Wind Down of Windows XP. Next Best ??
 

What is the general consensus for replacement of Windows XP now that it is being wound down. It has served me well but my current PC will not support Win 7 or 8 , so to be on safe side I assume I will have to either upgrade my PC or purchase a new one. With what ??????.

Enjay

I would go straight to win 8.1 64 bit and a new PC. What we recommend to new clients that want to upgrade their old PCs ranges in costs from $1700 to $2000 from a dedicated PC shop (not harveys, office-works or similar)

I respect those whose opinion is that you can get a similar specked PC for lot less, you can, and you will be disappointed for the life of that PC. Cheep PCs are cheep for a reason. Inferior hardware = inferior performance.

The above priced PC will perform well into the future and be able to perform well even after Windows starts to slow down due to the normal deterioration in performance which is due to leftover crap and patches and so on ..... that is where the pretend PC's just fall apart. We see it all the time.

In punting the PC is your betting partner, your analysis buddy and form study companion. That is something that is worthy of proper investment, if you are serious, speed saves YOUR TIME; you need a great PC, NOT an adequate one!

Finally, WIN XP and next best; I hope that you did not infer that XP is the best and what ever else you choose is the second best. Win 7 is far faster then XP and Win 8 is faster again. Once you will get your head around the interface you will kick yourself for not taking the initiative earlier. That is how I felt and I loved my XP.

Thank you for your thoughts Michal. Most importantly (you should know.) will this run FEU and **** Ultimate, which are my main tools.
Thanks. Enjay

This is no disrespect or to bag MS, but hopefully there are now more choices.

If you have a dedicated PC that is working your program with XP, why then the upgrade ? ( if it ain't broken don't fix it - principle )

Researching Linux/Ubuntu
It depends on one's own current racing program's infrastructure.
Is it Operating System tangible ?
Meaning, can it work in a non MS environment ?

OK,
Q: But what about the MS Office/Excel and VBA issue ?

A:Current research:
http://www.liberiangeek.net/2012/06...using-wine-1-5/

or

http://rmitc.org/2013/04/ultimate-m...comment-page-1/

or

Google How to install Office 2010 in UBUNTU

Hi Enjay,

Yes FEU will work in Windows 8. As will the other program. It will benefit the most from your investment. Drop us a line at Ratings2Win if you want the specs of what we are recommending to clients. You can take it then to your local PC shop and have them put something together. I guarantee you wount be disappointed with it. None of our clients are.

Perhaps you may even investigate the performance and functional benefits of using Axis, to take your punting to another level. Especially if you use my FEU frequently :) as Axis is it's far more powerful, stand alone successor .

I must admit that I have no working knowledge of Linux, but there is always an option to run a Mac with a Parallels version of windows to cater for the windows racing software. But that is a more expensive option.

enjay, XP will work for a long long time yet, for as long as you want it to in fact.
What will happen is that there will be a phase-out of support for security and virus programmes.

All you have to do to keep it safe is not to visit questionable websites. Downloading your usual data and betting on the TAB or bookies sites should be safe. They have a lot more to lose if they allow viruses to infect their sites.

I use the latest and fastest computers, but that's just me, I need it and I like to upgrade, but if it works for you and does the job you want it to do, I can't for the life of me see any reason for you to upgrade.

My 3&1/2 year old $600 Dell laptop is still going strong, easily accounts for all my punting activities & is the backbone of my media center.

Better things to spend $$ on than constant IT upgrades imho.

Honestly there is no need for 64 bit upgrade UNLESS the programs you run are in 64 bit mode.
Most programs you install will default to 32 bit anyway, so it's a complete waste.
You can get a very good upgrade for under $1000 if you have it custom made.
Computers are so much cheaper now, the bottom fell out of the market completely and what used to cost the price of a secondhand car and now be bought for half the cost.

For example if you aren't into games, knock off somewhere between $500 and $750 for a state of the art graphics card - not needed. A low to mid range graphics card will easily do the trick.

Don't be fooled by the old trick of 8gb or 12gb of ram (memory)
Most computers cannot utilise all of this memory in realtime, so it's a complete waste of money. Knock off another $400 or so.
Most computers 4gb will be ample providing you have a quality mainboard and processor.
The tip is pay for what you need, not what they say.

Also if you're a punter, your data is most important and reliability. SSD drives are much faster, however, they have a much shorter lifespan and are prone to data loss in the event of power surges and blackouts etc. The old SATA drive performs almost as well if you buy a high rpm drive, shouldn't lose data and will have at least twice the lifespan and reliability.

I use an old HP server with SATA drives and two dual core processors. The graphics are hopeless, but on speed it beats a new machine hands down. It 's built to last and built to be reliable. The memory is self error checking and the drives are high rpm server hot swap drives, with raid. So if a drive starts to fail, it warns me with lights and buzzers BEFORE it fails, and all I do is swap it for a new one, reboot and it rebuilds itself totally.
The power supply is super heavy duty and swappable as well.

If you're looking to upgrade, just go to a reliable store that specialises in computers, word of mouth or Whirlpool will find you a store that custom builds to your requirements, you'll save probably $1,000 easily for a sturdy reliable, fast, unit.

Michal is correct, don't go to Officeworks, Harvey Norman etc, the cheap ones are cheap for a reason, there are tricks they do to suck you in. Like stating the amount of processors or ram but not the physical speed etc.

It's interesting isn't it just how many opinions there are. Given that I just want to mention a few real world examples.

Currently my machine is using about 5.12 gig of the 16 gigs I have, on 64 bit windows, it obviously depends on what I have open, BUT I certainly would not LIMIT myself to 3.5gigs under the 32 bit operating system to save a few bucks on ram. Long term that is a false economy.

