An interesting note on something I saw in a news feed: The rumors persist of the enormous 16.x" Mac Book Pro showing up later this year. It appears that their pricing is based on about $150/diagonal inch of display and the latest rumors have them still using an LCD screen for $2,900.
No Windows 7 support in 2020.
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Linux is really slick on pretty much any Windows Pee Cee and the security updates don't wait for the company to figure out how or when to present them.
To suggest that a home computer that isn't a whacked out gaming machine has anywhere near the stresses of a work computer is folly.
I have just one computer left with Windows 7. The funny part is that the main reason to keep Windows 7 on it is that Windows 7 has Windows XP Mode! 
I still have some Windows XP programs that I need to support and they require USB pass-through, which is a challenge with Hyper-V, but never a problem with XP Mode (based on the old Virtual-PC).
I still have some Windows XP programs that I need to support and they require USB pass-through, which is a challenge with Hyper-V, but never a problem with XP Mode (based on the old Virtual-PC).
Another half-vast Microsoft solution that isn't really a fully functional. I acknowledge that they desperately want everyone to upgrade but they're going to have to make the upgrades a lot more worth having and not just a different set of looks at the same old thing.
While they're at it, they can strive towards an environment that is less about run-time libraries and more about forward thinking to achieve backwards compatibility. AutoCAD products seem to require at least four different incarnations of run-time libraries and multiple .net engines.
I got another windows 10 update that took quite awhile to do compared to the usual security updates. Fascinating change! Maybe it was my really nasty report I sent them begging them to fix it or I will be replacing my windows 10 with MACs.
I had to log in to another win 10 computer with user name and login password and now all my hard drives that were shared are visible and I can access the files. Were they listening? Or was this just something they knew didn't work right since the Spring update? All I know is I haven't touched it in over a week and now it works.
I had to log in to another win 10 computer with user name and login password and now all my hard drives that were shared are visible and I can access the files. Were they listening? Or was this just something they knew didn't work right since the Spring update? All I know is I haven't touched it in over a week and now it works.
This one is one of those feature updates that is supposed to come out every six months. It takes a long time to install and does at least two reboots. Features will disappear and fairly useless features will be added. The one seriously useful addition I've seen is the addition of a scratch drive for temporary files and updates (i.e. something you might dedicate a large RAM disk to -- /var/tmp in *nix parlance). The rest seems to be dominated by attempts to band-aid Microsoft's substantial lack of security forethought. Compared to the previous update, there's pretty much nothing new in terms of new programs although Edge is Chromium-based now and there will be extensions for Chrome and Firefox to use Microsoft's web app filtering that was previously limited to Edge.
Microsoft knows you can't use Macs to do very much so they're not likely to bite on that kind of threat. I'm not sure what markets Apple hasn't already ceded to Windows but there can't be many given their on-again-off-again pissing match with Adobe and Apple's inattention to the markets that they once did rather well in.
Most people have seen those tools to "clean up your PC" I have been a fan of these for quite some time and still have two that work rather well. I finally decided it is time for me to get serious about backing up my C drive I have on my newest computer. Usually before doing that I like to clean up the unnecessary stuff so I had a copy, uninstalled that came with one of my many video editing apps. So I installed it and while it cleaned up the Registry file and deleted 16GB of nonsense files, It also made a suggestion that my computer isn't running at peak speed for the hardware I have. Do you wish to make improvements? Sure why not. It's blazingly fast now so let's see what it can really do. So, I did, made the backup and the next day I tried to launch adobe premiere Pro and got a BSOD with a WHEA fatal error crash. I had recently taken an Adobe update so I thought it might be the problem. Next I noticed several USB ports were dead. Then one of my SATA ports died. Now I'm thinking maybe the mother board is dying. Also I noticed Google Chrome wouldn't launch, but Edge did. I got BSOD on Chrome too.
