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Hardware

P4 2.2GHz and D845BG Review 225

Posted by CmdrTaco from the hardwareto-lust-after dept.
nihilist_1137 writes "GreenJifa.Com has gotten their hands on the new Intel P4 2.2GHz/Intel D845BG DDR Motherboard for review. This is the new P4 that has the 0.13m die and the new "Northwood" core. Check out the review." This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)
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P4 2.2GHz and D845BG Review More

P4 2.2GHz and D845BG Review

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  • Taco's XP comment (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM.

    For what it's worth, XP doesn't run all that slowly. It's merely average -- comparable to your typical decked-out Gnome desktop on X...

    Man!

    • Re:Taco's XP comment (Score:4, Insightful)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:02PM (#2832384)
      ahh, but see... When OS's get older they should get faster. GNOME and KDE have the age advantage. They are too young yet to have increased their speed. XP on the other hand has come from a long line of slow OS's.

      You get what you pay for (or at least that's what should be the case). If you are going to pay $200 for something you should at least have a decent speed at which to work at.

      I hear everyday, "I really need to upgrade my computer, it's only 500mhz". No, what you need to do is have an OS that is actually decent and runs well on a slower CPU.

      Well that's just my opinion.

      I really don't think that we should have to have a 2.2ghz machine just to open a couple of applications.

      • Re:Taco's XP comment (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        2.2 ghz for word processing -> people are stupid

      • Re:Taco's XP comment (Score:2, Informative)

        by yoshi_mon ( 172895 )
        I hear everyday, "I really need to upgrade my computer, it's only 500mhz".

        Who are you hearing this from? I expect that it's either a) gamers or b) ppl who want every damn bell and whisle turned on.

        My AMD 300 with it's measly 128M of RAM has been running XP for a while now. I am able to have more than, "a couple of applications" at one time and it does it well actually.

        I will upgrade soon, but my current computer will go to another family member who I will probaly setup with XP. If they decide to turn on all the eyecandy that I will tell them not to do, they can live with the slowdown, but as my box is setup right now, it's way better than Win9x ever was.

        Yes, I do run a 2.4.x kernel on here and it smokes. Yes, by running a light window manager in X it runs way faster than XP. However, as it stands, when I do use windows I would much rather run XP than Win9x. And by tweaking it, it runs better than 9x ever could.

        Microsoft markets it's products to the MASSES, and they love pretty things. When ppl see my desktop they think its sterial and plain, but to me all the crap that they put on their desktops only annoys me. However, that is why they have their computers and I have mine. They will go out and spend $2000 on a new computer that will do what they need it to do, while I will go out and spend $200 on a bare bones upgrade and it will do what I need it to do.
      • This is not true. Software may become faster as it evolves to exploit more powerful hardware. It may also become faster because of increased efficiency in the code.

        But this does not mean that software gets faster with age. Because with age also come features and increased expectations. Imagine you had written a strcmp() routine ten years ago. You have had a decade to tweak your code and by now it is almost twice as fast as then.

        However, now people expect Unicode support. If nothing else, this means your strcmp() has to compare twice as much data (not even counting character set translations and the like). So did your strcmp() actually become faster? Well, yes, it did -- but for any actual workload, no, it didn't.

        I agree with your statement that we do not need a 2.2 GHz machine just to open a couple of applications. But people might require the ease of use (in the sense that the system has comprehensive knowledge about real world things such as character sets, physical dimensions, monetary values, etcetera) that a 2.2 GHz machine affords.

      • Really, if you know what you're doing, there's nothing wrong with Windows, except the moral issues of supporting a monopoly.

        Crashes? Lockups? Maybe once every few months, after installing some crappy shareware.

        I'm considering switching to a higher speed processor, but mostly just for the coolness factor. There's really nothing at all wrong with 500mhz.

        What gets my goat is that my company gives out 900+ mhz machines to morons who will never appreciate it, because they've got every tsr known to man running. Meanwhile, I do all my developing on a 733mhz. Which is okay, but the coolness factor dictates that I should have the fastest processor, as a power user. Oh well. I sleep at night because I know it's all so much silliness.
    • I agree totally. I use a Thinkpad A21p which isn't exactly the fastest thing around anymore! It contains a P3/850, 256MB RAM, and a 16MB ATI Mobility 128. WindowsXP performance is just fine on this machine. For what it is worth, I also have Mandrake 8.1 on this box using kde and it doesn't seem to be any faster than WindowsXP . I have linux (Redhat 7.1) running on an old Pentium 200 with 64MB RAM -- a perfect little router/firewall box -- it even runs apache just fine. But, when I try to run X (with either gnome or kde) on this machine, it feels like an HP150 running Windows 1.0

    • Re:Taco's XP comment (Score:5, Insightful)

      by _xeno_ ( 155264 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:14PM (#2832417) Homepage Journal
      Since this was posted by an AC, I'd like to reiterate this point with an actual datapoint.

      Windows XP ran fine on a PII 400 with 256MB RAM and 5GB hard drive space. With all the pretty and useless GUI options enabled. Now it was a little slow, but no worse than GNOME on X on my nVidia GeForce2 on my 800MHz Athlon. The only thing that really killed the usability was excessive use of alpha fade effects in certain scenarios (namely, selecting a rectangle of files Windows Explorer) that weren't hardware accellerated due to an older graphics card.

      For most "every day" tasks, the PII 400 was fine - you could browse the web, listen to MP3s, and play older XP-compatible games (which, in most cases, is the same as a Win2K compatible game).

