* Posts by Jamie Bowden

7 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Oct 2007

WIN a 6TB Western Digital Black hard drive with El Reg

Jamie Bowden

The new craze in offices, the head stand-up desk.

US cable giant to throttle P2P

Jamie Bowden
Black Helicopters

On Cox and fiber...

Cox actually upgraded a huge portion of their network just a few years ago. Everything is fiber except the coax from the head end to the house. I used their network for almost ten years (from the early @home days) until I switched to FiOS a few months back. I had no problems with Cox, but Verizon was offering a higher tier of service for the same price.

Next Windows name unveiled: Windows 7

Jamie Bowden
Boffin

Numbering.

7th release of Windows NT. Come on people, there are a lot of reasons to give MS crap, this is a trivial non issue.

Did we say you can read that?

Jamie Bowden
Paris Hilton

What's up with you kids across the pond?

You lived with IRA extremists for decades without self destructing, and now a few middle eastern fuck ups, who can't even manage to be half competent have your kickers in a twist?

It's pretty fucked up over here too, but we're new to this terrorism thing (with one or two minor exceptions), and the idiots across the Potomac are finally realizing that they might have over reacted just a wee bit and are starting to scale back the idiocy finally (that, and the courts are still mostly sane and stomping the more egregious crap into the ground).

Where's the Paris angle?

Happy Sysadmin Day!

Jamie Bowden
Coat

Excellent...

I believe I may skip out early.

Mine's the one with the bottle.

Why I downgraded from Vista to XP

Jamie Bowden
Go

Vista's been fine here...

I'm running OEM Vista Ultimate on a Dell Latitude D820 T7600 (Core2 Duo 2.33ghz), 2GB RAM, 80GB SATA HDD, and a 256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 7400 dual booting with FreeBSD 7-STABLE, and I haven't had any problems with it. The first things I did were to turn off indexing on the drive partition properties, remove all locations from the Indexing Options control panel, and turn off UAC.

I did notice that if I left the WiFi transceiver powered on, Vista took a while to boot on the corporate LAN (this is one area where XP wins, without doubt...Vista waits for all WiFi connections in its list to time out before going to wired connections...uh, guys, this is FUCKING STUPID, even when I'm at home...if I'm at my desk, please default to the 100mbit wired connection if it's available...). I just slide the switch on the side of the machine to the 0 position, and it's back to booting in half the time XP takes in this same machine (yes, I have an identical machine with XP Pro installed on it for testing purposes, both are current for all drivers and OS patches). Turning off indexing in the partition properties is a performance gain in XP as well, FYI.

I have my gaming rig at home running Vista along side XP Pro and FreeBSD too. Abit IP35, Intel E6700 (Core2 Duo 2.66ghz), 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 RAM, 2xSeagate 7200.10 SATA2 250GB HDD, WD 7200RPM SATA2 500GB HDD, ATi Radeon HD 2900, and with the same caveats for indexing and UAC above, it performs as well as XP for disk, memory, and peripheral IO, and out performs it on others (and DX10 is actually faster for some DX9 operations than DX9, thanks to some optimization by MS). The games that run in Vista tend to be more stable (or they refuse to run at all...hello, middle ground? We seem to have been cut off).

I haven't tried to run Vista on older or slower modern hardware, but I can see where it would definitely be problematic if you can't feed it the resources it wants.

One thing to note about Vista and memory is that even when it's running nothing, it appears to have allocated all physical RAM according to Task Mangler. It sort of has...Free RAM is currently reported as Zero, but used RAM is 57% (I've got a bunch of stuff running in the background right now)...it grabs all available memory and task manager still lives in an NT4/5 memory management world where raw memory is left alone if you're not actually using it.

Ballmer: All open source dev should happen on Windows

Jamie Bowden
Paris Hilton

Patent != Copyright

Rewriting code won't fix a patent violation.

And where the fuck is Paris Hilton?