The True Windows Tax

The Windows tax usually refers to the higher price that computers cost because of the amount we unknowingly pay for the Windows license. With computers being so cheap these days, we tend to not care; the higher Windows-induced price tends to show itself in the realm of netbooks, which offer Linux as the alternative.

The true Windows tax, however, is in how the bulky operating system taxes computer speed. This effect is clearly seen on dual-booting netbooks, such as my 1GB LG netbook. Presto Linux boots in 35 seconds; Windows 7RC boots in three minutes, and even then continues to operate sluggishly -- in contrast to the snappy performance of Linux.

This line of thinking was sharpened by a press release headline that read, "Autodesk Increases Moldflow Performance Two Fold." The increase stems from hardware: multicore CPUs, and GPUs specific to certain nVidia graphics boards.

It certainly takes a lot of hardware to run today's Windows snappily; I inherited a recent model of a dual-core 64-bit computer with 4GB RAM and a very fast hard drive. Vista runs well on it, but poorly on other computers with lower specs.

I wonder what speed increase could be accomplished if MoldFlow relinquished the Windows tax and ran on Linux?

Comments

[fcsuper]

Perhaps all software should be written for Linux natively. :)

[Tony]

I'd say this tax applies to all popular GUI OS's: Linux, Windows, and Mac; K and Gnome are kind of porky, too.

What I'd really like to see is how a stripped down OS (say QNX) would run on modern hardware.

[Tony Tanzillo]

Decreasing the usable life of the average PC through the use of needlessly-slow OS and application software serves the interests of Microsoft, precisely because of the bundling of its OS with most new PCs.

Hence, because Microsoft has a very direct interest in the sales of new PCs, it can use slow software to drive sales of them, and profit from the sale of more bundled copies of Windows.

It's just another slimy trick our technlogically-ignorant government completely overlooks.

[DF]

I'd say this tax applies to all popular GUI OS's: Linux, Windows, and Mac; K and Gnome are kind of porky, too.

Not so fast; Mac OS X 'Tiger' could run happily on 350MHz machines, whereas 'Leopard' goes well even on its minimum 867MHz spec, and 'Snow Leopard' has a minimum spec of a 1.5GHz Core Solo. Yes, they benefit from being able to write their software to known configurations of past Macs, but OS X stuff like graphics-card acceleration of the UI works even on Macs more than ten years old, enormously expanding their useful lives.

And the stated priorities by Apple with 'Snow Leopard' bear some comparison to what Microsft will eject out the door in October:

http://www.apple.com/macosx/refinements/

(e.g. faster, slimmer, 64-bit, GPGPU acceleration in apps and better use of multiple CPUs)

[Tony]

DP, OS X on a 350MHz Mac with 512MB is optimistic

And I consider >256M memory definitely porky -- although I've run XP fine with 128M and 256M.

[DF]

DP, OS X on a 350MHz Mac with 512MB is optimistic

I beg to differ, as someone who was using a B&W PowerMac in work up until a few years ago (G3 350MHz, 768MB RAM, GeForce 2 MX with 10.4) with no noticeable slowness for office work and some video streaming.

And I consider >256M memory definitely porky -- although I've run XP fine with 128M and 256M.

RAM is cheap. And, saying that, I really don't believe that someone can "run XP fine" with 128MB of it, or even 256MB.

[Bill F]

If you want to see REAL speed, I wonder what would happen if you ran DOS on a current core-2 quad, 3gHz, 3gb machine?

I have a very old Toshiba T1000 laptop, arguably one of the first laptops. DOS, all 72k (yes, k) of it is burned on a ROM chip instead of loading from disk. It also has 720k of battery-sustained RAM drive. I can go from a power-on cold boot to running WordPerfect 5.2 in under 3 seconds. And that's on a 4.77mHz machine!

My current desktop machine, see specs above, runs XP x64 and takes 3 -1/2 MINUTES to get Word up and running from a cold boot.

[Robert Green]

Software will be written for OS's that are well supported and installed as OEM systems on the computers you buy from Dell, HP, etc.

Until somebody puts some major $$ behind Linux and gets it on every computer shipping software will continue to be written for Windows.

PS - There just aren't that many people out there who even care to be honest.