PC Strange Love, or how I learned to stop worrying and love Windows 64
First of all, Thor_Leifson is right. I am a malcontent with computers, but Windows and PCs especially, probably because they give me such excellent opportunities to tinker. I tink. I tink a lot. I tink so much they can smell me a block away. I have a very powerful tink.
And, as Thor warned me, I tinker until I break things. As I have again and again with PCs, which is what makes me get so mad at Windows because I see how frustrating it makes it to upgrade and optimize in a certain direction, how extremely fragile the system and data become in certain situations, and why must they make it so gosh darn difficult to upgrade, convert, move, backup, restore, what have you in these situations? Like if they can put a man on the moon, why can't Microsoft manage to allow Windows to achieve this very simple task for its users?
I rankle at its inability to (for instance) take a backup from a normal system volume and put it back (in bootable state) onto a RAID volume. If I can put it in a sentence, why is it rocket science (or a PhD in computer science) to achieve? But there you have it - Windows Backup can't do it, Norton (Symantec) Ghost can't, Acronis can't. Basically, I learned you have to rebuild your volume and re-install your apps, and from the backup you MIGHT be able to recover data.
Which, after 3 days of trying to do the "easy" way, I gave up and did.
Which allowed me opportunity to elect for a change of Operating Systems. I installed Windows 7 SP1 64-bit instead, along with 64-bit versions of most apps I was using. Right now, I am also re-installing World of Warcraft, for it seems no easier method achieves an install of the 64-bit components of the game either, despite them being just 3 or 4 critical files that if you delete them, the patcher just ignores and thinks you're good to go, except that upon launch of 64 bit mode you crash.
Yay Blizzard, good one.
Yay a lot of devs on Windows is my problem. But I can give a lot of similar snide cheers to Mac developers (and a phalanx of devs who decided to not even try developing for Mac). What can you do? Computers are just a big pain to code for - believe me, I've done it. And the companies that pay you to do it, because they know you can't go on strike or unionize (federal law prohibits it), they abuse this privilege and make you work long hours, weekends, and give you unfair deadlines. No wonder software comes out crappy and needs all kinds of patches!
It's patches that keep customers in an ongoing service relationship with software companies anyway. Just look at Microsoft and their word processing and Operating System products. Both were full of kluges for almost a decade or more before they became really streamlined, useful and worry-free. RELATIVELY SPEAKING.
64-bit Windows is the latest of this trend, and it is where we're going to go with new laptops, new desktops, even new portable devices. It opens up a processor's (and especially a multi-core processor's) bus, capabilities, memory mapping architecture, memory capacity - the latter really good for huge media and server potentials - and in this era of systems coming standard with 16, 32, 64, 128 gb RAM built in, 64-bit Operating Systems are a must.
Timesharing, or I should say multi-tasking, is much easier for a 64-bit environment to work with. It's a matter of swapping workspaces, some which can swap to disk, or virtual storage. There's quite a number of bytes possible with 64-bit addressing. I forget exactly how big, but it's ginormous.
With the OS upgrade, running a RAID0 array on SSD drives, and 64-bit apps and drivers, WoW is looking fantastic and running 60 fps easily (I sync to frame rate just to not cook my GPU in the name of FPS I can't honestly see). Sounds are slick; special effects are vivid. I'll even be getting one of the wireless headsets, so can use in-game chat, or of course Skype or Vent.
I'll be on Unktehila#1421 if I remember correctly. --BP
And, as Thor warned me, I tinker until I break things. As I have again and again with PCs, which is what makes me get so mad at Windows because I see how frustrating it makes it to upgrade and optimize in a certain direction, how extremely fragile the system and data become in certain situations, and why must they make it so gosh darn difficult to upgrade, convert, move, backup, restore, what have you in these situations? Like if they can put a man on the moon, why can't Microsoft manage to allow Windows to achieve this very simple task for its users?
I rankle at its inability to (for instance) take a backup from a normal system volume and put it back (in bootable state) onto a RAID volume. If I can put it in a sentence, why is it rocket science (or a PhD in computer science) to achieve? But there you have it - Windows Backup can't do it, Norton (Symantec) Ghost can't, Acronis can't. Basically, I learned you have to rebuild your volume and re-install your apps, and from the backup you MIGHT be able to recover data.
Which, after 3 days of trying to do the "easy" way, I gave up and did.
Which allowed me opportunity to elect for a change of Operating Systems. I installed Windows 7 SP1 64-bit instead, along with 64-bit versions of most apps I was using. Right now, I am also re-installing World of Warcraft, for it seems no easier method achieves an install of the 64-bit components of the game either, despite them being just 3 or 4 critical files that if you delete them, the patcher just ignores and thinks you're good to go, except that upon launch of 64 bit mode you crash.
Yay Blizzard, good one.
Yay a lot of devs on Windows is my problem. But I can give a lot of similar snide cheers to Mac developers (and a phalanx of devs who decided to not even try developing for Mac). What can you do? Computers are just a big pain to code for - believe me, I've done it. And the companies that pay you to do it, because they know you can't go on strike or unionize (federal law prohibits it), they abuse this privilege and make you work long hours, weekends, and give you unfair deadlines. No wonder software comes out crappy and needs all kinds of patches!
It's patches that keep customers in an ongoing service relationship with software companies anyway. Just look at Microsoft and their word processing and Operating System products. Both were full of kluges for almost a decade or more before they became really streamlined, useful and worry-free. RELATIVELY SPEAKING.
64-bit Windows is the latest of this trend, and it is where we're going to go with new laptops, new desktops, even new portable devices. It opens up a processor's (and especially a multi-core processor's) bus, capabilities, memory mapping architecture, memory capacity - the latter really good for huge media and server potentials - and in this era of systems coming standard with 16, 32, 64, 128 gb RAM built in, 64-bit Operating Systems are a must.
Timesharing, or I should say multi-tasking, is much easier for a 64-bit environment to work with. It's a matter of swapping workspaces, some which can swap to disk, or virtual storage. There's quite a number of bytes possible with 64-bit addressing. I forget exactly how big, but it's ginormous.
With the OS upgrade, running a RAID0 array on SSD drives, and 64-bit apps and drivers, WoW is looking fantastic and running 60 fps easily (I sync to frame rate just to not cook my GPU in the name of FPS I can't honestly see). Sounds are slick; special effects are vivid. I'll even be getting one of the wireless headsets, so can use in-game chat, or of course Skype or Vent.
I'll be on Unktehila#1421 if I remember correctly. --BP