4 ms·

And Calc! It takes about 5 seconds to load. And search is so unreliable mixing web and local results.

dmitrygr 8mo ago
I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.
- RankingMember 8mo ago
  If I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows
  - netsharc 8mo ago
    I wonder if it's ancient enough that the exploits floating online are too modern for it... Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...
    - dmitrygr 8mo ago
      This reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.
      - kyboren 8mo ago
        I'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.
        dmitrygr 8mo ago
        Gentoo-by-obscurity?
        kyboren 8mo ago
        That's exactly how I think of it. Gentoo plus ABI obfuscation. I'm sure there are issues (particularly around binary blob drivers) but they seem surmountable given enough effort...
- spwa4 8mo ago
  I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha. And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
  - dmitrygr 8mo ago
    https://dmitry.gr/89 https://dmitry.gr/89 you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs. (emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)
    - phonon 8mo ago
      Derive is more sophisticated. TI-89/92/Nspire is close though.
      - dmitrygr 8mo ago
        Derive doesn’t run on my iPhone sadly
    - spwa4 8mo ago
      Sure (and thanks for the link, do you have a TI-82 as well?) but it won't "last". You'll take the site offline, sooner or later and I can't just store an exe locally and use it in 20 years. I'll lose the ability to install it on phones.
      - dmitrygr 8mo ago
        That is my personal site, I do not expect to take it down, since that is where I post my projects. But also, you can just save it from there entirely, and serve from your own site -- there is no server-side part to it. no 82. I only liked the ti-89
BoredPositron 8mo ago
Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.
- pacifika 8mo ago
  Yeah first time Windows Clock wouldn’t restore because the net wasn’t ready I was shocked
kyboren 8mo ago
I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days. Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds. I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.
- netsharc 8mo ago
  What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.
  - agumonkey 8mo ago
    I'm betting a very large loading time.
  - rstuart4133 8mo ago
    I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too. I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that. I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.
rleigh 8mo ago
If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it. The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.
- lossyalgo 8mo ago
  I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want. It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add". Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.
pjmlp 8mo ago
It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.

I still use a copy of Calc.EXE from Windows 2000 that I just move from machine to machine. It stopped being useful after that. That old one is nice. Hex mode. Starts quickly.

RankingMember 8mo ago
If I could get regular security updates for Windows 2000 I might still be using it- peak Windows
- netsharc 8mo ago
  I wonder if it's ancient enough that the exploits floating online are too modern for it... Hah, I guess the Internet really is like a sewer, you have to have good protective equipment to wade in it...
  - dmitrygr 8mo ago
    This reasoning is actually why I ran Windows XP 64 bit edition for very very long. Most exploits found that it was XP and tried to do stuff and failed on the 64 bit kernel they did not expect.
    - kyboren 8mo ago
      I'm not going to say that's a good idea, but I've long had an idea along similar lines that a source-only distribution that generates a bespoke calling convention, stack frame layout, syscall number mapping, etc. for each individual machine at install time would do a lot to mitigate RCE threats.
      - dmitrygr 8mo ago
        Gentoo-by-obscurity?
        kyboren 8mo ago
        That's exactly how I think of it. Gentoo plus ABI obfuscation. I'm sure there are issues (particularly around binary blob drivers) but they seem surmountable given enough effort...
spwa4 8mo ago
I have a derive.exe from 1996 that I still use. TI's calculator, as an incredibly fast windows app that's like 20% of wolframalpha. And to think on all "modern" OSes you can't even do that. Neither Android nor IOS let you do this in any way shape or form. Even with portable webapps it doesn't work, as webapps go offline. And microsoft clearly wants to create this situation too (last brute force attempt was windows home)
- dmitrygr 8mo ago
  https://dmitry.gr/89 https://dmitry.gr/89 you can also "add to homescreen" on iOS/android and it acts like a native app & works offline. symbolic math - computer algebra system, integration/differentiation, finance app in rom, 3d graphs. (emu is not my work, i only packaged it for PWA and host it for myself to use, but you are welcome to as well)
  - phonon 8mo ago
    Derive is more sophisticated. TI-89/92/Nspire is close though.
    - dmitrygr 8mo ago
      Derive doesn’t run on my iPhone sadly
  - spwa4 8mo ago
    Sure (and thanks for the link, do you have a TI-82 as well?) but it won't "last". You'll take the site offline, sooner or later and I can't just store an exe locally and use it in 20 years. I'll lose the ability to install it on phones.
    - dmitrygr 8mo ago
      That is my personal site, I do not expect to take it down, since that is where I post my projects. But also, you can just save it from there entirely, and serve from your own site -- there is no server-side part to it. no 82. I only liked the ti-89