      Bottom line is that XP is no worse than any other "modern" graphical OS - it's just made by Microsoft. Accept the fact that Windows XP is a decent operating system and far superior to the Win9x line and get back to using your Linux PC. To each their own, but bashing XP without actually using it is pretty foolish, especially because it does run at without noticable slowdown on any new PC and on most older PCs as well.

      Unless your desktop is still a Pentium class machine, assuming that your computer has enough disk space and RAM, Windows XP is a decent operating system. If you're going to bash it, bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation, or on any other Microsoft expansionist move. Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.

      • I run Win2K on my laptop (PIII850, 256MB RAM, etc.) and it runs fine. It runs everything I want it to just fine.

        I also run Win2K on my 1.333GHz Athlon (which has 512MB PC2100 DDR). Runs great there as well.

        However, I noticed that, either psycologically or actually, XP on the computer I use at work (PIII1GHz, 256MB RAM) seems to boot up far faster than Win2K. I can't quite figure it out - I understand it's a brand-new install so perhaps it hasn't had time to accumulate software bloat, but it's not like my systems have a ton of system services starting. As a matter of fact I make it a rule that nothing starts up aside from what Windows needs to run (e.g. no WinAmp agent, AIM, etc.). But XP will beat Win2K to the login screen every time and be 'up and running' faster than 2000. XP seems like a decent OS but there's no real reason (other than the startup/login speed) for me to upgrade from 2000. 2000 does everything I want and I don't have the time, money, or inclination to upgrade 2 boxes to XP (and yes, you can turn off all the fou-fou WinXP eye candy and make it look a whole lot like 2000. The one really neat thing is that it stylizes (aka 3D shading) all the web form elements (like submit buttons, checkboxes, etc.) which is really neat).
        • XP *DOES* boot faster. Microsoft spent tons of time optimizing the boot sequence, and it definitely shows. I have XP installed now for several months with tons of programs installed and it still takes ~20 seconds between "Restart" and usable state. (Helluva lot faster than my Linux partition, I might add.)
        • In my experience, XP is much faster than 2000. When I upgraded my computers form 2000->XP, I defnitely noticed a speed increase. Not just bootup time, but overall performance. I still have one computer with 2000 (necessary because my employer's VPN software only works with 2000), and I just upgraded to 512MB, but it's still slow as a dog. My Celeron 433 Laptop with 256MB RAM is faster with XP, than my Celeron 800 Desktop with 512MB of RAM is with 2000. (But my P4 with XP blows them both away :-)
        • I wholeheartedly agree with this. I loaded XP on this machine to give it a shot, and I didn't notice any speed problems. Of course, I have 384MB RAM on this machine and a 1Ghz Athlon with a 64MB graphics card (geForce 2 MX at the time). And the bootup speed was faster than Win98. Gods, did it boot up fast. Seductively fast.

          However, I've issues with alot of the stuff that's in XP and the whole activation situation, so I wiped it. Running 98 now for games, but probably will move to 2000 as my Windows partition. More stable than 98 and doesn't have all the nasty crap MS is foisting on the world with XP. And most of my games will run on it.

          But it did go fast...that much I'll give it.
      • If you're going to bash [XP], bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation, or on any other Microsoft expansionist move. Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.

        Fair point. I'd also like to bash it for being rather insecure, but I suppose I'll just have to stand in line behind all the other /.ers who want to bash it for being a Microsoft product.

        But what interests me about XP is that so far there's no sign that the people at our office who use 98, NT or 2K want to upgrade. There seems to be a curious lack of keenness about this product. Perhaps it's the digital rights stuff. We developers run partly Microsoft, mostly Linux, so the people I'm talking about are the CEO, sales, marketing, legal, administrative and whatnot. They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems. Or perhaps they're just scared to move in case they end up having to pay out for "upgrades" in the future.

        I guess we'll get an XP machine eventually because we are an ISP and we will have to support our users, just as we run tests on Mac (9 and X). But somehow our people don't seem to see XP yet as a gotta-have, the way 95 was.

        • We've encountered the same type of hold back from our business segments. They say that they are perfectly happy running Windows NT 4.0.

          Of course part of it is that they just don't realize many of the benefits they could see. We do a piss poor job of marketing our IT services internally.

          But I don't think it has anything to do with DRM or the other things mentioned here. These users are no more aware of those features than they are of the alpha blending GUI coolness.

          It's mostly just a fear of the unknown. Things work fine now don't try to fix them... that sort of thing.

          But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.

          Ohwell, the technical people in our company have been using WinXP for several months now and the more they use it, the more they like it. The changes are subtle, but very likeable.
          • It's mostly just a fear of the unknown. Things work fine now don't try to fix them... that sort of thing.

            But this same attitude pretty much also dooms the notion of Linux on the desktop. If people are afraid of moving to WinXP for fear of what might no longer work, they aren't about to jump into another plane of in-compatibility with Linux.

            I agree wholeheartedly on this. I've never really seen Linux as a general purpose platform for desktop productivity software. In fact it surprised me to see how far Ximian and whatnot have taken this. But the killer is interoperability. As long as Microsoft is permitted to keep its file formats secret, no competitor stands a chance because people will always need to keep a copy of a Microsoft product lying around in order to read and convert legacy files and files from third parties who have not switched.

            Even if Linux were a boon to the desktop user (it isn't, it has its own foibles and it can be a pig to learn them), the inertia that pertains to use of any non-mainstream (which translates to non-MS, in most cases) software would apply.

