Pentium 4

[VERAULT]

The net-loss for the economy for the forced introduction of the ribbon interface is estimated in the billions of dollars. Billions. With a B. Its hard to find specific examples of poor UI designs that cost the world that much.

Where are you citing this information from.? Id like believe it but I always feel like the only person still complaining so to me it would seem far fetched there would be a study on it.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Well things are heading that way regardless. Granted im rusty with lots of things because I was using it more more regularly back in the 20 Teens.. Ill get back to that again when its my only option. Im not afraid.. It whats going to happen.

But you already use Linux. Aren't there a million lightweight desktop environments you can stick to?

 

[VERAULT]

But you already use Linux. Aren't there a million lightweight desktop environments you can stick to?

I was using and loving Slitaz linux,, but the community must have gotten much much smaller and the updates years in between so I abandoned it. But when it was good. man it was good. Had it running fairly well on my 1999 dell latitude cpxj.. very lightweight.

The other install was on my work laptop; an HP 8540P where it screamed.....

 

[Eudimorphodon]

Windows XP hit me in the face with a baseball bat on how sluggish the interface and bloated it all was.. Had to really start turning things off and really changing registry values just to get it to a point i could tolerate (Yeah no nostalgia for XP, its the beginning of the end).

It always boggles my mind when people describe XP as "snappy", because my experience with Windows since 9x, but *especially* with XP, is, yes, its UI is aggravatingly and randomly sluggish, on *every machine* I've ever experienced. It's like the hallmark of the Windows experience for me is after the system boots up and displays the desktop, implying it's ready to, well, take my input, the truth is no, it's NOT. It's inevitably still faffing around in the background doing gawd knows what (I guess?) and the first time I click on the start button I'll get stupid monkeyshine behavior like the menu not popping up until I get impatient enough to click on it again, after which it pops up and goes away again... And aggrieving slowdowns like that happen *all the time*. And again, so far as I can tell this has been a problem with the Windows UI since 9x in varying degrees. But XP was the absolute worst. (I'd say Windows 7 was the second worst; I've never actually used Vista so maybe it's at least possible that it could be beat; not interested in finding out.)

I'll be honest, I found Windows 10 *amazing* because it was the first version that didn't act like that. It has its own problems, but at least the UI is usually responsive.

 

[VERAULT]

It always boggles my mind when people describe XP as "snappy", because my experience with Windows since 9x, but *especially* with XP, is, yes, its UI is aggravatingly and randomly sluggish, on *every machine* I've ever experienced. It's like the hallmark of the Windows experience for me is after the system boots up and displays the desktop, implying it's ready to, well, take my input, the truth is no, it's NOT. It's inevitably still faffing around in the background doing gawd knows what (I guess?) and the first time I click on the start button I'll get stupid monkeyshine behavior like the menu not popping up until I get impatient enough to click on it again, after which it pops up and goes away again... And aggrieving slowdowns like that happen *all the time*. And again, so far as I can tell this has been a problem with the Windows UI since 9x in varying degrees. But XP was the absolute worst. (I'd say Windows 7 was the second worst; I've never actually used Vista so maybe it's at least possible that it could be beat; not interested in finding out.)

Ditto

 

[VERAULT]

I'll be honest, I found Windows 10 *amazing* because it was the first version that didn't act like that. It has its own problems, but at least the UI is usually responsive.

When I was forced to use windows 10 for 1 month I made the decision I would never touch it again and thats it. Im done with all new versions of windows forever... I felt violated just having to use it. If it was an animal I would have shot it dead because its an abomination.

 

[3lectr1c]

Very interesting experience. @Eudimorphodon I’ve found on all my computers that it’s the exact opposite. 9x is generally sluggish, but that’s just how I expect it to be. 2k and XP are quite snappy.
Vista and 7 are both very quick when running them on solid hardware. 10 is the one version I have consistent frustrations, slowdowns, and bugs with. Start menu always seems to open slow. In fact, all the menus in the taskbar seem sluggish. File explorer practically locks up any time you open a folder with a lot of files it has to preview. And the worst, and I mean WORST part - copying a large number of SMALL files. Files each only a few megabytes in size or whatnot, is SLOW when copying across two disks. Speeds drop down very low. Copying for instance, my MP3 music library takes probably 5 times as long on Windows 10 than it does on Linux OR older versions of windows.
I just find it strange how you’ve had seemingly the complete opposite experience that I have had.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Where are you citing this information from.? Id like believe it but I always feel like the only person still complaining so to me it would seem far fetched there would be a study on it.

Let's start with looking at buisness:
1. The Microsoft Office Suite is the standard in the business world. If you had a job that used a computer on March 6th, 2006, there is an 80% chance that job used 1-3 different M$ Office programs and a 50% chance it used more than 3. I am low-balling these estimates, feel free to look up exact statistics.
2. Most of these users were non-technical people who were expressly trained at company expense in the usage of Office products for their specific tasks.
3. Most of these users needed access to advanced features of their specific office program related to their specific job.