Cut to the solution- It seems that the speedup on my PC by the Magix tool had gone into the bios and set the CPU to 5GHz speed. There was no indication in the software telling me what they were planning to change. There was a reverse switch, to undo the changes but when I selected that, I got a BSOD. In the process of trouble shooting, I tore everything out of the computer and installed a virgin new SSD and installed win 10, the downloaded Chrome and it crashed too, so I knew it was not windows, but still might be the hardware. Went online and entered the error and said to set bios to default, as the CPU speed may be in turbo mode. Sure enough the tool to improve the speed of the PC just upped the turbo to 5GHz. That's way over the rating of the CPU. Set it back to the base speed. and all is well again.
According to intel the Turbo rating of the CPU can go to 4GHz but only with the 3200 memory. I'm using the lower cost 2400 RAM. If I get into 8K video h265 rendering I may want to upgrade the RAM and apply Turbo speed of 4GHz but for now the system is plenty fast at 2.6GHz.
The system is an i9-7980Xe with water cooling and an X-299 MB
Cut to the solution- It seems that the speedup on my PC by the Magix tool had gone into the bios and set the CPU to 5GHz speed. There was no indication in the software telling me what they were planning to change. There was a reverse switch, to undo the changes but when I selected that, I got a BSOD. In the process of trouble shooting, I tore everything out of the computer and installed a virgin new SSD and installed win 10, the downloaded Chrome and it crashed too, so I knew it was not windows, but still might be the hardware. Went online and entered the error and said to set bios to default, as the CPU speed may be in turbo mode. Sure enough the tool to improve the speed of the PC just upped the turbo to 5GHz. That's way over the rating of the CPU. Set it back to the base speed. and all is well again.
According to intel the Turbo rating of the CPU can go to 4GHz but only with the 3200 memory. I'm using the lower cost 2400 RAM. If I get into 8K video h265 rendering I may want to upgrade the RAM and apply Turbo speed of 4GHz but for now the system is plenty fast at 2.6GHz.
The system is an i9-7980Xe with water cooling and an X-299 MB
It probably wouldn't accept the change in the bios but I have a dual water cooler system installed. It was a cheap upgrade at the time from a single and while only air cooled for my current setting is adequate, the water cooling is to be able to easily upgrade to Turbo one day. The big cost will be the high speed RAM.
There was a team of experimenters who fitted a Liquid Nitrogen chiller system and they pushed the upper speed even higher. The system was so cold it froze the moisture out of the air and while the CPU was cold, the frequency was still too much for this CPU to handle.
The one thing I am still having issues with is running the Oculus Rift at the highest resolution settings with the files on a D: drive SSD. It will feed 8K video for awhile and then freeze for a couple seconds. I had it working when the VR files were on the C drive which is a 500GB M.2 Samsung 970 stick located on the MB. But relocating those files to an external SSD on the SATA bus is not as fast. I had to get the high res graphics files off my C drive because they were filling it up. I'm thinking I might need to put them back on the C drive and upgrade it to a 1TB 970. Those have come way down in price now since I bought this box.
Those system cleanup programs are typically snakeoil and borderline malware. I've seen people install them on their work laptops, their laptops start running like crap, they call me up, I uninstall that junk they paid for and their computer magically runs better again. The guy I ultimately answer to, our CFO installed one of those programs right after I issued him a brand new laptop with an M.2 SSD and after a while it was running slower then similar laptops with spinning HDDs. It was doing some scanning in the background that was causing disk usage to be pegged at 100%. One of the more common things I see is people who buy the dogsh!t antivirus applications from Norton and McAfee for home use and they come with system mechanic type programs that can be installed on multiple PCs, so they poison their company computers with this junk, causing problems, most notability with our home grown software developed in house causing false positives. I have custom policies for our Bitdefender Endpoint that ignore all the applications and their related processes and services that are apart of our in house software.
