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Windows 8.1 on a new desk top, early thoughts.

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  • #16
    Why oh why when the post title indicates this is a thread relating to Windows 8.1 do we still have people chime in beating the open source software drum? and for what its worth the posts are full of techno babble, indecipherable to the average human, but you only have to read through their posts to realize these people are, a little different.

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    • #17
      Originally posted by Yelta View Post
      Why oh why when the post title indicates this is a thread relating to Windows 8.1 do we still have people chime in beating the open source software drum?
      They relate to their thoughts on the topic.

      and for what its worth the posts are full of techno babble, indecipherable to the average human, but you only have to read through their posts to realize these people are, a little different.
      Just as the techno babble regarding coffee equipment on here is indecipherable to the average human with all you having to do is read through posts on here to realize we're a little different. In that sense this thread is no different than thousands of others on here, it just doesn't deal with coffee as most of them do. But then that's what the Off Topic forum is for.


      Java "Techno what?" phile
      Toys! I must have new toys!!!

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      • #18
        Originally posted by fruity View Post
        Can't say that's been my experience, TampIt. 7 & 8 definitely handle multiple workloads a lot better than XP for my usage, particularly when it comes to disk IO & memory management, and even multithreaded tasks.
        Hi Fruity

        Memory management? My experience: Win 8 has more leaks than 7 which has more than XP 32 bit. 7 needs a reboot every 12 hours or so if I use it "native" for my normal workload as its memory map has morphed into some fantasy realm. 8 doesn't even get to load it. FWIW, I am really resenting having to allocate nearly half my RAM to do virtual tasks in Win when they are only doing about 5% of the actual work. If I ever went back to that full time I would be seriously reprogramming some of the client's software into something more reliable: the main reason I am (temporarily, I hope) running the stuff I mentioned earlier is that their new, upgraded, "in house" Win systems can no longer generate all their end of month reports in the required time. XP could three months ago. Training their IT staff in the care & feeding of virtual machines looks like taking up too much of my March.

        This "workhorse" machine is on its 9th day now, even with 3 WinXP & Win7 virtual machines running to do stuff like keeping Excel macros in a secure sandbox and blocking internet access to insecure portions of Office. None of the Win's are really capable of utilising more than a fraction of this hardware's capability, whilst truly heavy workloads remain a distant pipe-dream for MS afficionados.

        Disk I/O: Using my "test" machine's Adaptec / 16 disk raid, none of the Win's are close to ext4, or even my more usual journalling file systems (even as far back as ReiserFS) despite their heavier disk workload. Running big multi DB queries in Win takes at least twice as long, often 5 or 6 times. Whether one of the Wins is faster than another seems rather academic from my perspective.

        Enough IT stuff from me (sigh of relief from some CSr's). Too many more fun things to do while waiting for another session to complete...


        TampIt

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        • #19
          Windows 8.1 on a new desk top, early thoughts.

          Comparing Windows disk IO to *nix is a bit redundant: but your claim than XP 32-bit does a better job than 7 or 8 just doesn't stack up in my usage. (which isn't that dissimilar to your own with multiple VMs, heavy memory usage). I don't even know how you managed 4 VMs under XP - there just isn't enough RAM to go around!

          It doesn't sound like your comparing apples with apples. There's a lot of rose-coloured glasses with XP - if you went back to it and tried to do the same tasks I think you'd be surprised.

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          • #20
            Boot up time?

            With a top spec like that - what is the boot up time? or do you leave it in sleep mode for a quick startup? Or maybe on all the time?

            Did you consider using a small SSDrive for the O/S?

            i run a C drive with only my OS and a separate D drive has all the data. So i am very particular about backing that up but dont bother with the OS.

            I need to update my home PC, but like you yelta i cringe at all the setup and transition BS. i think my next machine will have a 256G SSD and a regular 2TB for data.

            Thanks


            Originally posted by Yelta View Post
            I took delivery of a new PC running Windows 8.1 recently, have spent the past week running my old and new PC's side by side, experiencing the joys of configuring a new puter, i.e, setting up email, data transfer, loading programs, transferring bookmarks etc.


            After all of the negative opinions (mostly from people who have never used the OS) must admit I was a little concerned that I may have been in for torrid time, nothing is further from the truth, it really has been a straight forward operation, most of what was there in XP is certainly still there, some things are accessed a little differently, no big deal, just takes a little getting used to.


            Sure, like everything there is room for improvement, however a lot of this will come down to personal preferences and how we choose to set the machine up for our own use.

            For them that's interested, it's a custom built PC.


