Windows 10 [2014 - 2017]

Local heat output is one factor justifying load bouncing from core to core.

 

Thank you so much for explaining.
I am much relieved to discover that this is a mere figment of my imagination & never actually happens

 

Windows 8 was already there for performance on low performance devices. It basically made my old Atom based tablet actually useable compared to how it was with Win7 (garbage and slow as molasses). I'll be curious if there is any speed improvements at all between 8.1 and 10.0 on that that device.

I'm guessing boot might be faster, but that actual in Windows performance will be the same.

Regards,
SB

 

on my PC, the performance of win 10 is actually slower than 8.

in 8, i can type my password, enter, bam! - very quick loading screen - desktop.
in 10, i type my password enter, bam! looooong loading screen....... desktop

but the performance after settling on desktop feels similar with 8.

 

How are windows updates going on these slow machines?

I had to service a slower-than-Atom laptop (yes, VIA C7-M with 2GB RAM, 40GB hard drive - not the original one) on Windows 7 and it was like 80 to 90% of hardware resources were spent not only on booting Windows but also on installing updates (which slowly trickled in via wifi, so I couldn't install them all before I left)

Windows 8 or 10 would probably be out, as graphics operation are very slow (though I finally could get smooth full screen (1280x1024) streamed low-res video going, as long as it wasn't in a browser) ; making everything go through the GPU 3D hardware would be a bad idea (it runs Windows 7 Starter's Aero basic, and I went as far as disabling "show content when moving a window"!). Old Atom graphics is better than you think.

 

The biggest problem with Windows updates on Atom machines is the reliance on eMMC for SSDs. Write speed is slow as molasses and there's nothing Windows can do to make it faster. It doesn't affect the download of the updates. But comes into play when the updates are applied. And you go through the entire read-modify-write process. When doing that it's actually slower than a 5400 RPM notebook drive. It's night and day when you compare an Atom based machine using a SATA based SSD versus one using an eMMC based SSD.

Not sure if the VIA C7 would suffer from the same problem. But my Atom tablet can take hours upon hours (sometimes 2 days) to fully update if I haven't updated in a while.

Regards,
SB

 

Ouch, it wasn't that bad : real HDD, if a slow one. So just the usual deal of slow updates, not something pathological. and slow internet.
It's probably needed to read storage benchmarks for tablets, seen that recently for Android hardware. Now we have an idea of what you may find in a $79 Windows Atom PC-tablet or something silly like that.

"SSD-on-chip" were announced, where a single chip contains an SSD controller and flash, and it's connected with PCIe 1x (NVMe protocol) to the CPU. This might remedy the bad, simplistic behavior.

(/edit : or the next-gen low end SSD may be a controller chip with on-die RAM plus one flash die or stack)

 

windows update also hogs full 1 thread. Its VERY HEAVY on my Phenom II X2 550 BE @ 4GHz unlocked to 4 cores.

basically when windows update runs... bye-bye video game, byebye watching movies.

 

Actually, XP changed the thread enumeration to properly deal with hyperthreading, although they didn't get AMD's cores right until Windows 7..

Also remember that with Windows Vista and later, the kernel finally threads I/O requests across all cores rather than pinning them to CPU 0. This results in a system that will start moving process threads around in response to varying I/O loads.

I wonder if the I/O stream contexts in WDDM2 are now part of that (multi)threading model.

 

But as pushing data in and out of caches can be a costly exercise, surely swapping cores could be a source of additional heat?

 

In a service pack?

XP used the super simple scheduling policy (as did Linux) to try to maintain run queues at equal length. Which meant your single threaded Counter Strike would occupy each core in a dual core system exactly 50% of the time, bouncing it back and forth every 10ms with craptacular results on an AMD X2.

The result was 10-15% lower average framerate with rage inducing stuttering. I used to always pin single threaded games under XP, I have never done it on Win 7.

Cheers

 

no, not a service pack. The acpi enumeration of processors in XP was correctly redesigned for smt scheduling.

http://download.microsoft.com/downl...ae-9272-ff260a9c20e2/Hyper-thread_Windows.doc

 

I've decided to be less adventurous, and I'm going to install inside a VM instead. Will probably do that this weekend.

 

Running in VirtualBox. Seems pretty nice. I can't get sound or my mic to work, so that kind of limits Cortana a bit. The Xbox App looks cool. I fed a bunch of info into Cortana, so that should be interesting. Right now the options to add info to her notebook look pretty limited.

I like that they have "quests" for feedback like on the xbox preview. I'm going to do as many as I can. Hopefully I'll have enough to say. I already like the organization of the settings page a lot more than in Windows 7.

 

Oh, damn. Windows Store is going to be getting a kick with Windows 10.

Looks like League of Legends is confirmed to be coming to the Windows Store.

And I like the new feature of being able to grab Windows updates and apps from any other computer that has already downloaded a Windows update or app.

Regards,
SB

 

The free Windows 10 is confusing nkwnow

 

How is it confusing?
If you hold a Windows 7 or 8(.1) license, you can upgrade it to Windows 10 license for free. The offer is available 1 year from launch of Windows 10

 

@Kaotik
microsoft said

non genuine windows 7 /8 will upgrade to non genuine windows 10 for free.

what the heck did that means? is it simply microsoft will give nag-screen every few hours like non-activated non-cracked windows 8?

 

It's about the upgrade policy they mentioned in China(?) where everyone can upgrade to Win10, including those that use pirated copy. Later they explained that the behavior will be consistent globally (probably means that everyone can upgrade from pirated copy, not just those in China).
The not so clear part is that they then mention about a way to make non genuine Windows genuine. So it looks like you need to pay to make it genuine? How much restricted the Windows experience be if upgrading from pirated copy? The details surrounding upgrade from pirated copy isn't there yet.

 

The statement in China was inaccurate.
Microsoft issued new statement afterwards, that even if non-genuine copies can be upgraded, they will stay non-genuine