ECN Forum Forums Technical Discussion Re: Computers and the Internet When will XP run out?

Greg...

You nailed it. MSFT puts in 'wait states' within its code.

More than a decade back, they over did it. The howls coming back from IT departments were so intense that Gates sent the code back to the shop to 'improve its performance.'

It had taken four years to write the new era operating system. In less than six weeks MSFT was able to improve its speed FOUR TIMES OVER. No bugs were introduced.

There is only one way on this planet that such an achievement was possible: Gates had his crew take out the wait-state padding that had been thrown in for marketing purposes. Removing such bloating lines of code is exactly the kind of thing that can be done quickly.

Wait states are obligatory for without them, no-one can interact with their computer before it's moved on to the next process step. But, this is deliberately taken to the absurd so that ever exploding chip performance does not stop the public from running out to buy a new machine.

All of the new bells and whistles are to be slipped into the wait states -- replacing them -- so that the user does not comprehend just how much of their expenditures -- all these years -- have been cut to pieces by MSFT.

Only Java Scripts seem able to clunk up browsers enough to become noticed. I now have to use No Script to stop my machine from clunking all the way to dead stop.

Any interrupt driven OS needs wait states and they do not slow the machine down if they do not miss the interrupt. It is simply the way they direct traffic when you have more than one thing going on at a time. Generally they are waiting for a hardware event to finish. It can be a problem if you are not managing your hardware efficiently but the biggest time killer is a lack of RAM when the system has to page software segments in and out of disk storage to run. I have seen systems so overloaded that they were paging, just sitting on the desk top.