Windows 8 & XP

It goes a bit deeper than just desktop vs metro. But rather than try and explain a technical discussion I only somewhat understand, thankfully, someone else already did.

http://www.extremetech.com/computing/13 ... -windows-7

You are quite right. We were talking about reasons that only really apply to the business world anyway.

As far as gaming is concerned XP has been a dead platform for a while now. Kind of like the Wii U. Oh! Zing!

I use a ramdisk set up as my virtual memory paging file to access over 4 GB. If any other components lagged, I planned to upgrade them and continue using XP. It's a bummer to have to pay for an OS I don't really want, so if it doesn't support XP, I might look into dual booting Linux w/ Wine just to play PA :|

Last time I had to "upgrade" an OS just for a game was with Win95 and Warcraft 2. I can understand that, but I didn't realize there was anything that would absolutely affect game portability from XP to Vista+.

From that article:

Has this changed since it was written, or will the new update change this?

You wouldn't need WINE to play PA, as it is being developed natively. With regards to gaming, WINE is used for running Windows games on Linux. If you have old games that can run on XP without requiring Vista+, chances are that WINE will work with them.

But in any case, despite the slow rollout of good graphics drivers for Linux (which isn't that big a deal, for those of us who had to deal with previous driver disparities, such as with wifi drivers), we are slowly reaching the point where Linux will be a very viable gaming platform, so setting up a dual boot system is definitely a good place to start.

As awesome of a work around as that is and as much as it makes my inner geek cheer you on its still just a work around and not a long term solution.

PA will have a native Linux client. Wine will not be needed.

Its unreasonable to expect an OS to be totally compatible with applications written for a 12 year old out of date older version of itself or vise versa. XP dropped the true DOS compatability that 9x/ME had kept alive from the DOS era. 64 bit Vista dropped support for win16 that XP had kept alive from 9x/ME days. One day some future version of Windows will drop support for win32 that Windows 7/8 currently keep alive. Its the natural progression of technology.

Nice article,

I'm curious if you have any data from in the engine related to Win 7 vs Win 8. Frame rate comparison for example. I ask because if there were data to support I would likely upgrade.

Dunno about gaming performance improvement, I'm mostly looking at it from a compile time, copy time and general productivity perspective. Gaming between win 7 and win 8 didn't seem noticeably different to me.

Windows 8 has some horrible decisions that they decided to ship with, but it's also not nearly as bad as people like to claim, especially if you spend 95% of your time in desktop mode, which I do.

I still use XP and it can play just about any newly released game that I can think of. I do realize that it is outdated but I heard windows 8 doesn't even have the traditional start menu so I'm not sure weather to get windows 7 or 8.

I'm not sure on the big difference between windows 7 and 8 besides one is newer so some pros and cons would be nice.

Try reading the article that he posted above.

it is there, hidden. There are apps to bring it fwd by default (start8, startw8 for instance). Also ms are releasing windows 8.1 shortly, a free upgrade for win8 users that fixes a feww things and one of them is a traditional desktop and start as default

Or use Linux. Linux mint is nice ( or gentoo like me)

Gentoo is probably not the distro to be suggesting for a newcomer.
Linux Mint is okay, as are most Ubuntu derivatives, if only because Ubuntu is so standard nowadays.

I would suggest for those on XP and don't want to spend money, the duel boot with linux option is best way to go. Just put Ubuntu 13.04 on it, I tried it again recently (I do this every couple of years to see how linux is getting on hardware compatibility / UI wise compared with Windows) & it actually works, didn't crash horrifically when I tried to install G-card drivers which is where I got to last time. Even managed to play Half Life through steam! - I was open mouthed shocked...

As for Win 8 - I'm on Win 7 & will wait till both 8.1 & yearly subscription are released and then I'll move.

Ok, this kind of confirms my inclination to leave my current system on Windows7 and only move to Windows8 when I build my Haswell based system and only after the Blue update to Windows8 comes out.

It sounds like for a new system the updated Windows 8 will be a good idea, but if you already have Windows 7, it may not be worth it to upgrade just for gaming.

Personally I will be sticking with Windows 7 until Windows 9 is out unless MS stops assuming that desktop PCs have touch interfaces. It looks like Windows 8.1 is going to fix a lot of the issues that Windows 8 has on the desktop but I don't think it is going to fix enough of them to make it a successor to Windows 7.

As for why. Well, this sums it up pretty well.

It's not even going to fix the issues in Windows 8, really. When they said they were bringing back the Start button, they meant exactly that. Windows 8.1 will have a Start button, but it will still open the Start screen, rather than the Start menu. The fact that Microsoft chose to ignore the actual issue that people were complaining about shows their disconnect from their customers, and that does not bode well for the additional changes to 8.1. In the end, they are still making an OS for touchscreens, with desktops as an afterthought.

To be fair it does fix some of the issues with mutli tasking in the modern UI and cleans up the tile mess a bit. Engadget has a pretty good write up on it.

The start screen itself isn't a bad idea, they just implemented it poorly and made too many assumptions about touch interfaces being common. If they had shiped one UI for tablets and one UI for desktops and then let the user easily switch between them and run apps in either one then they would have had a winner on their hands. I hate to say it but Apple actually got it right.

This seems like a good work around for XP but I'm not totally sure if it's possible to duel boot Linux with it since I'm not a hardware expert. I've found some documentation but I'm inclined to hear from someone who has done it before.

You wouldn't need to. If you use 64-bit Linux, you would have full access to that memory.

I have a 32 bit computer with XP installed I heard that duel booting could solve the issue of XP not working on some modern programs. The RAMDISK work around is to get more then 4G. Though you have a point on the 64 bit Linux I'm just worried about some sort of conflict.