1) Don't install junk you don't need
2) Disable/remove services you don't need
3) Don't have a bunch of junk running in the background, especially all the junk that comes with WIN10
4) Run the built in Disk Clean Utility on Windows from time to time, especially after patch Tuesday
5) Maybe run SFC from time to time
1) Don't install junk you don't need
2) Disable/remove services you don't need
3) Don't have a bunch of junk running in the background, especially all the junk that comes with WIN10
4) Run the built in Disk Clean Utility on Windows from time to time, especially after patch Tuesday
5) Maybe run SFC from time to time
All good suggestions but I would not agree that all tools are junk. I have had good luck with a few of them and have used them for years on windows 7 and 10. I prefer the AVG tune up. I am disappointed in the Magix product that came with my video editing software. While it did work in some tasks such as clean up the registry, it does run in the background as a monitor with popups constantly telling me that Chrome has traces of internet files. I plan to dump this tool and switch to the AVG tune up tool. It costs annual subscription but I have had excellent experience with it.
What you may refer to as junk I may find useful. For example, on my main communications computer I like having stock alerts running in the background, email alerts for Office 365. After all if all apps are junk what's the purpose of having a computer for communications? If the computer is too slow with the stuff I want to run then I will upgrade to a faster computer. This system is more robust than most as I am feeding three monitors with two stock trading platforms that are constantly updating the market data in real time, including the options chain for 25 stocks. News alerts, and a small video feed of CNBC and another for Bloomberg. This is running on an older i7-950 with 24GB of RAM.
My second computer is the one I have recently been upgrading. It is an i9-7080Xe with 128GB of RAM. It's for video editing and is very fast. I just added a DV 1394 card to control a DVCAM recorder. Also added another dedicated SSD for frequent backups of the C drive which is a Samsung 970 on the MB. It also uses 3 more Samsung 970 m.2 working storage for ongoing projects. It runs 2 monitors ( one a 3D ) plus an Oculus Rift.
The one issue that remains that I consider a PIA, is my communications computer has two C drives, one is for windows 7 and the second is windows 10. The data drives do not get automatically recognized when I switch between OS. I have to reset the security permissions on each every time before they show up.
What you may refer to as junk I may find useful. For example, on my main communications computer I like having stock alerts running in the background, email alerts for Office 365. After all if all apps are junk what's the purpose of having a computer for communications? If the computer is too slow with the stuff I want to run then I will upgrade to a faster computer. This system is more robust than most as I am feeding three monitors with two stock trading platforms that are constantly updating the market data in real time, including the options chain for 25 stocks. News alerts, and a small video feed of CNBC and another for Bloomberg. This is running on an older i7-950 with 24GB of RAM.
My second computer is the one I have recently been upgrading. It is an i9-7080Xe with 128GB of RAM. It's for video editing and is very fast. I just added a DV 1394 card to control a DVCAM recorder. Also added another dedicated SSD for frequent backups of the C drive which is a Samsung 970 on the MB. It also uses 3 more Samsung 970 m.2 working storage for ongoing projects. It runs 2 monitors ( one a 3D ) plus an Oculus Rift.
The one issue that remains that I consider a PIA, is my communications computer has two C drives, one is for windows 7 and the second is windows 10. The data drives do not get automatically recognized when I switch between OS. I have to reset the security permissions on each every time before they show up.
Testing last night of the Steam files for the Oculus Rift moved to a SSD from a HDD did eliminate many of the freezeups and video stuttering. But some of the apps still crash in places. I did a bit of reading into the forums for these apps and discovered others were reporting some of the same problems. Hard to figure what is a bug in the app or my hardware. When it works, it works really great. Google Earth in VR 3D is really phenomenal. So much more advanced than flat screen Google Earth. It now runs flawlessly on the SSD so those other apps may just be software bugs.
I come from the industrial days of floppies and when a "huge" drive both in physical size and capacity was a Winchester having 10 megabytes storage. And tape drives.
DOS and VMS were the predominant operating systems. VME card cages were prone to HALT indicators and reseating of individual cards and long reboots.
