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Author Topic:   Windows 10
dwise1
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Posts: 5949
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(2)
Message 31 of 48 (865887)
11-01-2019 7:02 PM
Reply to: Message 30 by Percy
11-01-2019 6:18 PM


I also loved XP, once I got rid of their stoopid Fisher-Price UI -- I went immediately to "Windows Classic", putting everything inside a gray box.
As opposed to the earlier versions, everything was open and open to being resolved.
Any networking issue, I could deal with directly in XP. Now I have to ask some "troubleshooter" who grinds and grinds away and accomplishes absolutely nothing besides wasting all our time.

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 Message 30 by Percy, posted 11-01-2019 6:18 PM Percy has seen this message but not replied

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 Message 32 by Theodoric, posted 11-01-2019 7:37 PM dwise1 has replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5949
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


(2)
Message 33 of 48 (865935)
11-02-2019 6:05 PM
Reply to: Message 32 by Theodoric
11-01-2019 7:37 PM


Any networking issue I can take care of on my own. I run the troubleshooter some times and moat of the time it resolves the issue.
Most of my networking setup and troubleshooting tasks were at work (software engineer, now retired). XP worked like a charm and let me examine and modify settings at almost all levels and let me observe how the connections were working including showing in real time the counts of packets sent and received. I haven't found anything close to that on 10 nor 7.
We didn't work with WiFi at work, but I use it at home. Most of my networking problems at home are either with the WiFi connection between the computer and router or between the router and the cable modem. The solution ends up being to cycle power on both the router and modem, usually once but sometimes it takes a second or third time, and then after giving it enough time repeatedly pinging yahoo.
When I bought this computer it ran Win7 which was the current version at the time and then when Win10 rolled out it automatically installed into my computer (with my permission). I've had to deal with that troubleshooter ever since I first got this computer. In all those years, I cannot recall a single instance of the troubleshooter ever actually figuring out the problem, let alone fixing it. Maybe there was one or two anomalous successes, but not that I can remember.
If it doesn't I use all the old tools and resolve it. All of the old stuff is still there.
One of the big problems with my Win10 is that it's a 64-bit system, so my old tools, which are 16-bit, no longer work. That includes my DOS ports of Linux utilities.
What did you used to do that you can't on Win 10?
Do a proper file search in the file manager, Windows Explorer. In XP and before, I could set up the search parameters based on name or content (and I could specify which!), date ranges of creation or modification, location and whether to search sub-directories, etc. And then it actually worked! For example, I have a couple decades of text file captures from CompuServe and my emails and I have used XP's search utility to find just about any past discussion I had had (very valuable when dealing with creationists). Now I can no longer do that.
Starting with Win7, that search utility lost nearly all utility. I had to park Windows Explorer in the directory in question and could only enter a search string. There was no way to specify filename or contents, so it would allegedly search for both. And more often than not it never found the file. Even when I could see that that file was right there in the directory I was searching, a search on that explicit filename, the complete filename, would result in "file not found", even when I copy-and-pasted that filename into the search box.
A basic utility is disabled and that's supposed to be an improvement? I ended up using grep from the command line, but even that was taken away when the OS went 64-bit. Searching through Help, I found that it was supposed to support a command scripting language to regain the lost ability to specify searches, but it was not described anywhere in Help or online that I was ever able to find. Now it looks like Win10 is trying to restore the old XP capabilities, but I haven't had any luck with it so far and frankly I'm very skeptical about it.
Another example is that the XP-and-before search feature saved my sanity so many times in trying to deal with my ex-wife (not yet ex at the time). She wanted to use Word but absolutely refused to learn the most basic concepts like naming your document file and saving it into a directory. She would create a document leaving everything defaulted and then a week later vilifying me because my computer had lost her document. My first questions to her would be where she saved it ("I don't know!") and what she named it ("I don't know!"). At least she knew when she had last modified it so I was able to do a search and find the most likely candidate. I never could have done that with the new search "feature" inflicted upon us starting with Win7.
It is unworkable for touch and is in fact too dated for todays computers.
Who cares about touch? I have a new beater laptop that supports touch and I never use it. It can go into tablet mode which I've tried, but it's absolutely useless in that mode. I thought that it could be used to get some work done in that mode while on a flight where you cannot unfold the laptop, but when I tried that I couldn't do anything. I use it mainly for writing and there is no way I could get to my text editor in tablet mode nor could I use it in tablet mode. Tablet mode is completely useless.