BoredPositron 8mo ago

Best part is that on a fresh install without internet you are not able to use it...well all of the modern replacement apps.

pacifika 8mo ago
Yeah first time Windows Clock wouldn’t restore because the net wasn’t ready I was shocked

kyboren 8mo ago

I've been pretty much exclusively Linux-based for over a decade now, but I used every version of Windows from 3.11 to Windows 7, so I still have some muscle memory from the good ol' days. Recently I was helping a relative do something on their Windows 11 machine and I asked them to press Windows key + R, type calc, press Enter. And I was astonished at the result. Literally: Mouth agape, frozen in astonishment for about 10 seconds. I knew about the ads and tracking and the local account bullshit, but I didn't realize just how bad the Windows experience has become.

netsharc 8mo ago
What does happen? I'm using Windows 10 Enterprise (is that GitHub repo to activate any license still around?) , with policy to disable Internet search from the start menu... so your story makes me wonder what the astonishment is.
- agumonkey 8mo ago
  I'm betting a very large loading time.
- rstuart4133 8mo ago
  I had a similar experience to the OP. After a new version of Windows I tried to run something, or maybe it was just pressing the Start button, and I waited, mouth open, wondering what in $DIETY's name was happening before it responded. The pause was completely alien to a Linux user, who is used to the Window manager unconditionally responding instantly. It would be alien to users of older versions of Windows too. I decided in the end it was pulling down stuff from the web - in tiles it displayed beside the start menu. If you were on a fast network and had a good internet connection the problem mostly went away. The feature was inherited from WinPhone, I think. So it wasn't that the underling OS or video had got slower, it was them bolting on irrelevant crap to the menu. I later got smarter and deleted all the tiles, so only the menu was displayed. That improved things considerably. I remain gob smacked at them crippling their product like that. I'm try to avoid Windows now, and am mostly successful. But I read these stories about them adding AI and ads into the mix. If they bolted them into basic window functions like the start menu in the same idiotic way, I could well believe Microsoft has release the slowest Windows ever despite it running on the fastest hardware the planet has seen.

rleigh 8mo ago

If it loads at all. The last two days, the start menu refuses to launch it when you click on it. The lack of quality in Windows is simply astonishing. And the new start menu and taskbar are terrible. Quite how a company can transform a product into such a mess in just a few years is incredible.

lossyalgo 8mo ago
I love when it takes 3 minutes to open "Add or Remove Programs" because the Start menu search decides that typing a, ad, add, r, re, remove, unin, install, etc. definitely means "let me Bing that for you" instead of opening the one thing I clearly want. It obviously knows what I'm trying to do (Bing search recommendation is for "Add or Remove Programs"), yet refuses to surface the actual shortcut to that settings page (or "app", or whatever Microsoft calls it this week). Even better: some days it pops up immediately after typing "Add" and other days I'm wrestling with it like I'm training a stubborn animal, clicking the result in the hope that the OS will "learn" that yes, this is what I want when I type "Add". Most of the time I just give up and dig through the Settings menu like it's 1999.

pjmlp 8mo ago

It was rewritten into WinUI, hence why.