Later on came Windows GUI. Interfacing hardware that allowed machine communication and control did so with parallel interfacing.
Manufacturers held on to those systems as long as they could. System upgrades (and inherent 'dialing-in' of hardware & software) was sometimes disastrous.
We lost a lot of production due to mandatory upgrades that were hurried out the door.
Now, most all peripheral communication to attached machinery is TCP-IP. And that's a good thing!
I was fortunate to have access to transitional Windows XP pre releases in the form of Windows Server 35XX operating systems.
I was familiar with XP long before it was released as RTM. From Windows 98 to XP it was a big leap.
My company used macOS only in the graphics department. I'm running a "Hackintosh" pc here on and old Intel 486 pc.
And I've extended the life of many old pc's by installing flavors of Linux. Ones that didn't have the oopmh to handle 7 and 10.
Browser compatibility mainly. That is one thing that has condemned most of those computers.
Hospitals were one of the entities that held on to XP. Because upgrading to 7 would condemn attached hardware and peripherals.
If it cost you X dollars, multiply that by at least 3X for medical equipment.
And in reality computers not exposed to the Internet did not need the endless updates. Such was the case of many computers in my previous industry.
XP (and 98) computers got slow and balky and would go BSOD simply because they were used.
My practice of having several cloned hard drives with a snapshot of a stable OS with applications and updates for each machine ready to image to a crashed one was norm for me.
Even purchasing and over nighting or next flighting a replacement from the manufacturer would still require me to spend hours, days of restoring machine specific files and configurations.
So Acronis True Image and me became close friends. A few software updates and restoring config's wasn't a breeze...more like a gentle hot wind. With managers and the CEO breathing down my shorts.
A lucrative time here after leaving my previous company was when the free upgrade to Windows 10 came out.
Libraries, municipal departments, and individuals who went for the upgrade was (being kind) a complete disaster.
Stupid simple things like fingerprint readers on laptops were obsoleted. Graphics using Windows tailored drivers were faulty or nonexistent.
Same for me. I had a disaster on my own desktop. Acronis to the rescue.
I guess the bottom line is I've never found upgrading an already sick pc to a new os good at all.
A wipe and reformat, fresh install is the only way to go. And if possible. OS on one partition, data on another. Or multiple hard drives.
An SSD will make an old pc come to life (if it can accept one). A minute and a half boot time down to 15-20 seconds is amazing.
Hardware obsolescence aside. Windows 10 for me has been a good thing. BSOD's...haven't had one I can remember in a long long time.
I'm afraid the hardcore XP and 7 users have to realize that Microsoft still owns your os. You've just purchased the license to use it. If you did.
Their code is locked up, like mac. But unlike those systems, Linux it's out there for free. Compared to 10 years ago it's gotten quite friendly.
But it's not Windows. And if you've never used it before, never expect for it to be.
DOS and VMS were the predominant operating systems. VME card cages were prone to HALT indicators and reseating of individual cards and long reboots.
Later on came Windows GUI. Interfacing hardware that allowed machine communication and control did so with parallel interfacing.
Manufacturers held on to those systems as long as they could. System upgrades (and inherent 'dialing-in' of hardware & software) was sometimes disastrous.
We lost a lot of production due to mandatory upgrades that were hurried out the door.
Now, most all peripheral communication to attached machinery is TCP-IP. And that's a good thing!
I was fortunate to have access to transitional Windows XP pre releases in the form of Windows Server 35XX operating systems.
I was familiar with XP long before it was released as RTM. From Windows 98 to XP it was a big leap.
My company used macOS only in the graphics department. I'm running a "Hackintosh" pc here on and old Intel 486 pc.
And I've extended the life of many old pc's by installing flavors of Linux. Ones that didn't have the oopmh to handle 7 and 10.
Browser compatibility mainly. That is one thing that has condemned most of those computers.
Hospitals were one of the entities that held on to XP. Because upgrading to 7 would condemn attached hardware and peripherals.
