Main Area and Open Discussion > Living Room
First compelling reason to switch to Windows 7
f0dder:
IainB: hold back your conspiracy theory horses, there!
There's pretty sound technical reasons for going to 4096-byte sectors, but that's covered elsewhere. Western-Digital has actually gone to lengths to make legacy OSes support these drives at all - exposing 512-byte sectors and doing internal handling (which is a fault imho, they should've exposed 4k sectors and dropped legacy support), and even adding a "offset-by-1" jumper so people who can't figure out how to manually create partitions (which solves the performance problem 100%) don't get the performance problems.
As for the 4GB limit in 32bit XP, keep in mind that 4GB is the logical memory limit for a 32bit OS. Yes, since the PPro we've been able to address more than 4GB in 32bit mode, but it's done through "memory windows" - which is mostly useful for running a crapload of apps at once, or pretty specialized big applications. Basically server stuff... so while the limit might suck, it's fair enough they don't want a client OS potentially eating server OS marketshare.
What really sucks about the 4GB limit is that it's on physical memory addresses rather than "available memory", which has given all those "I have 4GB but can only use 3.25GB" problems... and that's something you can thank fscktarded 3rd-party driver developers for. XP RTM supported 4GB-total, but because of people thinking "oh, we're on 32bit, we only have to handle PHYSICALADDRESS.LOWPART", users experienced BSODs. And following tradition, Microsoft bent over for sucky 3rd-party developers instead of saying "go fix your crap if you want it to run on Windows".
Darwin:
And following tradition, Microsoft bent over for sucky 3rd-party developers instead of saying "go fix your crap if you want it to run on Windows".-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 10:23 AM)
--- End quote ---
True, in a way, but really, what choice did they have? You can rest assured that lots of those 3rd party developers WOULDN'T have fixed their crap/End users wouldn't have updated to the new builds and end users would have continued installing and trying to use the problematic products.
End result? MS gets smeared by the pundits, maligned by Apple's marketing, and their support system gets hammered by irate customers. MS would get 100% of the blame, whether they deserved it or not.
OK, so same old same old ;D
f0dder:
And following tradition, Microsoft bent over for sucky 3rd-party developers instead of saying "go fix your crap if you want it to run on Windows".-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 10:23 AM)
--- End quote ---
True, in a way, but really, what choice did they have? You can rest assured that lots of those 3rd party developers WOULDN'T have fixed their crap/End users wouldn't have updated to the new builds and end users would have continued installing and trying to use the problematic products.
End result? MS gets smeared by the pundits, maligned by Apple's marketing, and their support system gets hammered by irate customers. MS would get 100% of the blame, even if they deserved little/none of it.
OK, so same old same old ;D
-Darwin (March 13, 2010, 10:42 AM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah, it sucks. They could have at least made a "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!" option, though.
Darwin:
They could have at least made a "USE AT YOUR OWN RISK!" option, though.
-f0dder (March 13, 2010, 10:44 AM)
--- End quote ---
Good point. I guess their legal department killed that idea - no doubt arguing (probably correctly), that the average user wouldn't read/heed the warning and MS would still be in the wringer. This *must* have been one of those damned if you do, damned if you don't decisions and they figured that the fallout from this course of action would be less costly than the other...
Innuendo:
(b) It was Microsoft who deliberately crippled XP so that it could not address more than 4GB of RAM. (Now, who on earth would have thought they would have done anything like that?) :)-IainB (March 13, 2010, 09:05 AM)
--- End quote ---
IainB, your theory might be believable except for the fact that there was indeed a 64-bit version of Windows XP that had no such limitation on RAM. f0dder's post stands well on its own outlining the why's of why 4 GB was the limit with the 32-bit version of Windows XP, but a person did not have to move to Vista in order to enjoy 64-bit goodness.
So.....no. No conspiracy theory here. Move along, people. :)
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version