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Technology Stocks : Compaq -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Captain Jack who wrote (74791)	1/2/2000 11:34:00 PM
From: jim kelley	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 97611

Why is CPQ the only company reporting a freeze problem-if it is due to MSFT Win98????

To: Captain Jack who wrote (74791)	1/3/2000 12:24:00 PM
From: rudedog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 97611

Jack - This problem is not unique to CPQ. When the original Windows program was designed in 1984-85, they allocated a pair of "pages" for graphics and system "handles". Remember that was before the 386 chip, and the 286 used 64K pages for EVERYTHING. With average memory size at the time, 64K seemed like an ocean of space. As the capabilities of Windows increased, and the artificial restrictions on memory access disappeared, this resource page became more and more of a problem. NT used a completely different resource allocation scheme, and a completely different memory management. NT is a "virtual system" like UNIX. Windows used "swap" management - it is essentially a memory based OS which takes a complete "context" and swaps it to disk when memory gets tight. This is much less efficient than the NT method, and does not use memory very well, but it was easier to program... With Win95, MSFT made some attempt to fix the resource page problem but the result was that the allocation was doubled, the problem was still there. As more and more "resident" programs were expected by users, there was less resource available for general purpose use. MSFT exacerbated the problem in Win98 and especially Win98 second edition, which inserted MSFT's own resident programs into the mix to enhance the "user experience". The newest generation of Presario systems are so powerful (the 5900 uses the 750 MHz Athlon AMD processor, for example), the number of "standard" add-on programs was increased. Apparently, this, when combined with the things many users do today, used up the resource blocks. This does not actually "hang" the system but things get so slow that it sure looks like it's hung - for example, since new windows can't come up until an existing program frees up resource, for example, the "CTRL-ALT-DEL" prompt can't even come up. This has nothing to do with how much memory is on the system - the resource blocks are the same for the smallest and largest systems. In this sense, the problem actually gets worse on larger machines, since they have a proportionally smaller resource pool. The 5800 and 5900 machines have 128MB standard... That's one of the reasons I use NT for all my serious work - I only use Win98 on a machine for my kids' games.