OT: Yet Another Unhappy Customer for Vista

Finally some engineers must have peeked over the fence and learned from other trades. When nearly everything quits on a jet aircraft, for example because of contaminated fuel, a little generator plops out the side. While it does slow the aircraft and spoil it's glide ratio to some extent it powers the essential electrical stuff. Of course, when that thingie comes out you'd know the situation is really serious. Time to read the emergency bail-out procedures...

RAM was the first thing that cam to mind of course, but a whole weekend of memtest86 checking came up with nothing. I think it's some sort of timing issue.

BTW, what is the right half plane zero issue when running buck regulators in CC mode? Any good app notes on that? Just curious.

--Daniel

That's not multitasking, that's just swapping one app out for another.

You either need a better pdf reader, a better OS, or both. But I'm always amazed just how slow Acrobat reader is in Windows, and I'm using v5. But the almost completely feature-less xpdf in Linux is up before your finger left the "Enter" key (I'm a keyboard man).

For the desktop, multitasking is pretty useless unless there is really something that the computer could be doing in the background while waiting eons (in CPU time) for user actions. As long as that background process doesn't make the foreground one less responsive, that is.

--Daniel

No, there were true multitaskers such as Desqview available; by "switching" he just means from "screen" to "screen," since there wasn't a regular GUI/windowing system. The "swappers" were perhaps more prevalent though -- I used Carousel briefly while at IBM.

Acrobat is very much bloatware these days... v5 seems quite sleek by comparison to the contemporary v8 (which I didn't even bother with -- last version I own is v6, and it's still working fine). A good alternative -- one that I used on some older (obsolete, really) PCs in a lab for awhile was FoxIt reader. *Much* tinier and certainly no slower... plus it even had some extra features that Acrobat itself didn't, such as allowing you to arbitrary adjust the print-out size.

---Joel

Never mind the quality, feel the width ! Its the old con suggesting more is always better.

And CutePDF will create a PDF file from Word or any other application. It's free.

John

Utter lunacy.

Hard drives are NOT used in such mission critical scenarios, and where they are used, they do not get used where such failures cause mission critical catastrophic failures of any kind... EVER.

That was in the days of full height, six platter, both sides used, hard drives. Today's, one and two platter drives do not in any way stop the spindle motor from spooling up, even if the heads were out on the platter at the outermost edge, which they would net ever be.

Absolutely not. That was a task switcher... period. While one task was active, ALL other tasks were frozen. THAT is SWITCHING.

DesqViewX, on the other hand was a true, pre-emptive multi-tasking GUI based OS.

OS/2 was the first, truly multi-threaded multi-tasking OS for the x86 realm.

DesqView was a switcher. One task at a time was up, and one task at a time got time slices... the one that was "active" or "forefront".

You sound like a chick saying "Size Matters".

At

exact

them

You also gotta remember that Google isn't messing with the systems. They have one configuration, copied a kabillion times. The bathtub works in their favor.

It comes with complexity. My one-year-old daugther turns on or off almost like a lightbulb. She wakes up and is just "there". The three-year-old already requires elaborate booting and shutdown procedures, and we all know how bad it gets when you really grow up.

robert

That's why we bought what is probably a 5-years supply, including a few spare machines. I don't *want* to but another PC in six months. There's nothing that we're running now that is compute-bound. Probably the worst thing we do is FPGA place-and-route, and these seldom break

Just about $3K each, with four hot-plug drives, 2G ecc ram, dvd burner, par/serial ports, redundant bios/fans/power supplies, and floppy drive. Being "servers", they have a vanilla graphics card and no sound card. CPU is a dual-core 2 GHz Intel. No OS, so we install OEM Windows XP.

John

Picky, picky...

Maybe time for a new PC then, or at least a new motherboard?

More of an issue with boost. The best literature are the app notes of the former Unitrode (not TI). I believe you understand German so the site of Dr.Schmidt-Walter at the FH-Darmstadt could help but right now their server times out. At least from the US.

Maybe this helps as well:

It'll be coming, have a look:

Not mission critical yet but that line will be crossed if Jeppesen maps and stuff are retrieved from there.

I has something that ran as a TSR in real mode DOS and let me multitask a few applications (like a download and a text editor and a command line) it was shareware

Bye. Jasen

he

You do not understand what the meaning of "multi-task" means.

I could have TEN "tasks" "up" under DesqView, and ONLY the ONE task that was in the forefront was actively getting process time. That is the same for your TSR. There were no TRUE multi-taskers under DOS. That's not only a fact, it was a rule. DesqViewX was the first and only exception as it supplied a gui interface, that gave timeslices to all active apps running in it. Even Windows' early releases that ran under DOS didn't do that. OS/2 didn't run under DOS, and it was the FIRST TRUE pre-emptive multi-threaded, multi-tasking OS for the x86 series of processors.

That thing you are talking about SWITCHED between tasks. It did NOT multi-task.