Quasi-OT: How to double your CPU power. for free

It is the same with Windows. XP was the pinnacle of Windows, after that it has gone downhill in terms of performance because more effort went into visual effects and other "sellable" things than into the OS itself.

There is simply no excuse, no reason on earth, that Microsoft should've allowed my computer to download and execute code without my permission. But they did. And do. A thousand times over. With complete callous disregard.

When you can't trust their ethics or their code, why trust the updates?

I'm not interested in letting them continuously patch their shoddy work, nor do I trust them accessing my machine.

YMMV.

Cheers, James Arthur

Methinks Martin's been assimilated. 'Resistance is futile' and 'patches are progress' finally crushed him.

Cheers, James Arthur

That is fine, but then the appropriate response would not be to turn of the updating, you should remove the shoddy OS and replace it with something else.

Horses for courses. If the machine can be isolated from the net, or XP runs in a VM that gets restored from a known-clean backup every so often, no worries. I'd certainly restrict it to my guest network though!

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Win7 was OK and although Vista got a bad press it was never as bad as it was painted. For my money all even numbered WinN have been dogs.

Win98SE being a notable exception.

Win2K was probably the most stable. The only reason to go to XP was the integrated multi-monitor support.

All non-NT derived versions were dogs.

Windows' problem is the (deliberate?) attempt to keep changing things that need not be changed. This is particularly amusing in light of the "studies" and "research" that comes out of Redmond regarding these issues. I.e., how can you publish something claiming "X is the one true way" and then, in the next release, adopt *Y*, in its place? And, with the same fervor??

I suspect staying *with* a particular release (i.e., avoiding the "mandatory" upgrade cycle) probably does more to enhance a firm's productivity than anything else! (how much time is lost by users having to relearn something that they barely had learned, previously? And, having done so, what have they actually *gained* from the effort??)

There also was notably better support for all kinds of videocards and laptop-specific devices (like WLAN adapters) in XP.

We stuck to W2K for a long time at work but at some point it no longer was doable, and the transition to XP proved to be very simple and problemfree.

After that, not so easy...

Sure, most of that was supplied by the manufacturer in Win2K. Integrated support made it simpler. Win2K made multi-monitor possible on video boards that didn't support it before. Both important but the latter was what made me change.

I worked for IBM at the time. We basically supported our own Windows systems (IT supported the Unix boxes), so could run whatever OS we wanted. I switched from OS/2 to Win2K because it was stable (tried with NT but it just just Not There).

I didn't have a problem going from XP to Win7. My wife had Vista on one of her laptops - aweful! When I bought mine, I had it "downgraded" to XP. I don't much like Win8x but 10 seems to be OK, so far (I've only been using it for a week).

Dew tell... Am _STILL_ running Win2K with no updates since SP4 and have very little problems accessing anything (except banks).

if I'm not mistaken many of your posts here indicate that you have far more computer problems than everyone else

PROGRAM problems..

You permit them to download but select and apply the patches after looking to see how relevant they are to your configuration and at a time of your own choosing (typically overnight).

It does. People like you not updating insecure code are the root cause of massive botnets and DDOS attacks against key network infrastructure. Critical security updates need to be applied in a timely manner to maintain herd immunity. It is particularly important for Windows since it has too many design compromises for backwards compatibility and to make games run that bit quicker.

You're forgetting Skybuck!

Sounds like you have something seriously wrong.

I have Firefox, Windows Explorer, Eudora, Agent, PSpice and associated Binning Software (to emulate Cadence :-) loaded.

Task Manager shows 104 Processes, CPU Usage 0%, Physical memory 30%

(But, admittedly, I've had Wimpows Updates and Win10 Attempts blocked for ages ;-) ...Jim Thompson