            • Intel i7-4770 CPU
            • Gigabyte G1 B5 full size mother board
            • 16GB DDR3 1600MHz RAM
            • 1TB WD black HDD
            • LG BlueRay rewriter.
            • 2 x 22 inch monitors (dual screen setup)


            So, in answer to the question, what do people think of Windows 8? I'm impressed, setup was easy, and the OS while different is easy enough to come to terms with, not sure what all the fuss is about.

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            • #21
              Originally posted by brettreaby View Post
              With a top spec like that - what is the boot up time? or do you leave it in sleep mode for a quick startup? Or maybe on all the time?

              Did you consider using a small SSDrive for the O/S?

              i run a C drive with only my OS and a separate D drive has all the data. So i am very particular about backing that up but dont bother with the OS.

              I need to update my home PC, but like you yelta i cringe at all the setup and transition BS. i think my next machine will have a 256G SSD and a regular 2TB for data.

              Thanks
              My new 17" laptop is similar in specs to Yeltas, except I have a 256SSD mSata for OS, 256 vertex 4 ssd which has my games and a 1tb hdd for data.

              Boot up time is approximately 10 seconds!

              Comment


              • #22
                I have a mix at home, 7 for my desktop and 8.1 is on my wife's new Vaio 'fit' 15A. The only beef I really has is with Sony and the non-responding touch after half an hour (and other times it's fine all day). I also work in IT and covering over 100 PC's in our environment, I find Windows 7 and 32bit XP to be roughly just as good as each other. I haven't seen any failures or issues on one OS more than the other.

                I also use Win7 on my work machine and I lock it rather than reboot it nightly/weekly and I think I might reboot twice a month.. maybe? It certainly isn't some major memory leaker IMHO. Also we have a VM environment and we reboot the ESXi server because of issues with our Ubuntu DB VM 100% of the time Vs the 6/7 XP VMs that are also running at the same time.

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                • #23
                  Originally posted by brettreaby View Post
                  With a top spec like that - what is the boot up time? or do you leave it in sleep mode for a quick startup? Or maybe on all the time?

                  Did you consider using a small SSDrive for the O/S?

                  i run a C drive with only my OS and a separate D drive has all the data. So i am very particular about backing that up but dont bother with the OS.

                  I need to update my home PC, but like you yelta i cringe at all the setup and transition BS. i think my next machine will have a 256G SSD and a regular 2TB for data.

                  Thanks
                  Not sure on boot time Brett, never bothered to time it, pretty quick, reckon about 30 seconds, leave it in sleep mode, shut down at EOD.

                  Yep I have the drive partitioned C and D drives, C has the OS and programs D I use exclusively for data, I back my D drive up regularly.

                  Investigated SSD's don't like the fact that when they fail the data is irretrievable, the WD Black serves my purposes very well.

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                  • #24
                    Originally posted by Yelta View Post
                    the WD Black serves my purposes very well.
                    Agree Yelta....

                    Those HDDs are excellent. My system drive though is a 0.5TB WD VelociRaptor, and very happy with the performance and longevity of that one as opposed to current SSDs. I'll be waiting until they have the same sort of life expectancy as the 'Raptor before I buy an SSD...

                    Mal.

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                    • #25
                      Just on this, when a platter drive fails (properly) the data is irretrievable too. In an old photography circle I was in, a young hotshot with tons of cash (i.e. Executive daddy) had a platter drive fail and paid for a platter transplant! He got back 15-20 files, most corrupt, a couple of Windows DLL's and a Windows log.

                      Irregardless of drive type, backups are king. Google drive has free 15GB, Mozy and Crashplan are faily cheap and a lot more robust than a NAS or HDD (NAS and HDD's still have hard drives within them don't forget).

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                      • #26
                        Originally posted by Dimal View Post
                        Agree Yelta....

                        Those HDDs are excellent. My system drive though is a 0.5TB WD VelociRaptor, and very happy with the performance and longevity of that one as opposed to current SSDs. I'll be waiting until they have the same sort of life expectancy as the 'Raptor before I buy an SSD...

                        Mal.
                        I've seen stats that suggest the Raptor RMA rates were even higher than SSDs (up to 5%?). Or was that just particular versions?

                        Originally posted by Nickgb View Post
                        Just on this, when a platter drive fails (properly) the data is irretrievable too. In an old photography circle I was in, a young hotshot with tons of cash (i.e. Executive daddy) had a platter drive fail and paid for a platter transplant! He got back 15-20 files, most corrupt, a couple of Windows DLL's and a Windows log.