        • Bashing it for being slow is mostly just uninformed.
          Mostly the eye-candy that makes it slow. But it's that same eye-candy that is used to promote it. Probably the main thing is to find what can be easily turned off that will bring performance up to at least sub-par.

        • They're more than happy with 9X or 2k, it seems...

          They ought to be. AFAICT, there is no good reason to upgrade to XP if you already have 2K. The latter finally gives Windows users some reasonable semblance of stability and security with which to run the Office applications that are "must have".

          If it weren't for home users getting XP with their new PC (as if there were any choice), the newly released XP would be getting scant real sales.

          That's probably why there's been all the strong arm tactics applied to Enterprise Licensing Agreements: there is otherwise absolutely no good technical reason for corporate IT to upgrade from 2K at this point. Sheesh, most corporate users are still trying to figure out how best to bite the bullet on upgrading their servers to 2K because of the viral cascade effects to contend with Active Directory (an "all or nothing" proposition).

          Along the same lines, there is little good reason for anyone with something like a 800 MHz PIII with 256 MB RAM to upgrade to this 2.2 GHz machine for the usual corporate office applications. Until more demanding applications become more commonplace, I wouldn't waste my money on either XP or 2.2 GHz.

      • Bottom line is that XP is no worse than any other "modern" graphical OS - it's just made by Microsoft. Accept the fact that Windows XP is a decent operating system and far superior to the Win9x line and get back to using your Linux PC.

        I will have to respectfully disagree (unlike some of the replies ive seen to you)

        We decided to set XP in my families new XP1800 computer. I wil be the first to admit that when it runs, it runs smoothly and the family likes it, but It certainly is much worse in terms of stability to say Mandrak or MacOSx. There is not a day that does not go by the computer iwll up and reboot for no reason or simply crash.

        As for being a decent OS being made by Microsoft, all i can say is that we must remember that Microsoft KNEW about a HUGH REMOTE HOLE for almost a month before deciding to let the rest of us know about. That in my opinion makes it a very much worse OS than the others. At the moment, i am trying to get hem used to a linux desktop and will simply replace it all with Linux in a few months.

        Thankx!
        • We decided to set XP in my families new XP1800 computer. I wil be the first to admit that when it runs, it runs smoothly and the family likes it, but It certainly is much worse in terms of stability to say Mandrak or MacOSx. There is not a day that does not go by the computer iwll up and reboot for no reason or simply crash.

          Not to defend Windows XP, but "up and reboot" reminds me a lot of flaky PCI devices, especially video cards, and overheating. Your description implies you have not run XP on any other systems and have not run another OS on this system. Perhaps you should eliminate a few variables before you condemn XP.

          • good point.

            But I ran linux on it using kernel 2.4.16 and ran unstable on it for about 2 weeks before converting it to XP and never had one problem with.

            it was doing seti@home calculations for 2 solid weeks.

            Thanks
        • The only reason I can see that happening would be a faulty driver that you knowingly installed (XP warns you A LOT before letting you install one). I've been running XP since Beta2, and have only had it crash on me about 6 or 7 times, at least five of which were due to bad drivers, mostly nVidia ones.
      • I would have to agree. I have been running a PII 333 288 MB of ram Asus F7400 laptop. XP seems faster than my old Win 98SE OS. I did turn off all the fancy eye candy and I am only running at 16 bit color, but it crusises. I use netbeans [netbeans.org] java ide and it starts and runs very fast, compared to 98. And the stability for a M$ product is pretty good. I have crashed it once and was due to driver updates. No problem just did an easy rollback and things work great! peace, abombss
      • If you're going to bash it, bash it on the potential Digital Rights Management that was supposed to be introduced in XP, or on the product activation.


        OK! I, for one, like many people here, enjoy tearing down my machines and putting them back together again. That precludes me from using XP, unless I want to activate Windows every time(no, thanks).


        Furthermore, you can't take MP3's created on a Windows XP machine and play them on another machine. They did build DRM into it, and its the dumbest thing I've ever seen. I'm sure its easy to get around, but frankly its much easier to just not go there.


        I use Windows 2000 primarily on my desktops and as far as I'm concerned, thats the last Microsoft OS I'll ever buy.

        • Windows XP doesn't need to be reactivated just because you tear down your computer and put it back together again. You can even smack a new graphics card or sound card into the motherboard, and it'll still run just fine without reactivation. You only need to activate it again if you make major changes to your setup (new motherboard and stuff like that).

          Also, don't tell me you're using microsoft tools to create MP3s. Ever heard of lame? I'm not even sure you can create MP3s with XP. I've used lame just fine with XP, and the MP3s can be played both with Windows Media Player and Winamp.
      • XP runs absolutely beautifully on my Pentium 3 800 and 256 megabytes of ram.

        Stable. Fast. Relatively secure (as opposed to other Microsoft offerings). And compatible with most Windows software from either the 9x or 2K line.

        XP is actually pretty good. Sorry, Linux people, you're going to have to bash XP for reasons other than technical, now. Call it ugly. Call it Expensive. Call it the work of satan. Call it Fred if you want. But you can't call it slow or unstable anymore without basically being full of crap.

