Windows 11

[sedrosken]

Likely not upgradable at all if their Pro 9s we are selling are anything to go by. These have always been kind of marketed at executives -- people with modest performance needs, money to spend, a need to look luxurious and elite in some way, and who are fascinated by touch screens.

I honestly think Windows on ARM stands a half-decent chance at this point. The only one seemingly capable of pushing x86 forward at this juncture is AMD. Intel stuff continues to perform the same, gobble more power, and if Microsoft has Prism dialed in like they're supposed to have, this may well be their Apple moment. I don't expect the transition to be perfect, but we stand a real non-zero chance of looking at Windows ARM as a real platform this time.

 

[LunarMist]

What are all the huge 350-400W Xenon and EPYC server chips running, some Linix or some Windows?
I suppose you can attach a crapload of the efficient ARMenian CPUs to a board instead or is that not the same thing?

 

[Handruin]

What are all the huge 350-400W Xenon and EPYC server chips running, some Linix or some Windows?
I suppose you can attach a crapload of the efficient ARMenian CPUs to a board instead or is that not the same thing?

Likely a hypervisor like VMware vsphere, Microsoft hyper-v, or maybe Proxmox. That or they may be used for containers like docker, podman, and/or a Kubernetes node.

 

[sedrosken]

Usually a hypervisor like Handy said on the bare metal. Within the various VMs they're running usually some kind of Linux -- from what I can tell usually CentOS, RHEL or Ubuntu -- though you do see Windows and occasionally some variant of BSD sneak in there. You also have to understand that UI/UX isn't a big deal for these machines -- most of what they're going to be doing is through a command line being sent hundreds of miles away over an SSH session if it requires any kind of manual intervention at all to begin with.

There is such a concept as using a ton of, for instance, Raspberry Pis to provide a relatively efficient Kubernetes cluster, but not being in the datacenter myself, I can only assume they've been doing something roughly similar for decades at this point.

 

[Mercutio]

Amazon and Google at least use custom hardware. Amazon runs a ton of systems on ARM based servers. Google users DC power instead messing with switching PSUs, but I think they're still running x86 mostly.

I've seen CPU and GPU compute racks, even in the relatively small colo where my stuff lives. I can't fully say what all is being done but I can definitely tell who is running contemporary hardware and doing something intensive versus someone just keeping a web server somewhere. There was a Pi3 sitting on top of my systems for years. It had a bunch of USB HDDs plugged and I could see that the drives were busy but of course I couldn't see why.

 

[Handruin]

Sometimes those xeon or Epyc systems are deployed as bare metal with probably Linux in order to get access to tons of pcie lanes for lots of IO cards or higher capacity IO cards like 100-400Gb Ethernet NICs that need lots of lanes.

 

[LunarMist]

Whatever they do, it ain't on Windows.

 

[Mercutio]

Microsoft has apparently restarted its Insider Update channel for Windows 10.
Makes me think there's a big subset of customers who have gone ahead and said "not no, but hell no" to a Windows 11 migration.

 

[Handruin]

I did see a video just yesterday about this where they are adding in more patches or something for windows 10 and there was mention of poor adoption rates for Win11.

I'm still in the Win10 world mainly because I can't upgrade due to my install not having TPM enabled back from the beginning of 2020 so I haven't bothered to reinstall.

 

[LunarMist]

You can easily update 10 to 11 after enabling the TPM. It's harder to prevent Windows from trying to update.

 

[Mercutio]

That's not actually a reinstall situation. There's a tool called mbr2gpt you can use if you are still on MBR disks. Otherwise, you just have to pop in your firmware and track down whichever of the 40 different things the TPM emulator dingus is called and enable it. Windows doesn't actually care whether it's on or not unless you're trying to upgrade to Windows 11.

I actually have some VMs that are old enough that they started out on ESXi, got migrated to Hyper-V on Server 2012r2 and have been upgraded a couple times and are now on Server 2019. They had to go through the MBR2GPT conversion to be switched to Gen 2 Hyper-V clients.

 

[LunarMist]

Is it correct that only cheap portable devices are Copilot Plus compliant? It seems lame to me that I can have a threadrapper or 9950x and powerful nVida graphics 4080 Supers with more than ten times the TOps performance of the flimsy laptops, but that is considered inadequate? Am I missing something?

 

[Mercutio]

Is it correct that only cheap portable devices are Copilot Plus compliant? It seems lame to me that I can have a threadrapper or 9950x and powerful nVida graphics 4080 Supers with more than ten times the TOps performance of the flimsy laptops, but that is considered inadequate? Am I missing something?