This message is a reply to:
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dwise1
Member
Posts: 5949
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 42 of 48 (871671)
02-08-2020 1:05 PM
Reply to: Message 39 by Minnemooseus
02-08-2020 1:10 AM


Re: XP lives!
The XP recorder computer is never connected to the internet, and is connected to a LAN that is not connected to the internet. It would be nice if it were faster (IIRC it has merely a 1GHZ processor), but it gets the job done. And it has a good search utility.
And I love it's Keep It Simple Stupid appearance.
We had a similar situation at work with the development tools for two decades of products. Many of our development tools were 16-bit applications. Every copy of Windows 10 that I've seen has been 64-bit. A 64-bit system can run 32-bit applications, but not 16-bit ones. There are a lot of very useful applications, including my GNU utilities, which I can no longer use.
For a long time, we kept our XP boxes running so that we could support our product line, but that kept getting harder and harder to do. When I left (retired two years ago), they had arrived at and finished testing out a better solution: run the older development tools in a virtual computer. Not only does that circumvent the perennial problems of upgrading to a new OS, but it also eliminates the day-long and error-prone process of setting up a new computer and loading all the development tools into it. Now all they have to do is install the virtual computer software and copy in the virtual computer image of an XP box with all the tools installed.
For example, at home on my Win7 boxes I installed VMWare Player, then I created two virtual computers and installed WinXP into one and Ubantu Kosmic Koala into the other. After I had done that on my desktop, I simply copied the two virtual computers over to my laptop. Since then, a script on my desktop got screwed up so that I could not install updated versions of VMPlayer and I lost the previous version in the process; since then my desktop upgraded to Win10 but that problem remains. I can still run VMWare on my laptop.
I do not know what virtual computer software they're using at work, but I'm sure that there are several products on the market. The hardware of your XP recorder computer will not last forever, so you might want to look into ways of replacing it, such as setting up a virtual computer. BTW, I very much agree about XP having a good search utility as you can see from my previous postings on this topic.
There's another issue which I'm sure does not apply in your case since you're using XP: hardware backwards compatibility. We have a long-term test setup in which a computer collects readings from an array of items under test, one after the other. The selection of which item to take a reading from is controlled in hardware by an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) which is controlled by signals sent through the computer's parallel printer port, LPT1. Therein lies the rub. The data collection program needs to control the parallel port hardware directly, but the last version of Windows to support that was Win98 SE (maybe ME, which itself was the end of that line). The current Windows philosophy is to protect the hardware from the user, so direct manipulation of the printer port is no longer possible. Since our data collection method requires direct manipulation of the printer port, that locks us into Win98 SE. I don't know whether running a Win98 SE virtual computer would allow that direct manipulation.
The pains of computers changing out from under us.

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 Message 39 by Minnemooseus, posted 02-08-2020 1:10 AM Minnemooseus has not replied

  
dwise1
Member
Posts: 5949
Joined: 05-02-2006
Member Rating: 5.2


Message 45 of 48 (912582)
09-13-2023 1:18 AM
Reply to: Message 44 by Minnemooseus
09-13-2023 1:02 AM


Re: Windows 10 updates being very slow???
Also got updated today. I attributed the slowness starting up as part of the installation/configuration of the changes, which I have seen before (though usually that's the friendly blue screen stating that updating is in progress. Also, at one point today I got a "busy CPU" popup.
Will see how it looks tomorrow.

This message is a reply to:
 Message 44 by Minnemooseus, posted 09-13-2023 1:02 AM Minnemooseus has not replied

  
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