      • Re:Taco's XP comment (Score:3, Insightful)

        by clinko ( 232501 )
        Thank you so much for being realistic on slashdot. And thank the moderators for being fucking retards that automatically bash anything that says microsoft. (i'm a moderator too)
    • sucks. Rest of XP runs pretty fast though, a bit faster than w2k on my dual XP and much faster than 2k on a friend's dual celeron. I haven't tested it on any single processor machine, and microsoft says there are plenty of improvements in MP side of things, so I can't say how it actually compares to older usable windows versions (NT4 & 2k that is) on single machines. You should definetly check it out if you have a dual system and insist on using windows. Check out the memory size though, memory load is about 100megs without any running applications.

      BTW, it boots much faster. I guess that is because it boots without negotiating network connections.

    • I don't know, I used to have a 386SX16 running Windows 3.1 with 5 Megs of RAM and I'm fairly certain my 850Mhz PIII with 768 Megs of RAM not only cost less than the 386, but also runs Windows XP considerably faster.

      BTW, the key to WinXP speed is a relatively fast hardware accelerated video card. i.e. a Tseng ET4000 isn't going to cut it, I'd recommend a Riva TNT at the very least. And also RAM, I bought my 768 Megs when it only cost $30 per 256Meg DIMM. I realize they are not like $60, but it's still worth putting in at least 512 Megs.

      Honestly for the first time in my experience with computers, I see no reason to buy the absolute latest greatest computer and two year old technology is more than adequate.

  • Four comments, none above zero, and its already Slashdotted

    The Gardener

  • boot times (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Gavitron_zero ( 544106 )
    Why the heck are people so interested in boot times on windows PC's? If you are running Win2K or higher, you don't need to reboot very often...

    In the last month, I've had to reboot twice, and that was booting when i got the lan party, and when i got back...

    • Re:boot times (Score:4, Insightful)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:04PM (#2832390)
      a good majority of people don't leave their computers on all the time, that's why.

      Also a lot of people are still running ME or 98. Booting takes up to 5-6 mins on some machines. That's why they are so interested in boot times.
      • Also a lot of people are still running ME or 98. Booting takes up to 5-6 mins on some machines. That's why they are so interested in boot times.

        I wasn't talking about Me or 98 though...i was talking about win2k. On any 9X type, you shouldn't be leaving it on, but Win2K is built to stay running...

        • that's not my point.

          You asked "why are people so interested in boot times." I explained why.

          A good majority of people don't see the need of leaving their computer on when they aren't using it. *gasp*
          • A good majority of people don't see the need of leaving their computer on when they aren't using it.

            There are many reasons why they turn the thing off:

            • To save energy (these fast boxen draw 300W/h)
            • To save fans (they break first!)
            • To prevent fires (who knows what may happen)
            • To protect little children (and the computer from them)
            • To reduce the noise (fans are noisy)
            • To do something else at the desk
            • and many more...

            • Re:boot times (Score:2, Informative)

              by Emil Brink ( 69213 )
              Um, either they draw 300 W, or they don't. They most certainly won't draw 300 W/h, since that just doesn't make sense. 1 W = 1 J/s, dividing by time again is simply crazy. This has been a heads-up from your friendly elementary physics and units consistency police, now please go back to the regular programming. Thank you. ;^)

          • Re:boot times (Score:3, Interesting)

            by Drakino ( 10965 )
            Then people need to look into sleep or hibernation. Everyone assumes it's for laptops, but it works just fine on desktops. I hibernate my media system all the time to have a middle of the road between power usage and boot times.

            Macs should be using sleep mode if running OS X.

    • Re:boot times (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Nameles ( 122260 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:11PM (#2832410) Homepage
      Even in XP, I've seen the fastest bootup times of ANY OS (Win9x's, ME, 2k, Linux, Win 3.x, old old old OS's that I can't remember the names of) I've used.
      • Atheos is fast boot contender too you know...

      • Re:boot times (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        DOS boots pretty damn fast....
      • System 7 on a 10+ year old mac will boot damn fast...like 15 seconds from power on, if that. I don't know how fast it will boot on my G4/7600, but I bet it's faster than XP. (Yup, 7.5/7.6 will run on that box)

      • BeOS still wins hands down in terms of bootup times. :-) But XP is still pretty close.

        Dinivin
      • I had a ZX spectrum once, took about a second to boot.
      • On the same hardware, I've had BeOS, QNX, Win98, Win2k, WinXP, and Linux. Excluding BeOS and QNX, which I haven't done much testing on (although I don't doubt they're quick to boot), WinXP and Linux take about the same time to load, possibly Linux is a tad quicker, because I've got a pretty stripped-down kernel. But WinXP takes a good half the time of it's predecessor.

        (note: it's a SMP celeron system, so that may have something to do with it)
        • A default XP install on my box boots in about 1/3 the time than the default Redhat 7.2 workstation install (booting into X Windows to make it fair, even though without going into X it is still about 1/2 as slow.).

          • Re:boot times (Score:3, Informative)

            by Howie ( 4244 )
            It's worth mentioning that since at least NT4, the NT-based OSes 'cheat' about boot times compared to many Unixes... The typical unix will go through it's rc files (or rc.d/nnn dirs) and run the scripts in turn and wait for them to finish. NT plops it's login screen up long before it's finished loading Services (the rough equivalent of things like Sendmail and BIND on your *nix box). Wait and see how much time you need until both systems stop accessing the disk after reboot - the NT system will clatter away running IIS, DNS, DHCPd, whatever you have configured, for quite a while after the login screen has appeared.
      • Ever notice how it seems that the newer and faster your computer gets, the longer the sucker takes to boot?

        Hence, I believe that (Myriad's law?):

        Boot Time is Inversely Proportionate to Computing Power - The more power you've got, the longer it's going to take.

