Thread: Next level of retirement....

Originally Posted by Mario F.

Hmm... actually it will depend if the jars are closed or not.

Well, unless you're planning to steal my few remaining marbles that is...


Actually ... if I have 6 marbles, I also have 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1 marbles... But I don't have 7.

And then there's this... 13 x 7 = 28

Well if the jars are closed we have one tough nut to crack. You see, there will be many, a few, one and no marbles on each jar. All at the same time. It's a mess, and you can see the problem if somehow these marbles represented your age...

Originally Posted by Shakti

I could also imagine that some older hardware lacks proper driver support for windows 7. Sure windows 7 ships with alot of drivers but as i noticed on my older laptop that came with XP some things just would not work properly until a driver was installed, and my guess is that most companies can't really be bothered to test a driver for 3 years old hardware properly, so that might have something to do with it aswell maybe?

Yep, sure might... My PC is about 3 years old at this point... mid-range in the AMD 64X2 run... Stable as a rock and working so well I'll hate to get rid of it but yes, drivers could be an issue. I haven't gone direct to the manufacturer's sites yet. Maybe I should.

Originally Posted by CommonTater

If you grab the DPC Latency tool you will discover that while XP typically runs 17 to 20 microseconds delay in processing Deferred Procedure Calls (kernel code) Win7 usually runs 200 to 300... and that's enough to make a huge difference in performance...

Well, first and foremost Microsoft recommends (and makes it a part of their Logo program) that a DPC shouldn't run for longer than 100 microseconds. Second, it isn't really Windows (XP or 7) that is responsible for that. DPCs are executed by device drivers. What you have there instead is a typical example of a bad driver for Windows 7 vs a good driver for Windows XP. Blame the manufacturer once you find the source.

EDIT: To clarify the context of this post: In response to your marble joke:

Variation: How many months are 28 days long?

75% of people will say "one."

EDIT: Wow, this is progressing fast. I just read my email about a new post and posted here w/o looking to see if any new had been posted... apparently there has been.

I've did some preliminary test with that DPC latency tool.

Here I'm playing an mp3 and streaming video at the same time. You'll be able to see the specs of this machine from the gadgets on the right. It's an old machine, like yours. More specifically an Intel Core2 Duo. The sound is coming from the onboard chip. The video from an ATI HD Radeon 4770.

Attachment 10348

Not once I got anywhere close to 500 microseconds. But I do get above 100 microseconds often, which is something I should expect considering I'm doing something stupid. Still nowhere near what you are experiencing.

Originally Posted by Mario F.

Well, first and foremost Microsoft recommends (and makes it a part of their Logo program) that a DPC shouldn't run for longer than 100 microseconds. Second, it isn't really Windows (XP or 7) that is responsible for that. DPCs are executed by device drivers. What you have there instead is a typical example of a bad driver for Windows 7 vs a good driver for Windows XP. Blame the manufacturer once you find the source.

Actually, Mario, I'm not getting any spikes... never over 300, which is usually while I'm watching the news and doing backups at the same time... very IO intensive stuff.

THIS machine doesn't have the audio and video problem. That's a whole different computer that also has no DPC spiking, just a consistently high delay... I never did figure that one out, I needed it working for a demo so it went back on XP real quick...

Still there is an audible difference in sound between XP and 7... as I now have my main machine dual booting, I can hear it... The XP sound is clear, almost transparent on FLAC sources where the Win7 machine is "cloudy" (for lack of a better term). It's the same hardware so I have to write that off to drivers as both are running Media Player Classic.

(If you're concluding that I'm all about AV, you're correct. I made my living at it for a long time)

Oddly, now that I'm dual booting, this install of Win7 seems better behaved... my DAC is working on both (which it never did before) but I haven't had the chance to check the other stuff just yet... Still drops keyboard characters though...

I dunno... An AMD 64x2 at 3ghz should do better than this... There's a noticeable difference in performance between 7 and XP... XP is clearly faster.

It just fries my gonads that I spent $1200 on several copies of an OS I'm likely to relgate to the dustbin...
Win7 Pro is $329.00 in my area...

I've installed Windows 7 on 3 computers and it has worked flawlessly.

The only trouble I have had is on one computer which is about 8 years old. I had to search around for the correct drivers for its old video and sound cards, and even with the correct video card driver I get choppy HD video (understandable...it's old hardware), but other than that that computer works great.

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I also love how fast Windows 7 boots compared to XP....even XP right out of the box.

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Originally Posted by DavidP

I've installed Windows 7 on 3 computers and it has worked flawlessly.

The only trouble I have had is on one computer which is about 8 years old. I had to search around for the correct drivers for its old video and sound cards, and even with the correct video card driver I get choppy HD video (understandable...it's old hardware), but other than that that computer works great.

Yep, I see that a lot... A lot of people use "last generation" pcs for HTPC systems and often as not they run into problems with Win7... usually XP is the fix.

I also love how fast Windows 7 boots compared to XP....even XP right out of the box.

Ok.. dual boot, same machine... Win7... 48 seconds. Win XP... 27 seconds.

See, that's what I don't get... I've put 7 in about 50 machines now (put XP back in 14 of them) and for some reason my results are wildly different than what is reported online... Now the logical first step in this is to blame myself: "What am I doing wrong". But amongst my little gang, others have done their own installs and some have purchased machines with Win7 installed at factory and they're experiencing the same issues... corrupt flash drives, DACs not working, crappy audio and video, keyboards dropping characters, etc. so I have a bit of a problem thinking this is my own fault...

Frankly, I'm beginning to wonder how much my opinion is being skewed by variance between obvious Win7 fan sites and the reality of day to day operations... They say it's so wonderful, flawless... no critical thinking... But one simply does not produce a double layer DVD full of code without at least a few bugs creeping into the mix.