Tell Me a Story
I remember saying that as a child. Stories were always fun. My Nana was great at ones about the olden days. Here’s my high tech, cliff notes version.
Windows is unavoidable for most. It wasn’t always that way. OS/2 was a superior Operating System but owned by IBM who couldn’t merchandise free money.
Windows came into existence with under powered computers the norm. To make it work they did kludges. Kludges are something all programmers are familiar with. They are little tricks that let you accomplish a task that otherwise might be impossible. The other side of their reputation is they are snakes in the grass waiting to nail you if you looked away for a second.
The kludges first implemented under Windows are nailing/poisoning us to this day. The worst idea was what was called co-operative multitasking. The processors of the day had interrupts available. Interrupts can do what they say. But, they weren’t necessary in the old single threaded applications. When multitasking came along, the idea was programmers were gentlemen and would release their task in a courteous fashion to other applications. I am/was a programmer. Nuff sed!
People obviously wanted their program to look best/speedy and courtesy was lacking. As hardware grew to the state of today, the problems from the early kludges remains. I have a system with 8 processors. Each is more powerful than anything even imagined when Windows hit. There is no excuse for processes hanging or computer looking sluggish. Guess what?
I’m using Windows 7 64-bit – MS’ latest and greatest. My computer is very close to state of the art with enough memory to avoid paging. I just allowed a poor application (Poker Track Stud) to compact its database. It completly took over the computer. Other times I’ll be doing seemingly insignificant task and the computer hangs with applications graying out from not getting access to the processor.
Windows has improved over the years but a chart of that success would parallel graphing a hyper active player who overplays every hand. It is the old two step forward and one or more back.
Windows provides us indirectly with some great applications. That is really its only claim to fame. Understand that this will at times frustrate you. It isn’t your fault. It is the perfect storm of application and operating system conspiring to bring what should be easily doable to its knees.
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gg last night.
. Although I agree with you in general.
Set the processor affinity of the PT before you compact the DB then you will not have these problems..