wider page mapping into physical memory. Alternatively, allocate 2-3 high order address bits for the segment register ID in the virtual to physical memory mapping.
Of course, the above would be appropriate for huge monolithic single thread programs with either huge data or code space requirement.
Modern multitasking applications would benefit from a system with a 32 bit virtual address augmented with a, say 8 bit process-ID register on top of that before the virtual to physical address translation, making it fast to do task switching without having to reloading all mapping registers.
Of course, increasing the effective virtual address (by segment registers or process-IDs) will enlarge the mapping tables. In practice the virtual to physical mapping registers are not all stored in memory, in practice TLBs (Translation lookaside buffers) are used to cache the most used addresses anyway. This discussion is not quite relevant any more, since 64 bit processors have eliminated these problems (at least for a decade or two :-)
And, MS supports PAE, but disables it on XP "for driver issues". Well, given the, uh, diversity of drivers plugged into the thing, that's probably true...
Tim
-- Seven Transistor Labs Electrical Engineering Consultation Website: http://seventransistorlabs.com
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