Copilot+ is just branding, like having a laptop that says it supports Intel Vpro. Your King Kong desktop with a 400W GPU will run rings around a Snapdragon X Elite-whatever in every possible way. The only thing that can be said is that said desktop doesn't have anything like the power efficiency. That's not terribly important for you, but it probably is to whomever is doing IT Procurement for a large organization.

Also, if you don't replace your desktop's keyboard for one with a Copilot key instead of a Context-Menu key, it won't matter even if you DID go out of your way to get a Lunar Lake or Ryzen AI 300 system, because that is also necessary to the Copilot+ branding.

 

[LunarMist]

I don't understand about the keyboards. I use a KVM, so different computers have different functions. By the time the Copulot reaches a high percentage it will probably be replaced with something else. My fingers are not very compatible with using a laptop keyboard, so that's only for emergency use. It looks like you can use the copilots with an alternative mapping.

 

[Mercutio]

It's just a checklist for branding. One of the checkboxes is a new key for the keyboard. It's functionally meaningless.

 

[Mercutio]

Mildly off topic from anything important, but Humble Bundle is currently selling a package that includes Corel Draw, Painter and WordPerfect Office for $25, for people who want a useful Office Suite and don't like the idea of using something like G2A to get a grey market version. That's a pretty good deal IMO.

 

[sedrosken]

I still occasionally see WordPerfect in use in production, usually in lawyers' offices. I know my uncle still uses it as it's what he started with after upgrading from his Amiga in 1997 or 8 or some such, but he's not in the legal profession, he's a poet.

 

[jtr1962]

Mildly off topic from anything important, but Humble Bundle is currently selling a package that includes Corel Draw, Painter and WordPerfect Office for $25, for people who want a useful Office Suite and don't like the idea of using something like G2A to get a grey market version. That's a pretty good deal IMO.

Is Pinnacle Studio worthwhile for editing videos? Right now I have nothing. Might be worth it getting the bundle just for that alone.

 

[LunarMist]

Have you tried the free version of DaVinci Resolve?

 

[LunarMist]

It's just a checklist for branding. One of the checkboxes is a new key for the keyboard. It's functionally meaningless.

So like the Centrino? It sounded like there was some kind of lepton involved.

 

[jtr1962]

Have you tried the free version of DaVinci Resolve?

Nope. Never edited video before. I'm thinking it might be something interesting to do in the near future.

 

[Santilli]

Anyone used pdfFiller?

 

[Mercutio]

Nope. Never edited video before. I'm thinking it might be something interesting to do in the near future.

I kind of live in Resolve Studio (the paid version). It's.... a lot. I learn things as I need to, but if you don't have complex needs, it might be easier to work with CapCut, which a lot of my Onlyfans-ing friends use for themselves since it runs on literally everything, or something a little simpler, like Magix Vegas/Movie Studio. I'm not specifically familiar with Pinnacle.

My original reason for using Resolve was to get easy color grading between cameras. Things are better now, but five years ago, Color grading was kind of exotic for many NLEs and Resolve was the only game in town doing it for free.

Anyone used pdfFiller?

P D F G E A R is free and works well.

 

[Santilli]

It's not something you have to continually apply, Lunar, it's a checkbox you tick and let it run initial setup and then it's protected thereafter transparently to the user. And like I said you'd be shocked what ends up in your temp files. Lots of settings and software installers unpack there, to be sure, but that's just one half of it -- your browser cache for another example is a very juicy source of information. It's a great way to fingerprint you -- sometimes even auth tokens and such end up cached and they can abuse those to get into accounts you might have signed in to. I don't know anyone who religiously clears their cache and cookies anymore -- these days it's often more a detriment in the form of having to sign into everything over and over again, and only undertaken as a last resort if someone has issues.

I clear my cache daily. Mainly because Hulu won't run with much over 320 mb in the file.
Guess it's a blessing in disguise~~

 

[Santilli]

Mildly off topic from anything important, but Humble Bundle is currently selling a package that includes Corel Draw, Painter and WordPerfect Office for $25, for people who want a useful Office Suite and don't like the idea of using something like G2A to get a grey market version. That's a pretty good deal IMO.

Bought it! Thank you!

 

[Santilli]

I'm really getting sick of a lot of the 11 features.
How do I get rid of them, and make 11 like 10?
Windows Explorer windows, etc.?

 

[LunarMist]

Copilot+ is just branding, like having a laptop that says it supports Intel Vpro. Your King Kong desktop with a 400W GPU will run rings around a Snapdragon X Elite-whatever in every possible way. The only thing that can be said is that said desktop doesn't have anything like the power efficiency. That's not terribly important for you, but it probably is to whomever is doing IT Procurement for a large organization.