Now let's consider a typical user:
1. Unless explicitly taught, most users do not use keyboard shortcuts.
2. Most do not make use of/know how to use built-in help functions; they were taught a process and to call IT when that process does not work.
3. Most of these people are more concerned with doing their job than mastering a program, and rely on wrote memorization of the little bits of Office they actually use. These bits remained relatively the same from Office '97 up to Office 2003, and the Ribbon didn't come until 2006.

That's 9 years of standardization thrown out the window.

Now let's look at Ribbon:
1. The UI is badly un-intuitive
2. The learning curve can best be described as a brick wall
3. And oh, yeah, early adopters did not have the option of googling "how to I access {insert basic feature now obfuscated by the Ribbon UI]" and had to rely on helpdesk tickets.

And, lastly, time on the clock cost money.

So if you look at it from the perspective of nothing other than the lost productivity as every new role out meant each user had to spend at minimum several hours re-learning the software and several months getting back up to speed on their specific business processes, that's tens of billions of dollars, easy. That is across the whole world economy, but still.

Then factor in all the time companies had to spend completely re-writing their internal training programs to accommodate the new, worse interface. Then factor in how employee training has to get longer because the interface is so much worse.

Now factor in that because it is so bad, just using it means many functions take precious seconds longer than they did before and factor that over hundreds of uses a day, all year long, accross the huge amount of the workforce who uses it and...

...yeah. Conservatively over the course of time since the Ribbon interface was first released, half a trillion dollars in lost productivity/lost time is a low estimate.

Of course there are many other widely used and equally awful interfaces bogging down the economy. But I am singling the ribbon out because it is the worst offender.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

When I was forced to use windows 10 for 1 month I made the decision I would never touch it again and thats it. Im done with all new versions of windows forever... I felt violated just having to use it. If it was an animal I would have shot it dead because its an abomination.

Well said.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

I was using and loving Slitaz linux,, but the community must have gotten much much smaller and the updates years in between so I abandoned it. But when it was good. man it was good. Had it running fairly well on my 1999 dell latitude cpxj.. very lightweight.

The other install was on my work laptop; an HP 8540P where it screamed.....

Yes but can't you use a lightweight desktop on Ubuntu for all your (admittedly few) GUI needs? I thought that was the whole point of Linux - tailor it to your own specific requirements?

 

[3lectr1c]

I just got out an XP laptop and a Win2k laptop side by side and there really isn’t any difference. 2K actually took remarkably longer to boot, which is a trend I’ve noticed, but once it got itself started it felt as quick as XP, maybe ever so slightly faster. Both running on period hardware.
XP on a Gateway Pentium M laptop, 2K on a Pentium III 800MHz ThinkPad.

Neither felt at all sluggish, except for the very long boot time on 2k.

 

[Eudimorphodon]

I felt violated just having to use it. If it was an animal I would have shot it dead because its an abomination.

That seems a bit over the top? I mean, I kind of felt that way about 8, but 10 is… okay. At least so far as the UI mostly goes. And there are a lot of things that are actually kind of neat about it, like the lightweight Linux integration.

There’s also a lot of not great, like the fact that I’ve had to resort to editing the registry multiple times because of stupid bugs that have cropped up with upgrades breaking settings in ways the control panel won’t fix, and, yes, the file explorer is bad and prone to weird lockups. But I never found it much good in previous versions either so I take it mostly as par for the course? My experience has mostly been that *all* modern OS’s file managers suck, and if I want it done right I open up a terminal window and find/mv/cp files around the way the Lord (of darkness?) intended.

(And, again, this is where Windows 10 shines for me compared to older versions, because with just a little work you can kind of treat it from a mixed GUI/CLI perspective like it’s a weird Linux distribution that happens to be able to run Windows programs when you need them. For this model it’s leagues better than older versions.)*

*EDIT: I think what it boils down to is this: Windows 10 roughly coincided with Microsoft giving up its holy war against Linux, and as a result you have an OS that's in a lot of ways is more like modern macOS than any previous version of Windows. There are a lot of people, including myself, that have used Mac laptops for work for the last two decades because they allow you to have pretty convenient access to all your unix-y tools while still letting you run a few mandated-by-the-job commercial programs without having to resort to virtual machines, etc. Sure, Windows 10's not actually built on a UNIX(oid) kernel and userland like macOS, but it can run an *actual* Linux kernel as a tightly integrated guest, and the native tools like Powershell also duplicate much of the "feel" of UNIX and can even be easily configured to use native BASH shells, etc. Sure, you *could* kind of get a similar environment on older versions with Cygwin and other tools, but Windows 10 mostly just worked with only a *reasonable* amount of faffing around.

