Onomatopoeia

Yea, the Broadcom crap really sucks. I feel bad for businesses being held ransom by them.

Hyper-V just isn’t an option for small businesses, unfortunately (it’s really designed for Enterprise where internal expertise is the norm).

I can ignore their nonsense for my home setup., fortunately.

Have you tried XCP-NG or Proxmox?

I don’t think laptops are much of a concern - virtually every laptop on the planet spends 90% of it’s time plugged in.

All of mine have since the mid-90’s (back then that really shortened NiCd life).

Since they’ve gone lithium I’ve had probably 20 laptops (with multiple running since 2019 as hosts) and seen one spicy pillow - and that was on a year old machine.

My newest machines have charge limit on by default in the hardware. I assume they all do these days as it would reduce support/warranty calls.

Good to keep an eye on them because it can happen to any battery, I just don’t think it’s a huge concern.

Oh, I’m sorry. Lol.

Hyper-V is just so bad. Decided to run it for a while as a test, I couldn’t get back to ESXi fast enough, haha. And I come from the Enterprise world where Hyper-V is common.

My ESXi box draws 20 watts at idle with 3 Windows VMs and 3 Linux VMs.

Guess which of those VMs draws the most power (hint: it’s not Windows).

1994 ish

BBS before that

Yea, I’d just revert the entire setup to 5v DC, and get a 5v DC power supply - less than the voltage it was all designed for, and an led lamp. Or even go 12v and find a 12v led.

Pumping AC, 230v at that, through switching and wires meant for 12v DC just yells “I want a big nasty shock”. (Not that doing it with 120v would be any better).

I can only imagine the arcing happening in that switch

Your (Windows) PC is also a server, as Microsoft included SMB (Server Message Block) and Share Services in the Windows workstation product.

Mapping/connecting to a share on another computer is using that machine as a server.

Linux machines can do this too, it’s just not a default thing like with Windows.

I’m shocked with what I’ve been able to do with an old Dell SFF desktop.

Upgraded to 48GB of ram it’s running ESXi hosting a couple Debian VMs, a DietPi VM, 3 Windows VMs, a massive data drive, idles under 20w and peaks at 80w when I’m doing video conversion.

At this point I’m shopping for some old mini PCs to run the VMs as independent servers because their idle power is so low.

8 watts… That’s RPi territory but with lots more actual horsepower when needed, in a useful package.

I love the concept of the Pi, but this stuff is so hard to compete with.

This was just posted to selfhosted, and does a great job showing what RPi is competing with.

It’s a tool for seeing actual idle wattage draw for a lot of mini-PCs.

Many are in the single-digit idle power - the RPi claim to fame - but have a lot more capability than Pi, plus come in useful packages.

Just thought it would be a useful link for here.

It won by having a single, common, consistent interface/UI/UX.

It’s long been not compatible with a LOT of stuff.

Agreed (and always my first thought with such questions) though I’ll add this is actually a new question to me.

Yes

Jealous!

Haven’t seen one in forever

I disagree with the functional change argument - OneNote didn’t exist then, Excel is a LOT more capable, as is Publisher (and Word). Docs I routinely work with today would crash the mid 90’s versions of the same app because of this difference.

My daily spreadsheets today would be dog snot slow back then. Multiple sheets in a workbook didn’t occur until like 1995-ish, and my current ones probably wouldn’t even open (ignoring the version difference and 64/32 bit difference) - Excel would probably freeze back then. We had to routinely split up docs to make it work at all. In fact, this is part of why OLE was developed by MS, so you could link to data in other files rather than have it all in one massive doc. No one uses the “L” part of OLE today as it’s no longer required to keep file sizes in check.

The performance difference is staggering - back then I would wait for some apps to redraw the screen (photoshop, pagemaker, publisher) if I moved something on the screen.

There’s so much I do today that was a wish-list back then.

It may be bloated to you or me, but it’s a general purpose OS that addresses many more requirements out of the box than Linux, by design.

As a business admin this means when you suddenly have a new business requirement for a functionality, you don’t have to go to every machine and install a new service, or even build a test lab to ensure that service will work stably - MS has done this for you.

This has always been the MS paradigm, and Linux started from the opposite paradigm - provide a nominally functional OS and let the end user (think business/environment management) add only what is needed for that specific use-case.

Windows exists because prior “operating systems” were task-specific (see the IBM Mini’s that still exist in some form) which weren’t really useful for a single user.

Linux exists because people (not just Linus) saw the need for a minimal OS for PC architecture that could be built to task - there had already been efforts to port Unix.

Two very different paradigms addressing different requirements.

Build a Linux box that does what Windows does out of the box (with all the testing that MS has done) and it will require more ram too.

(Though the lack of optimization has always been a problem, something people like Minasi and Gibson have long pointed out.)

Nothing you’ve said negates that multi-tasking in Windows has always required more ram than the nominal “run Windows” spec, and it’s generally been 2x the nominal.

And back to bloat - 64bit requires more ram for everything. That was a big leap. And then there’s maintained support for old software - running 32 bit apps on a 64 bit OS/API. That takes a thunking layer that doesn’t come for free.

Linux and Windows simply work from 2 very different paradigms.

Funny, no one ever complains about the memory requirements for say an AS400… Oh, yea, it can’t do anything that Windows does - that’s not what it was designed for. And really, Linux wasn’t either - you can just build it for that if you want (as the many distros have).

That’s a different OS altogether.

Try to run Windows in 8 gig and you’ll have a bad time.

It’s just the way it is.

Um, 16gb has been the minimum for years, as in “do not build a machine with less, you’ll regret it at some point”.

And 32 has been the “this is what you really want if you multi-task heavily”, so yea I wouldn’t try to game with less than 32.

My 2019 laptop came with 32 by default - you had to specifically choose 16.

5mm is tiny

I’d sooner invest in the spot welding tools.

Right?

FFS just give us the start menu and the gadget bar from Win7(?) or whenever they brought out that half-baked insecure thing - just fix the security in it.

What am I saying, I’ve been running Open Shell since Win10 (well, Classic Shell since Win8, but I only used that for 5 minutes before reverting to 7).

I would think people in healthy relationships aren’t even seeing the survey, let alone interested in contributing. They’re busy living.

You may be, but business isn’t. And this is what business wants.

Keep mind a business may have tens of thousands of machines and users.

An alternative to Syncthing is Resilio.

I use both on Windows and iOS - Resilio does a better job syncing in the background.

Either one is a good answer though (and I generally prefer ST anyway).

Yes.

It eliminates risks.

For example I have a proper NAS, a server with one large drive, and 2 external drives.

Guess what I never have a problem with? The NAS or the internal drives. Occasionally one of the external drives will just disappear from the server, because they’re not really intended to be up 24/7. So I’ll have to power cycle it.

Also those external drives don’t have any active cooling - they weren’t designed for that use case. So I’ve found they tend to get warm if I’m copying anything to them, and now have an old case fan on them. Talk about janky.

Pi is a good option because of it’s low power draw.

However I find used mini pc’s and Small Form Factor desktops to be a better value and their idle power is similar to the latest Pi (while costing about the same as a new Pi).

Of, wow, ViewMaxx… I had completely forgotten that.

Sure would like to get a collectiin of this stuff and run in a VM just for fun.

HP had an internal system just to make a simple GUI in DOS, forget about was called. Just gave you buttons for a dozen programs.

Oh Trumpet something… The hell of getting a stack back then

Haha

Digital Research DOS, of my memory is right

Yep, let mother nature do her thing, which she does well