[ale] OT "1 step forward, 2 steps back"

[Michael Trausch]

On Mon, 2010-05-17 at 14:48 -0500, Preston Boyington wrote:
> mmm... not sure about that.  while I haven't used Win7, someone 
> mentioned that it had some kind of VM way of doing 'compatibility
> mode'.
> 
> I would be concerned about the hardware compatibility with
> modern/near 
> future with WinXP* if people are thinking about a unit to upgrade
> over 
> the next few years.
> 
> *from cursory reading it seems that hard drives and other parts will
> not 
> (purposely) be compatible with XP. 

Huh?  Are you referring to the 4K-sector drives?  If so, they're
compatible.  They just require a bit of extra effort to properly align
partitions since the drives show (by default) 512-byte virtual sectors,
which makes it possible to misalign 4K clusters (the default, if memory
serves, with NTFS), which should be aligned with 4K sectors.

Even then, it's not incompatible.  All having misaligned clusters or
filesystem blocks means is that when a cluster or a filesystem block is
written to the disk, the drive will have to read 2 sectors, modify both
of them, and then write them both to disk, instead of just writing a
single sector.  The read-modify-write will obviously incur a significant
cost under high loads.

	--- Mike

-- 
Even if their crude and anticompetitive business practices don't make
you think about using their software, their use of sweatshops and child
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abuser:  http://is.gd/btW8m

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