I still think overall a pure Linux desktop would be more efficient, because even though the Unix-y integration is there it's not completely seamless and there are times when I'm left grumbling about things that Windows makes a lot more awkward (sure wish I could upgrade my installed Windows programs and add new ones with "apt"...), but, well, if you need the Windows execution environment for a few programs but otherwise don't love Windows *at all*, yeah, 10's a huge improvement to 7 and previous

 

[VERAULT]

Yes but can't you use a lightweight desktop on Ubuntu for all your (admittedly few) GUI needs? I thought that was the whole point of Linux - tailor it to your own specific requirements?

some are lighter than others. Ill take a slightly bloated linux over new windows any day.

That seems a bit over the top? I mean, I kind of felt that way about 8, but 10 is… okay. At least so far as the UI mostly goes.

I saw 8... It looked like a cell phone GUI... And I said "Hell no!" and skipped it entirely. (dont bring up 8.1 as the point would still be moot)

What I said about 10 stands...... I find nothing "OK" about it.....

Its an operating system that assumes its users are too stupid to use a computer....

 

[Agent Orange]

There are two good reasons to push forward with this project:

1. Building a maxed out system, any maxed out system from any generation, is a fun and rewarding experience.

and

2. If you've followed the general loathing for the P4 visible on this thread, you'll notice it will be dirt-cheap since nobody wants the parts.

Going back over this thread, I don't think anyone said they absolutely hated the P4, it's just that there were better options at the time. Mine stays in its box.

 

[GiGaBiTe]

Yes but can't you use a lightweight desktop on Ubuntu for all your (admittedly few) GUI needs? I thought that was the whole point of Linux - tailor it to your own specific requirements?

If you're referencing the hardware from the user you quoted, no, there isn't. Most of the mainstream modern Linux distributions have long since dropped support for x86 and only support x86_64. While there are still 32 bit packages, there is no 32 bit kernel. You can of course compile one yourself and rig up everything to work, but that's a ton of effort and a lot of headaches.

Some of those headaches include not all x86 processors being equal. If you have anything prior to the Pentium 4 / Athlon 64, you're going to have more headaches from the lack of SSE2/SSE3 instruction sets. Firefox won't run without SSE2 unless you compile a special build with it disabled.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Going back over this thread, I don't think anyone said they absolutely hated the P4, it's just that there were better options at the time. Mine stays in its box.

Verault definitely hates the P4 Not without good cause, of course. But it seems to be loathed on this sub-forum.

 

[VERAULT]

Verault definitely hates the P4 Not without good cause, of course. But it seems to be loathed on this sub-forum.

Again, I have stated this several times. I hate all the hardware associated with it... I hate the period of computing in general. Its just a shit time for hardware, software, and industry standards. Things got better after it (for hardware anyway).

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Again, I have stated this several times. I hate all the hardware associated with it... I hate the period of computing in general. Its just a shit time for hardware, software, and industry standards. Things got better after it (for hardware anyway).

I've never once said you were wrong.

 

[VERAULT]

I've never once said you were wrong.

Just stating the cpu by itself isnt the key to my disdain.

 

[seaken]

Well, I must say I laughed at times on this thread like I haven't laughed in a while. That was fun.

I am not a P4 hater. But I am a a small business user and I got use out of old cast offs for many years by using XP and Linux. Eventually I did retire all my P4 systems and moved on from XP and Xubuntu and adopted Core2Duo and Windows 7 and then Windows 10. My current systems all use Windows 10 on Core i5 processors. And I dumped MS Office for Libre Office a long time ago. But they still have a stupid "ribbon" interface. But I can still use the same key combos and menus, which someone was saying MS should have done with MS Office. Libre Office works fine for our shop. Except for integrating with Quick Books. I had to install one instance of MS Office just for QuickBooks.

At home I use MX Linux and antiX Linux. I have everything from P-III to Core i5 running Linux. I do have a couple of Windows 10 and 11 systems but rarely use them. Linux is my daily driver. But I am an experimenter and I still fire a few P4's and play with with them. They run MX and antiX and Debian quite well. But not for daily office work. Just for the hobby. I inherited the P4's as a natural progression of my upgrades. For quite a while we used P4's as our main fleet. When I replaced them with a Core2Duo fleet I ended up with the cast off's in my lab at home. Now my Core2Duo's have joined them. That part of my hobby is Linux centric. Linux is definitely worth the effort to learn for these now cast-off systems that are not really "vintage" but still "old computers".

I had to finish reading the thread even though I was trying to watch a Knicks game. It was that much fun. Now I have to go to bed so I can get up early to go to Wall NJ for the VCF East festival. It's a three hour drive for me.

Seaken