        Ie, my old 486DX50 took longer to bring up DOS than my 386. (The 386 behind my 286, 8086. Hell, the C64 kicked all their asses!) Primarily because of added TSRs, memory managers etc.

        Then my P100 took longer to fire up... Good 'ol Windows.

        Now the Athlon takes ages... init bloody RAID arrays, UTA100 controllers, SCSI devices, Windows...let windows initialize all the above plus more. Wait wait wait. Go for coffee. Wait some more.

        Kind of sick really.

        • Gates Law (Score:5, Funny)

          by Myriad ( 89793 ) <myriad@the[ ]d.com ['bso' in gap]> on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:47PM (#2832747) Homepage
          Ah, I see that in a way Mr.Gates got there first:

          From the Jargon Dictionary [astrian.net]

          Gates's Law: "The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the every-18-month doubling in hardware caopacity per dollar predicted by Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat.

        • Well a lot of that has to do with what is in your system. My PIII 700 with XP certianly boots slower than my 486 50 of yester year, however most of that is hardware. IT takes longer for the system to POST than for XP to load. IT has to scan 768MB ram, several HDs, 3 CD-ROMs, a SCSI card, etc, etc. It takes about 40 seconds to post and then around 20-25 for XP to load.

          Now back when I had 2000, that took longet to load, it took like a minute or so, but now it's the POST not the OS that is the slower part. I tell you what, if you take a board with a celeron, 64 MB ram, a 4MB VESA card, SB16 and a single HD and boot to DOS, you're up and running in like 15 seconds flat :).

      • The thing is with Windows XP that it doesn't load ANYTHING at bootup. On my Athlon 800, it takes about 1 minute to log into my user once I've clicked it in the login screen. And I can forget about tweaking or disabling things.

        But you might be interested in knowing what is the fastest OS I've ever seen at booting: Linux From Scratch [linuxfromscratch.org]. The BIOS took longer than the booting itself. 10 seconds after I had pressed the power button, I was ready to log in and every daemon was loaded. And the best part was that I knew what was going on.

      • Apparantly you've never booted BeOS.

    • Re:boot times (Score:2, Interesting)

      by trentfoley ( 226635 )
      I use a laptop and am rather mobile with it. Boot times are very important when you just need to check that one little thing that some pesky client "needs". There is nothing more frustrating than having the conversation with the client go on to something entirely different while still waiting for a login prompt to appear.
      • As someone pointed out to me the other day here, and has changed the way I use my laptop - if it's a Win2K try Standby next time. As long as the battery holds out, my Toshiba now 'boots' in 3 seconds, and shuts down in about the same. I don't know why I never tried it before.

        Which reminds me - anyone know if I can do the same with Linux? I'd like to be able to suspend (mostly-power down) or suspend-to-disk (complete power-down) RH7.2 too...

    • Re:boot times (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ivarneli ( 4238 )
      The operating system is not the only factor that decides system uptime. Many people do not leave their computer on all the time for one reason or another. For example, I turn mine off every night because I can't sleep with the noise. But boot times are important for many other reasons. Boot times are very important for people who dual boot and have to switch operating systems often. My work forces me to switch between Windows and Linux about 6 times per day. If Windows takes 5 minutes to boot, that's a half hour of time that has been lost. It's even more important when doing service work on computers. I used to work at a local tech shop, and the reboot times add up when you have to install a number of different applications or drivers. Also, we used to test parts, so if I had 50 video cards to test, that meant booting Windows 50 times. A great deal of time is wasted depending on how long it takes to load.

      BeOS is probably the fastest-booting full-featured operating system, taking about 7 seconds to boot. DOS is of course much faster, although there isn't a whole lot for it to do. MS-DOS 5.0 with no autoexec.bat/config.sys presents a command prompt pretty much instantly after POST, even on a 486. I once got an extremely minimal Linux to boot in 3 seconds on a Pentium 90 when I was designing a car mp3 stereo. However, that was without any daemons running, no unnecessary drivers, etc... so it was not really a usable general-purpose operating system. In the Windows world, I would consider Win95 to be the fastest (contrary to every review and ad for Win98+ that claimed faster boot and shutdown times). A fresh install of Win95 on my Athlon 800 loads in under 10 seconds, although this starts going up when you install a real video driver, Internet Explorer 5, etc. Still, if you carefully monitor what gets loaded on startup, you can keep Win95's boot time under 30 seconds, which helps immensely when rebooting many times daily is necessary. Even in cases of normal use, a short boot time is a great convenience.

      But maybe that's just me.
  • It says he needs to upgrade to a "higher service level" or something, cool! So, with .NET you have to pay for eveyrone who views your webpage
    (SARCASM)

  • A treat! (Score:4, Funny)

    by alexmogil ( 442209 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:01PM (#2832380) Homepage Journal
    We finally had the chance to hear 'I hate Microsoft and Intel' in *one sentence*! How rare!
  • O Tomshardware, they also have a comparison, it's pretty good. From what I read it doesn't seem like this chip is really anything special. I guess I'll just wait until 3GHz before really getting exited ;).
  • http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/cpus/intel/p4nw/

    does anything beat hardocp when it comes to testing new hardware?
    The athlon XP tromples the P4 once again.

  • Well Thought Out? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by The Gardener ( 519078 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:09PM (#2832406) Homepage

    This was the system I benchmarked the P4 on. I used 128MB of Micron PC1600 (200MHz) ECC DDR Memory.

