Windows Technical Preview  

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  1. 1. On a scale of 1-5, 1 being worst, 5 being best. What do you think of Windows 10 from the leaks so far?

    • 5.Great, best OS ever
      156
    • 4. Pretty Good, needs a lot of minor tweaks
      409
    • 3. OK, Needs a few major improvements, some minor ones
      168
    • 2. Fine, Needs a lot of major improvements
      79
    • 1.Poor, Needs too many improvements, all hope is lost, never going to use it
      41
  2. 2. Based on the recent leaks by Neowin and Winfuture.de, my next OS upgrade will be?

    • Windows 10
      720
    • Windows 8
      20
    • Windows 7
      48
    • Sticking with XP
      3
    • OSX Yosemite
      35
    • Linux
      24
    • Sticking with OSX Mavericks
      3
  3. 3. Should Microsoft give away Windows 10 for free?

    • Yes for Windows 8.1 Users
      305
    • Yes for Windows 7 and above users
      227
    • Yes for Vista and above users
      31
    • Yes for XP and above users
      27
    • Yes for all Windows users
      192
    • No
      71


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This many. Seriously, I can't describe how much I HATE this damn window.

 

attachicon.gifOptions.PNG

While I agree that the options could be presented in a better manner I would hate to wave goodbye to them. They're not hurting anything, are they?

While I agree that the options could be presented in a better manner I would hate to wave goodbye to them. They're not hurting anything, are they?

They're legacy options. They should remain with IE, and not be moved to Spartan.

They're legacy options. They should remain with IE, and not be moved to Spartan.

I must respectfully disagree. I am curious though about your position, though. Would you consider the accessibility options to be legacy? I would hope not.

I must respectfully disagree. I am curious though about your position, though. Would you consider the accessibility options to be legacy? I would hope not.

 

When you start comparing IE to other modern browsers and how they manage to get by without inundating the user with this many options then you might start to agree. Seriously read through all the options and tell me how many really need to be there?

While I agree that the options could be presented in a better manner I would hate to wave goodbye to them. They're not hurting anything, are they?

 

I would imagine they could still be accessed by something like chrome://flags

When you start comparing IE to other modern browsers and how they manage to get by without inundating the user with this many options then you might start to agree.

No, I won't.

Seriously read through all the options and tell me how many really need to be there?

That really depends on the user, doesn't it? I myself don't need the accessibility options, for example, but I am certain that there are others who do. I don't see how having more options is a bad thing as it makes the browser more customizable . . .

I would imagine they could still be accessed by something like chrome://flags

To be honest that doesn't sound like a bad idea . . . It would certainly be better than removing the options altogether.

WRT pinning IE sites it seems that either actual Tiles (in their smallest form) will come to the Taskbar (and other shell locations) or a major, TV advertised component of Windows 7+ will be FUBAR'd and no longer provide the same convenience or functionality.

As a jaded MS watcher I really hope they have a rabbit left in their hat. What are the chances tho..?

There's probably a good number of options in IE that don't apply to Spartan anymore because of legacy code that's been dropped, like for example, the whole "compatibility view" options in IE. That's no longer a thing in Spartan so it's gone, why just copy over options as is from IE?

 

As long as the core options are there then it's fine really. There's also options missing that are coming in a later build, like the download manager options and future extension options.

I must respectfully disagree. I am curious though about your position, though. Would you consider the accessibility options to be legacy? I would hope not.

Accessibility is different than classic ActiveX and BHO options. There's multimedia options in there yet from Windows 95. Yikes.

 

Some of this stuff just needs to go. Inundating the user with this stuff just really isn't necessary.

There's probably a good number of options in IE that don't apply to Spartan anymore because of legacy code that's been dropped, like for example, the whole "compatibility view" options in IE. That's no longer a thing in Spartan so it's gone, why just copy over options as is from IE?

 

As long as the core options are there then it's fine really. There's also options missing that are coming in a later build, like the download manager options and future extension options.

 

Most people probably do not feel the importance of compatibility mode unless you live in the Enterprise world.  Just about every work related .mil site I go to has to run in compatibility mode.  Ranging from online training modules to approving my civilians timecards and everything in between.

 

Obviously, by time Windows 10 makes its way to our computers (many...many...many years...if ever) ... the sites could be "fixed" though they are very slow to change.

Most people probably do not feel the importance of compatibility mode unless you live in the Enterprise world.  Just about every work related .mil site I go to has to run in compatibility mode.  Ranging from online training modules to approving my civilians timecards and everything in between.

 

Obviously, by time Windows 10 makes its way to our computers (many...many...many years...if ever) ... the sites could be "fixed" though they are very slow to change.

