U
User
My company used to have some 1000 Sun workstations with around 1500
CPUs on our network, and we used to run all sorts of parallel jobs,
sometimes on 50-60 CPUs at a time. It ran great, using peoples'
second processors during the day, and using all processors overnight.
But over the past few years they took away all our Suns and gave us
PCs, and now they have us running Windows (despite an almost unanimous
desire among the engineers to run Linux). Well, now we run all PCs
with Windows 2000 or Windows XP on our desktops, and to make up for it
we have a few hundred Linux PCs in clusters for our parallel jobs.
(And we have a whole team of people writing Perl scripts to give us
the functionality that was built into Unix.)
What is it with Windows? I can be editing a document in Word or a
presentation in PowerPoint or a text file in Wordpad, and the whole
machine locks up. In fact, everybody's machine locks up at the same
time. We can go for 10-15 minutes before anything comes back to life,
then everything is back to normal (well, normal for Windows).
Sometimes we can go for a whole morning without the ability to run any
PC applications. What causes this? When we call our help desk, all
they tell us is "we're working on it". On the Sun network, if
something on the network went down, we didn't even know it unless we
tried to access that resource. But now it seems that even moving my
mouse requires checking in with Redmond to be sure my license is up to
date, and if the network is slow, well, I just need to be patient.
And I can't even get to a Unix machine without running Exceed, which
is subject to all the problems of any other PC application. Life was
a hell of a lot better with Unix.
Is Windows really this slow, or have our network people just fu**ed
things up?
CPUs on our network, and we used to run all sorts of parallel jobs,
sometimes on 50-60 CPUs at a time. It ran great, using peoples'
second processors during the day, and using all processors overnight.
But over the past few years they took away all our Suns and gave us
PCs, and now they have us running Windows (despite an almost unanimous
desire among the engineers to run Linux). Well, now we run all PCs
with Windows 2000 or Windows XP on our desktops, and to make up for it
we have a few hundred Linux PCs in clusters for our parallel jobs.
(And we have a whole team of people writing Perl scripts to give us
the functionality that was built into Unix.)
What is it with Windows? I can be editing a document in Word or a
presentation in PowerPoint or a text file in Wordpad, and the whole
machine locks up. In fact, everybody's machine locks up at the same
time. We can go for 10-15 minutes before anything comes back to life,
then everything is back to normal (well, normal for Windows).
Sometimes we can go for a whole morning without the ability to run any
PC applications. What causes this? When we call our help desk, all
they tell us is "we're working on it". On the Sun network, if
something on the network went down, we didn't even know it unless we
tried to access that resource. But now it seems that even moving my
mouse requires checking in with Redmond to be sure my license is up to
date, and if the network is slow, well, I just need to be patient.
And I can't even get to a Unix machine without running Exceed, which
is subject to all the problems of any other PC application. Life was
a hell of a lot better with Unix.
Is Windows really this slow, or have our network people just fu**ed
things up?