    The latest, preproduction, Intel CPU, and he only springs for 128 MB of ram? Why bottleneck the thing? No one is going to production ship it like that. I will likely go out the door with 512 or so.

    The Gardener

    • Re:Well Thought Out? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by VAXman ( 96870 )
      Additionally, why are they using such slow memory? Why not PC2100, PC2400, or PC2700?
    • If it comes from Dell, it will have 128 RAM and 20GB hard disk. That's the P4 config they have been pushing the hell out of for quite some time. They will do any bastardization to meet their price sweet spots.

      "Dude, your gettin a Dell" seems more of a warning than anything.

  • Bah... (Score:1, Troll)

    by Nameles ( 122260 )
    With my current setup (1.2ghz and 640mb ram) and my last one (800mhz and 256mb ram), XP still runs pretty damn smooth, even while running 20 some odd windows, running a server, playing music, etc, with both configs. Last time I was in Linux (Bah to Windows installs formating the MBR) with 800 and 256megs of ram, XP was still faster with those stats than GNOME was (I don't care much for KDE).
    • beh, please moderate that post down, and put me on your Foe list while you're at it, Thanks for your time.

    • Re:Bah... (Score:3, Funny)

      by tswinzig ( 210999 )
      Sir, how dare you bring reality into the picture!

      By the way, why the hell does CmdrTaco care how fast it runs Windows XP? He only runs Linux, right?
  • Features (D845BG Motherboard)

    Support for Intel mPGA478 Pentium-4 400MHz FSB Processors up to 2.2GHz+.
    Onboard AC'97 Audio with SoundMAX with SPX Technology and Microphone Pre-Amplifiers.
    Two 184-pin memory slots with support for up to 2GB PC2100 (DDR266) SDRAM Memory.
    4 External USB 1.1 Connections for added peripherals, with support for an additional 3 USB 1.1 connections.
    Intel Active Monitor for monitoring of system temperatures, fan speeds, and power supply voltages.
    1 1.5V AGP 4X/2X Port for Accelerated 3D Graphics.
    6 32-Bit PCI Ports for added components.
    Ultra ATA/100 Disk Support.
    Onboard 82562ET Intel Pro/100 LAN

    Features (Pentium-4 2.2GHz Processor)

    Intel Net-Burst Micro-Architecture.
    512KB Advanced Transfer Cache (L2) with 8-way associativity and Error Correcting Code (ECC).
    System Bus Frequency at 400MHz.
    Rapid Execution Engine: Arithmetic Logic Units (ALUs) run at twice the processor core frequency.
    Hyper Pipelined Technology.
    Advanced Floating-Point and Multimedia Unit (FPU) for enhanced video, audio, encryption and 3D performance.
    144 enhanced Streaming SIMD Extensions 2 (SSE2) instructions.
    Advanced Dynamic Execution
    Power Management Capabilities
    8KB Level 1 Data Cache
    Optimized for 32-Bit applications running on advanced 32-Bit operating systems.

    Overall it seems like an evolutionary step.

  • Have you used XP, Taco? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    > This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16
    > running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)

    Have you actually USED XP, Taco? It's actually quite nippy imho.
  • Soon CPU fans will require a separate hole in the opposite side of the case. Mounting one will require at least two spare chips, or replaceable cores, since I'll inevitably drop the fan on the core at least once during the mounting process.
  • The guy needs some photography courses, badly. Or maybe glasses :-) Look at this [greenjifa.com], for example! What a sloppy job!

  • She's hosed captain (Score:4, Funny)

    by 0xA ( 71424 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @12:55PM (#2832550)
    Hmmm, maybe they should chuck that board into their web server....
  • Windows 3.0 on a 386 ran rather decently. 4 megs of ram? I could only have dreamed of having 4 megs of ram on my 386. I DID upgrade to 3 megs at one point. Back then I did it with an add-on isa card.

    Windows 3.0 even ran decently on a 286. And you didn't really need much more than 640K of ram, and it didn't complain much about it or spend too much time thrashing.

    However, thats not to say it was useful. In fact, I don't quite remember WHAT I did with win 3.0 except maybe something like paintbrush and the scanner software. Everything else back then still used Dos, and so did I. Windows was something that got loaded into a desqview window, along with all the other dos programs. :)

    -Restil
    • Actually, Word and Excel were running pretty well on Windows 3.x and a 386.

      I was really amazed by Excel. For everything else, my Atari ST was way better :)


    • Sure, you might have felt that Windows ran fine on a 286 at the time, but try using it now. You'll be making coffees during the screen redraws. As our computers have gotten faster, our perception of acceptable response time has changed greatly.

      I know I recently had to use a 386DX40 running Windows 3.1, and I couldn't believe just how slow it felt.

      • True. the screen refreshing really didn't get good until the eisa and vlb cards became available.

        Still... when windows was just another application and not your operating system, you didn't notice it as much. :)

        -Restil

  • Get the slower versions (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Oscarfish ( 85437 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:26PM (#2832673) Homepage
    1.6 GHz and 1.8 GHz Northwood chips are going to be available soon; these will likely be reaching some nice overclocks (maybe up to even 2.4) and these are the chips to get. They're also the only ones most of us will be able to afford, given the way Intel prices their chips (see here [overclockers.com]).

    I'm using an Athlon 1 GHz now and getting nearly a 40% overclock out of it, on an Iwill KK266-R board (KT133A SDRAM), at 155*9; it's not worth it to me to upgrade to an Athlon XP or a DDR chipset.

