Wiping & reloading

In lieu of real content, a recycled mailing-list post...

I advise wiping & reinstalling all computers periodically. Ideally, every 6mth, but at least once every 2-3y. With my consultancy hat on, I constantly see individuals & companies throwing out "old" computers that are now "too slow". Actually, if they were wiped & reloaded, the machines would be just fine - it's the accumulated cruft that slows them down.

Since the Core2 Duo and "Sledgehammer" Athlon64/Opteron chips came out, CPUs really have not got all that much faster - they just have more cores now, and very little software really benefits from more cores. Parallelism is /hard/ and most code is single-threaded. Having 2 cores gives you a slightly more responsive system; more, for most people, is a waste of electricity & silicon.

People often misunderstand & misquote Moore's Law. It doesn't say chips double in speed every 18mth. It says the number of transistors for a given unit of money (& space on the chip) doubles every 18mth.

However, the technology does not exist to spend more transistors on making processors run code faster, so instead, now, CPU makers just make the chips able to run /more/ code in unit time, by adding more cores. This doesn't mean 1 program runs in half the time; it means you can run 2 (or 3 or 4 or now even 6 for big server chips) programs in the same time as 1. This is actually no help at all for most purposes.

What this means is that computers stopped getting much faster a few years ago. Actually, a well-specced 2006 PC, properly set up, is within 15-20% as quick as a 2010 one, given the same amount of RAM and so on.

But the 2006 one is full of accumulated cruft. Wipe it & reload with its original software, it will probably be quite a bit faster than a modern machine laden down with Win7 & Office '10 (or if you prefer, compare Ubuntu 6.06 & OpenOffice 2 with Ubuntu 10.04 & OpenOffice 3.2).

Wiping & reloading is a pain in the *cough* neck, but the pain is rewarded. It is, as the kiddies say, like, totally worth it.

What if OS/2 v1 had been a 386 product?

I think it might have done quite well.

OTOH, and I loved OS/2 - I have spent more cash on OS/2 than all other PC software put together in my entire computing life; possibly more than on anything except Spectrum games, and maybe more even than that! - but even as a fan, it was a pig to install, a pig to network, a pig to install drivers, etc. etc.

When I tried the Windows 4 beta, I was dazzled. THIS is how it should be. It Just Worked, and setup & tweaking was a dream. Explorer, so elegant! Device Manager - I nearly wept for joy. No 2000-line CONFIG.SYS file! No separate windows for the directory tree and the directory contents!

WPS, elegant & sophisticated? My arse it was. Half-assed Mac ripoff.

And for all OS/2's alleged reliability, Fractint could kill it easily, the whole machine. Win95 was no better, and as the 32-bit apps & shonky drivers piled up, considerably worse. Then came the horrors of Win98. And SE. And ME.

But at first, even the beta of Windows 4 was about as good. And DOS drivers worked at a push. And DOS games and things. The long-filenames-on-FAT hack was a hack, but it *worked*. Make a long filename on HPFS, look for it from a DOS window or WinOS2 - gone! Invisible! You can't have it, mate, tough.

Then they hacked that to give us FAT32, and lo, it worked and was just like the old days. Incremental steps, no big bangs.

But when the state of the art was the horrors of Windows 3.x on DOS - even DR-DOS, optimised until it bled with QEMM - or the driver-less and app-less incompatible nightmare of NT 3.1 or 3.5 (if you could afford a £2500 PC to run it well) - OS/2 really actually was "a better DOS than DOS, a better Windows than Windows".

But I still wonder... If OS/2 1 had been a 386 OS, and had swept away Quarterdeck QEMM and DesqVIEW, killed the infant BSD4.4-Lite on 386, ensured that Windows 3.0 had been aborted... If it had used V86 mode to flawlessly multitask DOS apps, boot DOS and its drivers off a floppy for those troublesome programs for near-perfect compatibility...

Well... Program Manager and File Manager, which in the 1990s everyone thought were Windows 3.0 innovations but actually came from OS/2 1... They weren't so bad. I kinda liked them, actually. Had them tuned for a very efficient, convenient GUI. Loads of custom hotkeys for launching and switching apps, which always damned well worked, unlike on Explorer when if Windows was narked it would just ignore you, or launch 876 extra copies of your app then fall to its knees and die.

It coulda been a contender. In 1987, we knew no better. We might have gone for it.

But knowing what I do now about OS/2 2 compared to Windows 95... I am not sure that we were not a whole lot better off with what we got than what might have been.

I remember impotently screaming abuse at a Warp Connect box, just trying to get it on my LAN and on the Internet via dial-up at the same time. Either Win95 or NT 3 were vastly better than that.

OS/2 was, in a horrible way, more DOSsy than DOS. Everything was hand-configured in a vast ASCII config files, which you had to hand-massage into perfection with excruciating care. Then, if you were particularly masochistic, optimise for performance. I never did get Warp 3 to drive the graphics cards and the sound cards of my two 486 laptops at the same time. One or the other, but not both. And one of them was a bloody IBM!

I would in an odd way have liked to see OS/2 thrive, but you know... Despite my irrational nostalgia for it, on the whole, when Windows 95 gave us plug-and-pray, I mean, plug-and-play, and power management and suspend/resume and so on, and then NT4 gave us a vaguely modern GUI... Then Windows 2000 brought it all together into a single whole, which if not exactly seamless by any means, did slap enough makeup on Frankenstein's Monster to make it look presentable...

Sorry to say it, but I think we were better off.

I know, heresy, praise for Microsoft from one of the "Linux Taleban". Shocking.

Of course, after that it all went a bit wrong. I know everyone loves XP in hindsight, but with all the bloat, I wasn't and am not so sure. Themes? Really? Do I need that? I know, I can oh-so-intuitively switch to Windows Classic in Display Preferences, then run SERVICES.MSC and stop the THEMES service and disable it... But I can't uninstall Movie Maker or IE or any of the other cruft, no way José. I can't move the hibernation file to another drive or partition.

Then came Vista and we learned to love XP.

Then came 7, and everyone loves Windows again, except for those of us who found it handy to run a command-line app full-screen occasionally.

I think I'll stick to Linux, thanks.