Windows 10 upgrade

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Woodchips2

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Had a message yesterday Windows 10 was doing an upgrade and required 6.5Gb of free space. I only had 6.3Gb of free space on my 70Gb hard disc so had to get rid of a few things :roll:

Have reluctantly decided my 10 year old PC is going to struggle with Windows 10 and time to look in the sales (hammer)

Regards Keith
 
It's locked up on my new laptop a couple of times, first time I thought it was 'edge', second time edge wasn't running. Not impressed.
 
Except that many computers didn't use CP/M as their operating systems in the 1970s. It was disk-based and few small boxes has disks of any sort. IIRC, it was written for Zilog Z80-based machines (or Intel's 8080 predecessor), and other CPUs were available then, as now.

The biggest problem with Windows has always been that it is proprietary. In proprietary operating systems, security issues always face those discovering them with a dilemma: do you announce to the world that your product has big problems (and face business-destroying lawsuits, etc.), or do you downplay and conceal? Your source code is a business asset and needs to remain secret, and, paradoxically, that isn't good for security either.

The most secure stuff is either open source (where thousands of people can pick over the code looking for issues), or military grade projects, where exhaustive testing is done, and systems generally isolated from the internet, etc.

The second biggest problem with Windows is the choice of security model. When NT came out I remember being surprised at how 'upside down' their security model seemed to be, compared to Unixes and Novell, which were quite similar conceptually.

Also, giving tyro owners root/superuser/administrator privileges and not guiding them to make a new system more secure was asking for trouble in the mass market, even on standalone machines, and sure enough...

UNIX started from a far better security model, which is one big reason why its concepts now dominate operating systems worldwide. The remaining big system vendors, Apple, Android, and Linux systems are all using variants of UNIX, and out of sight it's embedded in many different sorts of technology, such as routers, smart TVs and even cars. For decades Windows systems dominated the small computer market, but now mobile devices dominate new platform sales, that's not at all the case any more.
 
I still have a vintage Dell laptop running XP since I have a couple of very ancient and occasionally helpful Windows applications.I started to migrate to Linux about eight years ago and have run Mandriva,Ubuntu,Peppermint and now Linux Mint 17.3.Each has been an upgrade over the previous and they have been absolutely solid in their performance.While I do run a firewall I have yet to find a need for antivirus precautions and I find that Firefox with adblock and no-script add-ons keep intrusions to a minimum.In terms of difficulty to adapt,I knew somebody whose mother had a system lockup using Windows and I gave him a live CD which meant she could boot and run a Linux system.She instantly found her way round it and once she had accepted that certain operations were done with applications that had different names to those she had formerly encountered,she was more than happy and having extracted the files she had created in Windows,she actually installed Linux and as far as I know still uses it.

Perhaps one of the IT experts will be able to advise in more depth but my feeling is that most of the changes since XP have focused on DRM and copyright protection and this has increased the overhead,thus requiring lots more processing power and memory to accomplish the same tasks that earlier systems managed.There also seems to be a move toward subscription models form companies such as Adobe,Autodesk,Office 365 and several others.Its probably a more sustainable business model for them,is it to the advantage of the consumer?

The other aspect of proprietary software that affects us all is that when businesses use applications that produce files that can only be read or updated with the same software,any other business that needs those files has to buy the same software.If its a well informed commercial decision for the advantage of the business and its owners all well and good.Ultimately though we as consumers are footing the bill.I think the least we should be doing is to expect government departments,councils and other public organisations to adhere to the Open Document standards and to require their suppliers to do likewise,not such a different concept to expecting ISO 9001 type standards really.We all know who foots the bill for public expenditure-we do-and avoiding proprietary file types would go some way to reducing the cost and we might all have a little more money to play with.
 
woodpig":2cp13q7i said:
The first answer on this page is quite interesting and goes some way to explain why Windows has had so many security issues over the years.

https://answers.yahoo.com/question/inde ... 901AAajOVR

This has answered a lot of questions for me. I used to write operating systems, bioses etc and in the early days (1070's) my home built ( from USA components) computer was based on Vista CP/M. But at the time the bios had been written floppy disk drives only had one side and 35 tracks (about 80K of storage). being an engineer I gained access to 40 track drive (later 80 and double sided) but could not use them. So I wrote my own BIOS for the new drives. To do this I also had to disassemble CP/M to patch it to my new disk BIOS. So I really learned about CP/M.

A few years later I had need to disassemble MSDOS (to patch it to a hard disk drive this time) and quickly realised much of CP/M had been copied. The old pip command, file management and some I/O routing for instance.

I had always assumed that Microsoft had copied CP/M themselves.

Mickeysoft craporation products have always been unreliable which is why I have been on linux for about ten years now.
 

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