I think you're right - take Compiz or KDE 4.4, for example. I still don't see the need for 90% of this stuff, but then I tend to only start X at all when I need it for something (like a lot more terminal windows, graphics editing, or web stuff).
I resent the waste of screen space more than anything else, actually. I have 8 GB of RAM and 4 cores, so it doesn't actually keep me from getting work done


A lot of that rot is due to the Windows XP prefetch, not so much the registry (unless you add and remove lots of apps). If you properly lock the page file and properly set/clean prefetch, XP will remain reasonably fast for ages.
Windows 7 is a huge boost in pure speed even over a clean install (I tested), and most especially in framerate in the games I used it for. Since I only use windows for taxes, graphics editing and gaming, it's a breeze for me to reinstall it frequently. I was able to test this first hand - there is literally a good 15% boost in performance on my same hardware. The new GUI also stays out the way better, and visually is cleaner than Compiz and KDE 4.4.

I still prefer BSD with a simplistic WM, but until there are good flight sims (not flightgear - that one barely even works), tax software support, and video/graphics software that works properly at the pro-am level... well, BSD will remain the tool for work but not fun.

At least it's 200MB lesser than VISTA's.
I think AVIRA's enough. When core files in system32\*.exe,*.dll gets infected like winlogon.exe,services.exe, and svchost.exe, sometimes it's just better to make a good reformat. Also a manual CMD script goes a lot better sometimes.

Agreed. I prefer avast to kaspersky (free and fast - plus it's even faster when you turn off all the scanners you don't need). Avast is currently using about 10MB of RAM and almost 0 processor on my machine right now.

McAfee (required by my company for my work machine) is the worst. It's often the #2 process in memory and processor, right behind Firefox.

Hmm.. I do though.

The first system I touched was probably 3.x but I started learning with 95 though I favored and learned more with DOS. I even bought a technical MS-DOS book for that.. It was "Using MSDOS 6". The book was probably published by Que.

I loved playing around with Config.sys and Autoexec.bat as well. I even made menu-driven config.sys's. I was so enthusiastic with CL based programs but unfortunately it was after 3 or 4 years before I really knew UNIX/Linux.

And now you mentioned that, I just remembered playing Pokemon/NO$GBA in a 386 or 486 pc with 7MB of RAM.. 9/10 years ago. The PC's were not mine and I still don't have any at those times. It was 80-90% laggy but it was enough. 100% was on the 16MB RAM 486 PC. There was no HD in both PCs. I just used a bootable floppy with himem.sys, emm386.exe ram, and ramdisk.sys /e:2048.

... What do you mean? What phenomenon?

Some not-really-critical AVs like AVAST and AVIRA can also be combined. They don't seem to make a conflict although it's not a good option.

Honestly I still find it faster or easier to manipulate the desktop in XP than KDE. Maybe with the help of simple based from DOS (alt-*) shortcuts or faster response. Or maybe it's just explorer.exe. It might be the same with 7 but 7 has the interface of Vista.

EDIT: moved up. Please delete this post.

EDIT: Oops I was planning to cut and paste the text to the previous post but I forgot. Sorry for the double-post. No.. this is already the third! Please delete this post if it's ok.

I find OSX and Win7 to be very easy to work with as well, and I find Gnome to be easier for me than KDE 4- it may have to do with how one's mind works.

Choice is good!

And speed is the essence.

What I've found with Vista is that a lot of the performance loss is due to all of the eye candy that is running. I like the search tool in the start menu, reminds me of KDE. Still, I put all the colors to Vista Basic or Classic and only use the right tool bar if there is something that I need on it.

Still, XP is way faster double for XP-64. Heck, even 2003 enterprise is faster then Vista Business, especially if you have a decent amount of RAM and a multi-core processor.

McAfee is a real memory hog. Microsoft's own free AV is noticeably faster. Since their O/S is so flawed in terms of security, I don't feel bad using their AV. After all, M$ messed up in the first place and therefore should fix it.

You can download Microsoft Security Essentials here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...2-33d813687a7f

Of course, you need a Windows box to run it. I don't think it'll run on a server, but haven't tried that yet since the machine that I used to test 2003 is no longer working and I don't want 3 operating systems on my laptop. Two is plenty.

Honestly, is 7 that much faster then Vista on 32 bit machines? I'm not inclined to spend the money anytime soon.

Here are the approximate memory usages from my experience:

Windows XP: 600MB

Windows Vista: 2GB (!!!)

Windows 7 Beta: 700MB

Arch Linux + FVWM2: 350MB

With Fedora 12 + Xfce, I'm using about 250 megabytes of RAM out of 2 gigabytes as well as no swap space. I disabled the swap file in any event. With KDE, its more like 360 megabytes and it varies more.

I have an Intel Core Duo which is also 2 gigahertz. This is horribly slow with Vista Business, but snappy and fun under Linux.

Me:

Ubuntu 9.04
Nothing running (except for System Monitor/GNOME/X-related stuff): ~439-440 MiB/1.5 GiB, no swap.

Okay, so not the best, but probably still better than XP

EDIT: my Arch machine, when running X, Xfce, the Terminal, and top, takes roughly 117 MiB/256 MiB, no swap (that is, I think it does...maybe I did my calcs wrong...I saw 119000K or something like that in top's used counter, and I just divided that by 1024).

Generally, I don't use Swap files. I'd rather save the room on my hard drive for real data, & when I'm done with the net for the day to let my history fade away in RAM. I would not want a credit card number, even a gift card number, sitting in a swap file.

(I Think) You are wrong about AV topic. I administer/fix Windows boxes for a living. There is really large number of Avira, Avast and other AV protected boxes I had to clean from viruses, but mostly malware. Eset NOD32 is not bad, I only had few infected PC's with NOD installed

And I am not talking about Kaspersky Anti Virus but about Kaspersky Internet security, with firewall, good malware protection, etc. Only on par with KIS is Symantec Internet Security, and NOD32 few places down. Everything else is "mostly" good, but not "safe". And I like PC's to be safe like Bank safe's. It is the first Windows software I paid for. And I still sell KIS licensies, and every customer that bought is one year requested to extend to next year. There were even people returning/coming from cracked (not paid for) AV versions and buying for their first software (very rare here) - KIS, just to be safe. I even had few "speed" junkies accepting speed decrease just so malware does not bother them anymore.

The man that wrote that is absolutely out of his mind.