You're going to risk the security of your computers by dragging your feet? Please. If the boss wants to update, you'll update. Windows 7 loses support in the next 5 years. IE 11 will retain compatibility mode.

Most people probably do not feel the importance of compatibility mode unless you live in the Enterprise world.  Just about every work related .mil site I go to has to run in compatibility mode.  Ranging from online training modules to approving my civilians timecards and everything in between.

 

Obviously, by time Windows 10 makes its way to our computers (many...many...many years...if ever) ... the sites could be "fixed" though they are very slow to change.

 

That has little to do with Spartan though, it's why IE is still going to be part of windows 10, just for that business support that needs it.

 

You won't be using Spartan for any intranet sites or apps at work, just for the web and mostly for consumers.

You're going to risk the security of your computers by dragging your feet? Please. If the boss wants to update, you'll update. Windows 7 loses support in the next 5 years. IE 11 will retain compatibility mode.

 

What are you talking about?

 

That has little to do with Spartan though, it's why IE is still going to be part of windows 10, just for that business support that needs it.

 

You won't be using Spartan for any intranet sites or apps at work, just for the web and mostly for consumers.

 

Oh yea...true enough.

I would imagine they could still be accessed by something like chrome://flags

Is that somehow less obtuse than the current advanced window?  I agree it needs a good degree of cleanup but lets not get ridiculous.  Its funny that the advanced screen is called out and not lower hanging fruit like 'connections', cause we all setup our dialup through there.

It is still infuriating beyond belief. Connecting to the VM in Hyper-V doesn't work half the time. I don't know if this is an issue with 10, or with Hyper-V in 8.1.

 

It is also slow, incredibly slow. Even with 4 CPU cores and 2 GBs of RAM in the VM.

I've been using Hyper-v heavily for every build thus far and haven't actually had any issues with Hyper-V itself. Some apps like Hulu don't work with Hyper-V installed though.

I've been using Hyper-v heavily for every build thus far and haven't actually had any issues with Hyper-V itself. Some apps like Hulu don't work with Hyper-V installed though.

 

My HDD where the VM is located is at 100% usage all time when running the VM, without ANYTHING at all happening, and it is slowing down so much that any kind of testing is pretty much impossible. It is a non-system HDD where I only store VMs, movies and games, yet still any VM is barely usable. I don't know what I am doing wrong, VMs in VMware were NEVER that slow and I was even playing games in them before switching to Hyper-V where the performance is just terrible at best.

 

EDIT: The connection to the VM also seems to crash from time to time if I try to do too many things at once and the VM cannot catch up. Giving up on this, I don't know what the problem is. Is my 5400 RPM HDD not good enough for a single VM without anything else running on it?

It is still infuriating beyond belief. Connecting to the VM in Hyper-V doesn't work half the time. I don't know if this is an issue with 10, or with Hyper-V in 8.1.

 

It is also slow, incredibly slow. Even with 4 CPU cores and 2 GBs of RAM in the VM.

elenarie - that particular issue (with Hyper-V) has more to due with the differences between it and other virtualization solutions.  Both VirtualBox and VMware have very *centralized* networking - Hyper-V does not.  Hyper-V has a virtual switch for every network adapter physically present/enabled - for example, my newest (and also my only portable) Hyper-V box has both a wired AND a wireless adapter - this means two virtual switches; one for each adapter.  While that means that I can actually segregate VM Internet traffic from host traffic (which requires extra effort from VirtualBox or VMware), it's not exactly common thinking in terms of non-corporate virtualization

 

Also, if you are running a quad-core CPU, add an additional core to the VM - the default (all VM solutions) is one core per running VM.

 

Lastly, Hyper-V in 10 (compared to 8.1) will be somewhat slower due to the debug code being still present (and features being in flux - it's why I won't be using Hyper-V in 10 for mobile development just yet - instead, that will remain the provence of Server 2012R2 and my core Hyper-V box.

My HDD where the VM is located is at 100% usage all time when running the VM, without ANYTHING at all happening, and it is slowing down so much that any kind of testing is pretty much impossible. It is a non-system HDD where I only store VMs, movies and games, yet still any VM is barely usable. I don't know what I am doing wrong, VMs in VMware were NEVER that slow and I was even playing games in them before switching to Hyper-V where the performance is just terrible at best.

EDIT: The connection to the VM also seems to crash from time to time if I try to do too many things at once and the VM cannot catch up. Giving up on this, I don't know what the problem is. Is my 5400 RPM HDD not good enough for a single VM without anything else running on it?

As a point of reference, my VM is running Server 2012, handles all of my house multimedia streaming and downloading so it can get pretty intense system-wide during moments of gaming on the same machine. I am running two drives in RAID1, separate from the system as well. They are western digital black drives though. 5400RPM may be your problem.
This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Posts

    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. 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It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. 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