Monday, September 04, 2006

Grinding Windows (To A Halt?)

Some of you have probably read this post on Digg. Someone apperantly made a video about Edgy Eft running 40 processes without crashing.

Some people basically replied "Windows [and Linux] can do this for ages!" or like "This is really neat!".

It is really cool though that the Ubuntu team has managed to quickly open Openoffice (around 3 seconds now), I am really looking forward to see that running on my laptop.

However, I wanted to prove that Windows will also not crash when doing this (not a recent version that is). So here it is: my video response, using the following amazing batch script:
:loopit
start sol
start mspaint
start calc
start notepad
goto loopit
It's the loop of doom! Sorry for the bad quality, but it's better than YouTube. When I close the command line window, Windows was running around 140 instances of Notepad
, Paint, Solitaire and Calculator each (screenshots maybe later). However: during all this, it did slow down, but is was still quite manageable afterwards. I had to stop the loop because Paint was starting to spit out error messages (as you can see in the video).

Then, I closed the four groups from the taskbar. Windows seems to have a bug here: it doesn't close all programs and some had to be closed manually (ah the fun!).

On which system was all this done: on my main Desktop/beast machine: two Opterons and 4GB of RAM, so I agree that this is in fact not really fair towards that first Linux-video, but it was a fun thing to do (I was surprised that Camtasia could survive the heavy load).

In conclusion: I do not want to flame Ubuntu or Linux in general (I am running it myself so...), but running 40 processes at once is not such a formidable feat. Also: Windows is more stable than Mac/Linux/Whatever-zealots tend to believe[1].

A, those lazy Sundays...

[1]: Except for Windows 3.1. And 95. And 98. 98SE too, a little. And ME. Especially ME. Stay away from ME... 2000 might work I think. Windows XP 32 bit too (I was running 64bit). And 2003 probably too.

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