Sorta OT: Win 7 64

You make a good case for sticking with XP for now.

I have tons of handy DOS apps!

John

I like your DOSBox idea here?

You might check out the list of VM tools here -- some are free:

. ...although VMWare is pretty good for the money. :-)

---Joel

Note that Spehro's problems are caused by running the *64-bit* version of Win7 -- the *32-bit* version will still run old DOS apps, AIUI.

Unfortunately a lot of manufacturers seem to install the 64-bit version by default, even though I suspect it provides no benefit to the vast majority of users at this point.

Yep, the 32 bit version is a lot more XP compatible that the 32 bit version of Vista ever was. I have been using Win7 32 bit on my test bench with no problems with any application that ran under XP and I like some of the new GUI features.

I use DOS-Box to support our ancient products and tools, it works pretty good and you can even install a copy of Win 3.1(1) on it too.

Dumb ass. All you have to do is look at the header bar and the location. To move up one directory, simply click on that directory in the title bar. It will always be ONE term before the last term on the list.

Ever heard of DOSBox? Virtual PC?

An emulator is better than cmd.exe ever was or ever will be.

It was the only was I could get my old OrCAD app to run with a higher resolution (800x600 VESA) graphics driver.

I also run Tango PCB in one.

You would use NET Use commands to make hooks to your network hardware, like printers.

Bullshit. Making the needed hooks to "mounted directories", etc. is EASY. A simple startup script no different than config.sys or autoexec.bat.

DOSBox was ALWAYS quite easy to use, once you figure out that yes, you MUST mount up any volumes which you wish to use while "in it".

Stop making it harder than it really is. There is no reason that ANY of your assembler apps would not run.

Jeez, you retarded twits take one IDIOT's failure and blanket kill your decision to check out the new OS? It doesn't get much more STUPID than that move.

You are an even bigger idiot than you have already previously proven yourself to be.

The figure seems to grow nearly every time you open your mouth.

The 32 bit version might be a lot more compatible, but it's a dead end.

64 bit is the way to go and will likely remain so for at least 10 years. I don't see anyone going to 128 bit - the future of the MS OS is multicore.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
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On a sunny day (Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:41:36 +0000) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

of

The future of the MS OS is zero.

DOSBox isn't that hard to use unless you like your directory structures the way they are. It's also slow as molasses and (iirc) has no full-screen support.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

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http://electrooptical.net

There are extremely few situations, in which a 64 bit virtual address space will have some advantage compared to the 32 bit virtual address space.

The main use of a large virtual address space is using memory mapped files. When using memory mapped files, the data is not accessed using read/write function calls, but instead, the file is treated as a multiple gigabyte array.

To get some data from somewhere in the file, just use an assignment statement to reference that location. The virtual memory mechanism will detect that the page is not in physical memory, it will cause a page fault, which will load the page into physical memory and the assignment statement can be completed.

To modify the file content, just modify the memory location in the huge array. When the physical memory contains a lot of "dirty" pages, the pages are written back to the original file (not the page file) to free up pages for new accesses.

While a 32 bit system could in principle handle 2 or 3 GiB memory mapped files, in practice, the virtual memory fragmentation in Windows NT due to the huge number of DLLs loaded at fixed addresses, makes it hard to find even 100 MiB of continuous virtual address space.

Unless you are using data base or video files larger than a few hundreds MiB as memory mapped files, I do not understand, what is the point of using 64 bit virtual addressing.

of

I'd be willing to bet that it is still the major OS for desktops in 10 years time. I also think it likely that Windows 7 is effectively the end of the line.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

OK, but in any decent object-oriented langauge you can do enough operator overloading that at least the semantics of accessing a big file appear to be pointer operations, even though that's not what's really happening. (Plus with this approach you can use 256 bit pointers if you feel like it and access every single electron in the universe...) What's the advantage of a true memory-mapped file implementation? A bit of performance?

(Granted, I do think it's kinda cool how, when you "load" a program in Windows, it doesn't do any loading at all -- it just memory maps the file and waits for the page faults to come in to perform the actual loading...)

---Joel

On a sunny day (Wed, 30 Dec 2009 23:50:54 +0000) it happened Dirk Bruere at NeoPax wrote in :

Could you elaborate on that? MS brings out something new each few years, say each 3 years, win 95 win 98 win

2000 etc.. So if win 7 is the end of the line, then in your view it should last 10 years? Hardware will be a lot different in ten years...

I really do not know here it goes, 1 GHz CPU is enough for multimedia, 2 GHz for HD video, lower power, smaller OS, small versions of Linux. You see Intel now also with some light Linux version (forgot the name) for their low power laptop processors. More powerful integrated graphics. Hardly need an OS at all. Maybe Linux can just be in the firmware (FLASH) sold with the correct drivers with hardware. No more need for MS bloat. This is already so, my eeePC shows that it is possible.

win 2000 etc..

I think the only major difference in h/w will be multiple cores, plus more extensive use of GPU style cores for dedicated operations besides graphics - think CUDA intergrated at OS level?

XP has been around for 9 years and I will probably not upgrade for around 2. For most people XP is/was "good enough". From what I read Win

7 is essentially a tidying up job with no new major features. It may well be that 7 is "good enough" for a lot more than 10 years whether MS likes it or not.

with hardware.

Well, up to now games has been the driving force at the top end of the market and they can still eat up all the processing power thrown at them. Add in larger screen resolution, 3D, AI characters, physics engines and the need for power will still be around in 10 years when we might have 128 core CPUs ex-Larrabee (sp?) style.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.blogtalkradio.com/onetribe - Occult Talk Show

It's also beneficial on servers and for handling some very large scientific applications, in which the ability to have more than 4 GB of memory space available to each individual program/process can be very useful.

The way some operating systems have been going lately, you may need more than 4 gigs of addressible memory just to handle the amount of "eye candy" that the OS insists on putting on the desktop :-)

64-bit support *ought* to be essentially irrelevant to the sort of work that one wants to do on a typical personal computer, but there's so much momentum behind the Bloat This Up With Lots Of Bells And Whistles mentality that smaller systems just can't handle the guff anymore.

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You can re-construct any directory structure you have or use or want.

Better, quicker processing of encrypted files, for one. Particularly considering the encryption levels we use these days.