What does your desktop look like?

[MidnightCowboy]

Riot invokes different images in my mind, but I guess I'll have to check this one out

[Anupam]

Originally Posted by MidnightCowboy

Wonder what you do with the 10 seconds saved?

Also, instead of using a horizontal scroll, try picking up the monitor and shaking the image to the side you want. Works for me every time

Every second counts

You just want to kill my monitor, dont you

[Anupam]

Originally Posted by MidnightCowboy

Riot invokes different images in my mind, but I guess I'll have to check this one out

Same here.. I wonder why such a name was chosen

[MidnightCowboy]

Windows 7 with PotPlayer, Rainmeter & CursonFX (just above the meter).

[wdhpr]

Taylor Swift... Pretty and can sing too. :-)

Hows Win7 treating you? I'm thinking of upgrading my sons Vista and although its a 64 bit machine his version of Vista is 32 bit. I would think getting the 32 bit version would allow it to run most of his older game stuff.

I found some good advice at http://www.techspot.com/guides/177-w...l-32bit-64bit/
It looks like everyone will eventually use 64bit operating systems but it seems the transition has been allot rougher than the 16 to 32 bit transition.

[MidnightCowboy]

Windows 7 is fine, at least for me anyway. The only major drawback I have is it's impossible to buy an English language version here in Brazil so I have to use Ultimate with a translation pack. This is only so-so because a lot of the back-end stuff still displays in Portuguese. Not much fun when you're trying to decipher log entries for instance.

Otherwise there's always the nagging security issues associated with running Windows which just aren't there with Linux, plus I don't enjoy the same stability of mail clients and browsers in Windows as I do with Linux.

[Panzer]

When I am home alone, I have Marianna and Camila Davalos on the desktop, though.

[Remah]

Originally Posted by wdhpr

It looks like everyone will eventually use 64bit operating systems but it seems the transition has been allot rougher than the 16 to 32 bit transition.

How soon we all forget. The earlier transitions were very different.

8-bit to 16-bit 8086 was source code and addressing (segmentation) compatible so no big deal when IBM PC came out with 16-bit 8088 CPU. The PC also ran 8-bit peripherals and when they were later dropped there was lots of angst and pain.

In 1985 the 32-bit 80386 CPU came out about 4 years before Windows. So it took 10 years to get 32-bit Windows 95. There were never any 8-bit apps to drop so 16-bit apps continued for another 11 years until Vista.

Windows 64-bit versions came out the same year as each of the Itanium and x64 CPU architectures so we didn't have to wait 10 years this time. But this time there were two compatible software types 16-bit and 32-bit. Fortunately, Microsoft dropped 16-bit so for the first time we have a transition that is not source compatible. That is the only thing making it rougher for people as drivers can't be simply ported to 32-bit.

The main part of the transition is 32-bit to 64-bit and that is actually much smoother and better managed than the 16-bit to 32-bit transition. And we're only 9 years into the transition.

[wdhpr]

Originally Posted by Remah

The main part of the transition is 32-bit to 64-bit and that is actually much smoother and better managed than the 16-bit to 32-bit transition. And we're only 9 years into the transition.

Thanks for the explanation. By the time I owned my IBM compatible computer (1989) The 32 bit bit software worked very well and still worked fine with 16 bit stuff. I bought my IBM compatible just so I could play Doom

Before 1989 I owned and Amiga which I like allot but it soon died a slow lingering death.

Anyway throw Unity and Gnome 3 at us Linux users and things start to get really fun!

[Remah]

Originally Posted by wdhpr

Thanks for the explanation. By the time I owned my IBM compatible computer (1989) The 32 bit bit software worked very well and still worked fine with 16 bit stuff. I bought my IBM compatible just so I could play Doom

Before 1989 I owned and Amiga which I like allot but it soon died a slow lingering death.

Anyway throw Unity and Gnome 3 at us Linux users and things start to get really fun!

What I find most interesting is that the x86 CPUs can effectively run everything back to the late 1970s. The CPU transistor count of the previous generation is less than half the new generation. Just 2% of the latest Intel I7's transistors are needed to duplicate the last of the 32-bit CPUs (Intel Pentium 4).

The decision to stop supporting 16-bit stuff was made because segmented memory is messy. This way they simplify with flat address spaces.