    Overclockers.com [overclockers.com], probably my favorite site, has daily bits of news and a lot of information lately on Northwoods. Apparently Intel is working on a dual-channel DDR chipset which should be a treat.

  • The end of interpreters! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by chrysalis ( 50680 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @01:35PM (#2832709) Homepage
    Hardware is still getting faster and faster for the same price.

    This is neat for developpers. Soon, source code will be recompiled in real time at every key stroke.

    No more need for interpreters :)


    • Actually, no need for compilers. Just interpret every line of code that much faster. Why compile to native code if you can build high-level engines that can do more at run-time than you can at compile-time? This is part of the theory behind virtual machines like the JVM or Microsoft's EE. Their biggest disadvantage is speed -- and you're right, if the trend continues (and it will) then we won't bother (manually) compiling code at all.

      But you do need to add type safety and type checking to more interpreted languages. That is the second biggest compile time win after performance. Of course, that is more of a flaw in the languages as they are currently designed, not of the interpreter itself.
  • utill I installed Windows 95 on it. Right when Win95 first came out I tryed it out on my 386/16 /w 4megs. Talk about slow boot times. I could turn on my computer and take a shower, eat breakfast, and get ready for my day before I would even get close to being able to use my comptuer. But with windows 3.1 on it, it ran like a dream. Well maybe not a dream, but better than 95!

  • XP on slow machines (Score:4, Informative)

    by DaEvOsH ( 24990 ) on Sunday January 13, 2002 @02:46PM (#2832941)
    This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM. Allright, thats probably crazy talk ;)

    This kind of comments are, sadly, not making /. the best image in the eyes of the public, and not gaining a reputation for clear, objective content it should (could?) have. I know that, after all, this is CmdrTaco's personal journal, but it has millions of visitors and could be one of the showcases to the world of the linux/open source/it community.

    Back to the topic, to those who have used XP little, this is my experience.

    The OS is great, I did not expect something as good from MS. It is stable, plug and play really works and reboots are very ocassional. Uptimes are long. And it is quite easy to administer. Performancewise (the real reason for my comment) it needs lots of memory, but I have been running it on slooow machines, with very satisfactory results.

    For example, it runs very well on my old Sony Vaio laptop, 266Mhz Pentium (not II) with 192Mbs of Ram. It had Win98 before, and I was tired of that. It runs at very good speed, not blazingly fast but acceptable, browses internet faster, boots in shorter time and is totally stable. Also, contrary to Win2k, I get the power management stuff I really need.

    Also, I got some old PCs here at home and it runs pretty well, a 400 Celeron for my mother, 256Mb ram and a 333P2 with 128 Mbs ram. It is a RAM hog, and 128Mb is the minimun acceptable.

    Also, as a recommendation for anyone running it, turn off the blue theme and run it in 'classic' time. Not drawing all those bitmaps will make it more responsive. Also turn off system restore, it slows the system down quite a bit.

    I know this is a place where linux is the ultimate OS. For me, it is, but for some (critical and important) applications. I use it at work. For end users, XP is great, and we (the linux/opensource community) should appreciate how well it works, learn from it the good things and realize that MS just got a better we have to compete against.

    Too bad that (like at work) MS has no way to compete with the pricing of linux :)
    • Something else.. as other post say, it is amazing how well it works. On my 1.4Ghz Athlon, 1Gig ram, I run also a server, gaming (mostly lineage this days), music (mp3's, including server for all the other pc's in the house), development (c++) and debugging, browsing, etc, many, many stuff at the same time. And I have lots of hardware, 8 hard drives, 2 scsi controllers, 1 cd, 2 cd-r, 1 dvd, capture card, 2 monitors, etc, all on this pc. And it is very stable, uptimes are, in my case, as long as I want. I reset to change OS, or to try something in another XP installation.

      By the way, a GREAT app for those who run so many junk on their Windows PC is minimizer http://thebluescreens.8m.com/, so you dont have your taskbar all cluttered by background running apps.
    • I have XP on my machine here, and it runs fine. But then, this is a 1533MHz Athlon and 768MB RAM, so it had damn well better run fine! I will also say that this is the first version of windows which has allowed me to install graphics drivers without requiring a reboot (or, in the case of Win3.1, restarting windows).

      That was a major shock to me and a sign of how things have improved.

      Course, it screwed up on me (in my case, failing to read system files; I can't remember which) within a week requiring a reinstall. It's been fine since, however.

    • Don't like the pro-linux, anti-ms bent to stories on slashdot? Go get your news at msn.

      Ever packet sniff a msn/xp dialup? Have you ever tried to shut down the connection and have the modem spend another two minutes sending msn encrypted data?

      Look, brain washed boy, MS has stolen the software market, Steals your data every chance they get, stole half the jobs in IT, and you have given them your mind.

      Maybe you should buy another opinion.

      MS: "if we want your opinion we'll sell it to you"

      MS memo fron last year: "PLEASE STOP AND TROLL SLASHDOT!"

  • Windows Not Slow (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13, 2002 @05:11PM (#2833487)
    I've been a linux user since 1995. I've used linux professionally since 1996. I've used nothing BUT linux on my desktop machines at work since 1998. I'm a huge fan of linux. I don't care for Microsoft... I despise their business practices and I feel that every iteration of windows up until windows 2000 was a hunk of garbage.

    However, these comments about 2000 and XP being slow are way out of line. They are the type of baseless, smug, nudge nudge wink wink hey other linux geeks look I'm cool I made fun of microsoft comments that I can't stand, and that I think severely hurt the linux community.