I have been running 2 Solid State hard-drives (SSD) in my machines these past 3 years and I have not worn them out yet nor have I lost any data. Wouldn't matter, I keep my data backed up internally on a WD 2TB hard disk just in case. As Chrome says data safety is paramount, but I wouldn't consider limiting my self to not using the fast seek of SSD especially for windows and racing software like what Enjay has, it will be of great benefit.

One of the reasons that SSD may fail is because people stick them in substandard, under ventilated cases with a crappy power-supply. I am reminded each month just how glad I am that I have a decent power supply when the brownouts hit. Even one spike is enough to do damage.

The funny thing is that the difference between a good PC and an average one is just a few hundred $.

We have clients using older machines taking 2-10 minutes processing our files and at the same time we have clients that have accepted our recommendation and their PC processes the same in less then 20 seconds. Do you think they care that they may have gotten 'almost as good' a machine for a few hundred less? Nor will they be sorry that they did for next 5 years or more to come.

What I am talking about isn't a state of the art gaming PC, Im talking about a machine with i7 processor, a good motherboard, 8-16 gig of ram, 120gig SSD and 1-2TB WD spin disk, a good dedicated graphic card, Win 8.1 64 bit pro, a decent power supply and case, DVD, an average 22-24 inch monitor. Have them build it. Stick with quality manufacturers like Gigabyte (mother board, graphics card), Corsair (SSD, memory and power supply) and Western Digital Black Caviar (HD). These offer 2-5 year warranty on most things. Well worth the few extra $.

Can you get away with less? Sure you can! I still run my 9yo dual core AMD for some things, but I wouldn't call that good computing though! Do others have valid opinions? Yep, Im just used to doing things this way. I only ever bought 1 cheep PC, the first one!

There are no right & wrongs when it comes to this other than as mentioned a few times here -

a) stay away from the Hardley Normal/Officeworks et al computing solutions(lol) &

b) data backup

I have no doubt the computing requirements of Michal & CP are vastly different to mine & to put it plainly, I pi.ssed away many thousands of $$ over the years keeping up with the latest tech, when really I could have done the job with much less.

It still amazes me what my cheap ol little laptop is capable of, & I've seen the light & aint going back;)

Not going to argue anything but I am a computer builder, less now than before, but you will never use anywhere near 16 gigs of memory unless you were running terrabyte servers. There's at least 10 gigs of memory that you paid for that even 64 bit Windows can't utilise.
So it's false economy.

If you run 64 bit Office, Windows and database applications then it's worth going 64 bit, otherwise, 64 bit is pretty much a waste, as Windows will only allocate 64 bits to the programs that can use it.

16 gig is really for storage centres and high end servers that run high loads and operating systems like Server 2012 that can use this memory and are built to allocate it correctly.

Anyway, horses for courses and all that. The point is that a very fast and effective system upgrade is affordable providing you read up on the specifications of the hardware rather than the hyped up promotional material.

My final point is be very careful with those SSD's and backups.
If your data is corrupted and backups are corrupted, you're toast.
Back up at least a week's worth, and rotate backup drives, because I was called in to fix a major problem and the backups were also corrupted going back a week - the client was in all sorts of trouble getting data back.
I implemented a plan whereby a backup was taken on a seperate drive for archiving which was verified by a second system and rotated backup drives for the remainder. However, this was a very large organistation. Just an example of the many pitfalls.

Thanks to all who have commented on my thread. All points taken into consideration and I will take it from there. I will certainly not be buying "Off the shelf".
Cheers.

Enjay

Hi

Sorry to reopen the discussion , but there is something vital that I forgot to mention in all of this. The future. For instance you cant run a 64 bit program in 32 bit windows (unless you use emulators or VM), but you can run a 32 bit on 64 bit (unless its a really old technology). Besides Win 32 or 64 are around the same price anyway. This morning my Ram usage spiked to 6.5 gig. If I had 32 bit windows or less ram, that data has to go to the paging file slowing things down. Every time I open a browser tab in FireFox my ram seams to spike 100 megs. The files I download are getting bigger and bigger, the graphics are more intensive. Programs are getting bigger. Things change!

My point is that when you design a machine, building in redundancies is not false economy, at worse you may have 'wasted' a few bucks. If you have to replace the whole thing because you can't run something or worse still you persist when its painful to run something; then you wasted a whole lot more, money being just a small part, mostly you are wasting your time Enjay. For instance running a Bet selector test taking hours to complete; that's your life slipping by, being wasted. THAT is false economy; when using an SSD would speed it up or using a different program would cut it down to a few minutes.

Building a machine to fit today's specifications is one way to look at things; if you wount use it today, that's fine but what will you be doing in a years time? My argument, perhaps poorly presented, is that a good quality 'SWEET SPOT' PC makes every sense especially when running data intensive tasks.

A sweet spot machine is a machine built using the upper end of the currently mass produced (read competitively priced) technology components. NOT the most expensive, top of the range components. Top of the range is a waste of money for not a whole lot of real processing difference.

Sweet spot PC provides the best mix of speed, quality and affordability.

Best of luck with what you decide.

if you're in Sydney google ccpu
have used them for 10 years and never had a prob
you'll get a state of the art computer with windows 7 or 8 for about 600 without a graphics card upgrade

I still run a couple of old 16 bit DOS proggies on Win7 64 - checkout DOSBox, it's free open source software. Takes a bit of fiddling to get the settings right but after that it works well.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/

Thanks for that, have had a look and am interested.

enjay