Sleep late.
In have always considering putting a new OS on old hardware the ultimate exercise in foolishness. I watched carefully when the "big one" came around and Infoworld reported that American business spend between $2500 and $4500 per box moving their users to the new OS including down time, training, hardware upgrades IT staff time, etc. because MS told us it would be so much faster. My expectations was that it wasn't going to change things all that much but for whatever reasons it seemed no one was doing any comparisons ... I gues becayuse the mindset was , well it's 32 bit of course it's faster.
Then came PC magazine annual round up issue with "over 100 PCs tested". I usually poured over this looking for trends ... one was systems w/ SCSI Hard Drives were always faster. The thing that puzzled me however, was:
a) There where a bit over 100 PCs tested about 65 % Win95 / 35% W4WGs
b) They were not grouped in any way as by CPU, by video, by HD etc... so to figure out why No. 22 as faster than number 31, you had to do a lot of page flipping so see what was in what.
c) In previous years, the article ran from start to finish on consecutive pages, with occasional interruptions by companies doing 3 - 6 page ads.
d) However ... the Win95 systems were separate by over 100 pages from the W4WGs systems which was a WTH moment.
e) I did notice that many companies ... Dell, Gateway, Comtrade, yada yada yada .... submitted several identical boxes say over 3 price tiers, where the only difference was the OS .. Why would they do that ?
f) It soon became apparent ... i copied the data into a spreadsheet (Yeay Lotus 1-2-3) and the result was shocking .... the W4WGs boxes averaged 40% faster than the Win95 boxes.
I could only conclude this was the reason for the 100 pages of separation ... the magazines were yanking in mega dollars for all the hardware ads, new software ads, and no one wanted to risk being the dude who let the cat out the bag that Win95 was a dud.
Back in the day, when you bought a new lappie for example, the manufacturers who gave you the option not to have OS reinstalled, gave you a CD which, when inserted booted up a Windows install menu which gave multiple choices ... a) Install Win95 b) Install 4WGs . We pretty much stayed with W4WGs for the grown ups. I fondly remeber those days when boot menu had 6 options w/ different config.sys and autoexec.bat files .... a) W4WGs for office suites and online stuff (Compuserve), b) DOS for AutoCAD and c) Win95 for the kids. The other 3 were basically tweaked with helix memory utility which was kinda required to get past the DOS memory limit and run AutoCAD w/ any degree of production.
Still have not seen an instance where putting new OS on hardware was a win. Win 10 was anticipated to do so, especiually in gaming but test results were pretty split. Early "leaked" testing showed significant gains which kinda disappeared over time. But here we are 12 years later and DX11 is far from "gone". Back in November my son and I toasted to the fact that Win 7 was now the No. 2 OS.
Lastly, I'm kinda stuck with it. I have a $15,000 36" wide format color plotter . I never had Vista but was able to use a hack to make the Vista driver work on Windows 7. So will have to keep a working box around if i wanna keep using my plotter.
