Re: Few rush out to buy new Windows Vista

[John Bailo <jabailo@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Roy Schestowitz wrote:

> They seem to be doing at at a lower level of capacity with Windows 2000 [1],
> but the issues are Open Source projects like Firefox (IE7 needs XP+ while
> older Firefox supported 98) and Linux that simply take over the computer.
> It's a dilemma: squeeze for a Vista upgrade and drive the users away to
> Linux, rather than to Vista. Finally, /real/ competition actually shows its
> importance, so overpricing the product won't help in the long-term. Wait and
> watch. It's already happening. A French company migrating 20,000 desktops to
> Linux... and that's just one company... in one among many stories yesterday
> (remember that many migrations are quiet because unsuccessful migrations
> anger the customer/watcher and successful ones attract lobbyist that bully
> and wear you out).
>
> [1] Microsoft Turns Up The Heat On Windows 2000 Users 
>
> ,----[ Quote ]
> | What if you want to keep your old operating systems, such as Windows
> | 2000, running as long as possible?

Here's an interesting anecdote.   We run W2K/SQL2000 servers as database 
to a java application server.   As we added java services, the database 
started rejecting transactions -- even though the W2k Server was running 
at a very low cpu capacity.   However Context Switching was high.

I decided to play around with the SQL2000 configuration and boosted the 
threads (from the default 255 to 512), set SQL to run at a higher 
priority and check NT fibers (lightweight pooling).   Suddenly the 
transaction/rejection dissappeared!

It makes me wonder that a lot of the "crippling" is by means of very 
simple configuration settings (tcp/ip for instance, is normally not set 
for high transaction applications, although that is what many servers 
are used for).