If it cost you X dollars, multiply that by at least 3X for medical equipment.
And in reality computers not exposed to the Internet did not need the endless updates. Such was the case of many computers in my previous industry.
XP (and 98) computers got slow and balky and would go BSOD simply because they were used.
My practice of having several cloned hard drives with a snapshot of a stable OS with applications and updates for each machine ready to image to a crashed one was norm for me.
Even purchasing and over nighting or next flighting a replacement from the manufacturer would still require me to spend hours, days of restoring machine specific files and configurations.
So Acronis True Image and me became close friends. A few software updates and restoring config's wasn't a breeze...more like a gentle hot wind. With managers and the CEO breathing down my shorts.
A lucrative time here after leaving my previous company was when the free upgrade to Windows 10 came out.
Libraries, municipal departments, and individuals who went for the upgrade was (being kind) a complete disaster.
Stupid simple things like fingerprint readers on laptops were obsoleted. Graphics using Windows tailored drivers were faulty or nonexistent.
Same for me. I had a disaster on my own desktop. Acronis to the rescue.
I guess the bottom line is I've never found upgrading an already sick pc to a new os good at all.
A wipe and reformat, fresh install is the only way to go. And if possible. OS on one partition, data on another. Or multiple hard drives.
An SSD will make an old pc come to life (if it can accept one). A minute and a half boot time down to 15-20 seconds is amazing.
Hardware obsolescence aside. Windows 10 for me has been a good thing. BSOD's...haven't had one I can remember in a long long time.
I'm afraid the hardcore XP and 7 users have to realize that Microsoft still owns your os. You've just purchased the license to use it. If you did.
Their code is locked up, like mac. But unlike those systems, Linux it's out there for free. Compared to 10 years ago it's gotten quite friendly.
But it's not Windows. And if you've never used it before, never expect for it to be.
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I run an Intel PC with an Asus motherboard here with 10, 7, Ubuntu, and "Hackintosh". Each on a separate drive in a server case.
A simple F8 to select the boot device at the BIOS prompt gets me into those operating systems and I experience none of the dual boot issues at all.
What is on one drive stays on it unless I manually transfer or assign a directory.
I thought the upgrade from Windows 3.11 to 95 was amazing and stabilizing and even a great deal.
But VMS is my favorite O/S of all time. Their share-everything clustering is still the gold standard IMHO. I tried to get partial functionality (simultaneous access to same disks) by installing a couple of Redhat Storage Clusters. They have been a PITA ever since! Too bad Ken Olsen, may he rest in peace, lost control of DEC. It went straight downhill from there on out.
Finally reinstalled Oculus software with a fresh download. There was a new release and my January release didn't accept the update. Deleted the files and then reinstalled with the latest version and apps in the Steam and Oculus library that had little freeze-ups are now gone. Loads faster too.
That's because you run your hardware in a safe speed recommended by intel. Crank up your Turbo speed to the max and see what happens.
This is one of the reasons why I’m glad we run a Mac for our home computer. I have to use a Windows 10 laptop for work and it sucks with the constant reboots to get Win10 to see my Ethernet connection on the USB-C dock whenever I have to take the laptop off the dock and connect back later. That and the constant updates.
My laptop is a Dell mobile workstation with a Xeon CPU. It has 32GB of memory and uses about 15GB with the various apps I use.
My laptop is a Dell mobile workstation with a Xeon CPU. It has 32GB of memory and uses about 15GB with the various apps I use.
Is once or twice a month really "constant"?
Have the Mac updates become predictable in any way?
Windows 1903 is making strides towards allowing the user to make the call on when updates are installed (or not).
My beef about Windows is that there are still too many mandatory utilities that lurk in the shadows (i.e. Cortana and other feeble Microsoft search/indexing utilities).
My beef about the Mac is that there isn't much software available and the library is shrinking (in large part due to half-vast software that Apple includes or offers for sale). If you have to spend a lot of time in a Windows VM, you're not fooling anyone.
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