                        Irregardless of drive type, backups are king. Google drive has free 15GB, Mozy and Crashplan are faily cheap and a lot more robust than a NAS or HDD (NAS and HDD's still have hard drives within them don't forget).
                        All good points. Online backups might not be viable unless you already have NBN though. Uploading gigabytes of data at 80-100kBps is painful!

                        Couple of HDDs is a cheap way to get lots of data backed up.

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                        • #27
                          Originally posted by fruity View Post
                          I've seen stats that suggest the Raptor RMA rates were even higher than SSDs (up to 5%?). Or was that just particular versions?



                          All good points. Online backups might not be viable unless you already have NBN though. Uploading gigabytes of data at 80-100kBps is painful!

                          Couple of HDDs is a cheap way to get lots of data backed up.
                          Some backup providers will take physical backups (at a cost) and deploy them 'to the cloud' so you can do incrementals afterwards.

                          In my reading (Backblaze have a couple of good reads on their blogs) their failure rates varied but they show some particular brands (e.g. WD) over another (Seagate) in their 'storage pods' to be much more reliable. SSD's are much the same with my preliminary readings showing Sandforce SSD's having the worst failure rates, which is one of the few reasons I purchased a Samsung 840. At the end of the day, we must consider how we use the drives in order to really gauge their lifespan and SSD's major flaw is the max read/write cycles, but in 'normal use', they should last around 10 years.

                          My NAS is a decent cheap, on-site backup (2-bay for $89+ some disks I already had) but I'd be buggered in fire/theft/act of god/allah/whatevs ergo 'cloud' beats all IMO.

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                          • #28
                            Originally posted by fruity View Post
                            I've seen stats that suggest the Raptor RMA rates were even higher than SSDs (up to 5%?). Or was that just particular versions?
                            Hasn't been my experience fruity...

                            Mal.
                            P.S.
                            I do remember that there was some kind of firmware issue with a range of 4th Gen. Raptors but these were easily sorted out from the few articles I read about 'em.

                            Comment


                            • #29
                              Originally posted by fruity View Post
                              Comparing Windows disk IO to *nix is a bit redundant: but your claim than XP 32-bit does a better job than 7 or 8 just doesn't stack up in my usage. (which isn't that dissimilar to your own with multiple VMs, heavy memory usage). I don't even know how you managed 4 VMs under XP - there just isn't enough RAM to go around!

                              It doesn't sound like your comparing apples with apples. There's a lot of rose-coloured glasses with XP - if you went back to it and tried to do the same tasks I think you'd be surprised.
                              Hi Fruity

                              FYI, All my current machines have 32 or 64Gb of Kingston HyperX RAM. Workhorse is "only" 32Gb as I do not need more for its usual stuff. Memory: 2 * XP @ 3.5Gb each = 7Gb, 1 * Win7 @ 8Gb = 15Gb of "VM Win" vs 17Gb left for Slackware. Mercifully, I do not need another WinVM, although Slack really only needs around 12Gb for those particular reports anyway. Spread of client work: about 5% Win with around 60% of overall machine resource allocation (esp. CPU & almost meaningless / unwanted "Win video noises"). Makes me wish you could just set it up to beep when completed (i.e. like a late '70's PDP11) instead of constant idiotic screen chatter consuming power and bandwidth.

                              Their old XP hardware has been running their accounts for well over 7 years now. Took 4 specialised XP machines to do it. I had nothing to do with their upgrade as I am trying to have a minimal IT life these days. They contacted me in a panic as their newer / much faster hardware with Win 7 / 8 cannot meet their reporting deadlines even across 6 machines. FWIW, I am not really an XP fan either.

                              "rose coloured glasses": I expect a few other ex-clients will be crawling out of the woodwork in the next few months with similar spectacles on. I suppose it is so '90's to desire to get their real work done instead of looking at pretty screens... which crash either heavy tasks or whole OS too often to be truly useful.

                              TampIt

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                              • #30
                                Originally posted by Dimal View Post
                                Hasn't been my experience fruity...

                                Mal.
                                P.S.
                                I do remember that there was some kind of firmware issue with a range of 4th Gen. Raptors but these were easily sorted out from the few articles I read about 'em.
                                Hi Mal, I actually had a look into it after I posted, and it looks like the smaller capacities & earlier ones had the most issues - 74 & 150GB (apparently). The newer 600GB ones seem pretty rock solid.

                                FWIW, I haven't personally had any SSDs die on me (touch wood!), but I've seen plenty fail in the field. Most have been completely dead, but a couple have failed gradually enough to recover data. I don't think they fail any more often than traditional HDDs, but I do think the failures are more sudden and 'complete'.

                                Either way... backup backup backup!

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