    I have a dual boot system at home. Its a dual p2 400, with 393 megs of ram. I have two 10 gig hard drives, one with debian gnu/linux, the other with windows 2000 professional. I use each OS for different purposes. I use debian for my work (development), for my hobby (more development), for some games (quake 1-3 mainly) and for my communications (email, irc, usenet, the www).

    I use windows 2000 for my games that don't work on linux, for my childrens' games, and my wife uses it for digital photo editing, browsing the web, and getting her email.

    Windows 2000 is a decent operating system (sorry to the zealots in the crowd.. but its true). Its been very stable for me. It runs very well on my hardware. I don't have any speed problems. My windows games play fine under it. All my hardware is easily supported with it. Recently I bought a digital camera and a usb printer, and setting them up was a snap. All in all, I've found it to be a very reasonable operating system for desktop use. I've heard XP is much the same, and geared a little more towards home users than 2000.

    All my hardware works under linux just fine as well, and linux runs great on the machine. Setting things up is of course more of a PITA.. when I bought my camera and printer, I had to recompile my kernel because I didn't include usb support in my last kernel. I wrote some scripts for automating downloading images of the camera. These are things an "average" home user does not know how to do, and does not WANT to know how to do.

    Windows is much farther along in terms of useability by non technical users than Linux is. Linux is playing a serious catch up game in that arena.

    Windows 2000 and XP are not slow. Will they run on a 386 with 32 megs of ram? No. Is Linux, with xfree 4.1, a full GNOME or KDE setup, and mozilla reasonable user on older hardware either? No.

    Windows 2000 Professional is also in my experience very stable. I've had IE crash a couple of times on me. Certainly no more times than I've had to kill -9 my mozilla processes.

    Linux is a great operating system for many things. I love it. Its been a pleasure to watch Linux evolve from its early beginnings to where it is now. However, it still has a long way to go (at least in the desktop arena).

    Making unfounded comments about competing operating systems doesn't accomplish anything, other than making you look cool to the other members of the he-man windows hater club. When someone who is unfamiliar with Linux, and uses XP or 2000, hears snickering and comments bashing Windows, when their Windows system in their experience works well, is reliable, fast, and supports all of their hardware, what do you think they think? Do they think "oh gee, I suppose I should use Linux, because Win-doze is for microsoft slaves and retards!". Or do they more likely think "wtf is that person talking about?".

    Only through honestly assessing where we are today can Linux continue to grow and move forward. Standing around patting each other on the back and making fun of other OSes is not a positive activity, and contributes to the negative stereotype of Linux users as an exclusive club of technosnobs.

  • Re:As others will surely also state... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 13, 2002 @07:18PM (#2833964)
    Read the number of posts that use the exact wording, "Linux is not ready for the desktop." I am amazed that they are soooo obvious... Sad really.

    And the tag team that two of them have going is also fun to watch... One makes a statement, then the other one supports it.

    Tisk, tisk tisk. They must really be worried about XP getting trashed. We all know that sales of XP really sucked, and that this dragged down computer sales in the last quarter of the year. Maybe people wanted a choice as to what OS came on their machines.

    Personally, I build my own machines. My favorite is a 2 year old dual celeron on a BP6, overclocked to 522MHz. It has 512 MB of RAM and 80 GB worth of RAID 5 hard drives. That machine is so fast, you click on a icon and the app pops up almost as you are letting up on the mouse. Even Mozilla starts in about 2 seconds.

    I fix the boot sequence to boot to an Xwindows prompt in just a few seconds. All the servers and a lot of the services are started up after X windows is started. I am suprised that we don't have a better boot sequence in Linux yet. Especially since it was so easy to do this.

    Maybe the distribution people need to get together and all agree to a new init method that emphasises boot speed for desktop users. Since this seems to be a problem for a lot of people here.

    Only running applications that are linked against one set of libraries seems to help by not having to cache a lot of different libraries.

    I also would like to see our applications get prelinked against the libraries that they are using, like under OSX. Linking at run time is just too expensive. It is better to do it just the one time and to save the executable prelinked. This can just be another step in the installation process. Prelinking would easily half the load speed of almost every program.

    The last thing that I would recommend is using the intel compiler to compile a some of the executables that are taking a lot of processor, like audio/video codexes.

    This would make them run much more efficiently and be able to take advantage of special instructions on the various platforms. This could easily result in upto 20% performance increase over gcc compiled executibles. Not because gcc is bad, but because intel is just good at writing x86 optimized compilers.

    An increase of 20% will make a 500MHz processor run like a 600MHz processor, and this is the difference between dropping frames and not dropping frames during recording.

    Can you imagine a Linux distribution that did these 3 simple steps? It would boot in 5 seconds to a login prompt, would start programs in sub second times and would need 20% less processor for the same performance as a normal Linux distribution. I'd pay good money for that distribution.
  • This setup might have a chance to run XP without it feeling like a 386/16 running Windows 3.0 on 4 megs of RAM.

    Is it just me or does this sound like a joke you'd hear from Nick Burns - Your Company Computer Guy [jt.org]?
  • In its latest issue the German magazin c't tests the new P4s and Athlons. There is a teaser (in German) [heise.de], and the SPEC Benchmark results [heise.de] online.

    BTW, the new "Prestonia" Xeons implement "Hyper-Threading" [intel.com] (a form of SMT), and report to have two logical processors.

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