Also, if you don't replace your desktop's keyboard for one with a Copilot key instead of a Context-Menu key, it won't matter even if you DID go out of your way to get a Lunar Lake or Ryzen AI 300 system, because that is also necessary to the Copilot+ branding.

Here is one take on the AI computing.

BOFH: An 'AI PC' for an Acutely Ignorant user

The Boss won't know the difference

www.theregister.com

"The Boss loves it because (as we explained) purple is the color of AI working."

 

[Mercutio]

"The Boss loves it because (as we explained) purple is the color of AI working."

A zillion years ago, I had a job deploying about 3,000 top-end at the time Thinkpads to BP's Downer's Grove "The Cancer Hot Spot" Research Facility. There were four VPs with offices there and I was asked to be the personal point of contact for those guys, or more realistically their assistants. Only one of the VPs personally took even the slightest interest in what I had to do, a German gentleman who was very excited to get his $5000 tricked out Thinkpad X21. He scheduled a four hour meeting for personal training time. Turned out that he wanted two things: To learn how to actually send an E-mail on his own and to make sure that his Microsoft Office helper was the kitty cat instead of Clippy.

In actually on-topic news, there are some reports that the Qualcomm Elite X isn't living up to published specs, although it may be an issue with Samsung's particular implementation rather than the chip itself.

 

[LunarMist]

That was a long time ago. Most everyone knows how to use office and TEAMS now.
I don't expect C folks to be good at ERP and specialty systems unless that was their area. Does anyone not in a relevant technical role really enjoy SAP, Oracle, JDE, Ariba, etc.?

How does that Qualcon do in noise reduction and image processing?

 

[Mercutio]

That was a long time ago. Most everyone knows how to use office and TEAMS now.
I don't expect C folks to be good at ERP and specialty systems unless that was their area. Does anyone not in a relevant technical role really enjoy SAP, Oracle, JDE, Ariba, etc.?

I don't think even people whose entire living is based on Oracle or SAP expertise like those products.

How does that Qualcon do in noise reduction and image processing?

Given that my Samsung tablet S9 tablet can make a fair stab at denoising video on Android, I'm going to guess it's probably at least not anything to complain about.

 

[LunarMist]

Whatever happened to Windows 12? Is it replacing Windows 11 when Windows 10 is destroyed? Will there be a direct upgrade from 10 to 12?

 

[Mercutio]

Whatever happened to Windows 12? Is it replacing Windows 11 when Windows 10 is destroyed? Will there be a direct upgrade from 10 to 12?

Microsoft decided it wasn't done inflicting Windows 11 on us. I think it plans to keep doing so until we say that we like it.

 

[ddrueding]

Just speculation, but I'd guess that the original plan was to put the AI and advertising in 12. Then they realized that no one would adopt it, so they started putting that crap in 11.

 

[Santilli]

Why can't I turn off compression? Logged in as admin, but still can't get into turn it off?
Turned off VM. Good idea with 98 gigs of ram, and only 18% max used?

 

[Santilli]

Logged in as admin, but through terminal denied access....????

 

[Handruin]

Why are you trying to turn off memory compression? Is this causing you a notable problem?

 

[Mercutio]

You have 24 threads. Using one or two to compress data in memory is probably pretty goddamned negligible in terms of impact on performance.

 

[LunarMist]

Why 24, because the RAM is asymmetrical at 96GB? I did not even know they had 2x48GB EXPOs at 6400GHz.

 

[sedrosken]

Leave it alone. It's infinitely faster to use a couple of your cores for a little bit to compress/decompress some things that are only rarely getting used vs hitting swap, though I'll grant that with 96GB of RAM, you're not hitting swap either way outside of some worst-case scenarios. It's not hurting anything and much like virtual memory itself, disabling it entirely will likely only cause problems down the line. I think stuff is more tolerant of no-pagefile environments today than they used to be, but the performance loss is negligible to just leave it be.

Why 24, because the RAM is asymmetrical at 96GB? I did not even know they had 2x48GB EXPOs at 6400GHz.

Lunar, he has a 12-core CPU with SMT. That makes for 24 hardware threads.

 

[LunarMist]

Does the ratio of RAM to the cores matters or not? With 96GB and 12 cores you have 8GB per core. If you have 64GB and 16 cores the ratio is only half (4GB/core). Which is better, 12 Cores and 96GB or 16 Cores and 64GB?