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I stumbled upon a couple posts of people complaining about too much RAM being used on their Windows 11 computer. One says 39 GB was in use and another says 19 GB, with 1.7 GB of driver pool. Feels like Mυsk losing a few million. Then the responses are "ram exists to be used" which was voted up by 1400 people. "It's just smart use of resources to make things work with less but scale with more when available." - No one's talking about disk cache after you've read an ISO or similar, that is never reflected as used RAM. And "it's normal for PCs to use around half of the RAM when in idle mode, even when nothing is currently running. That's because Windows uses Superfetch..." - Imagine sitting and waiting while it loads 15 gigs from the disk.

Supermium seems to work well and stable. It will complement New Moon for me. I wish the author can implement a normal Settings window with checkboxes because scrolling through those flags on a white hospital wall is overwhelming. There is a lot of stuff to disable, all the security crap and bypassing of my DNS. Can we customize the interface to get rid useless toolbar buttons like Enable Experiments and You? How do you get certificates into Supermium? There is no import button like in old browsers. Do you need to reinstall a new version? It seems I can disable most of the Secure Preferences to share a profile between two Windows "Disable machine ID". So far I have noticed settings disappearing like in Opera when not in portable mode. How do you prevent the Translation prompt from popping up all the time when the page is in English already? I want to have the option to translate when I click a button, but not the floating toolbar pestering me about it. The Ungoogled mode is not useful because then I can't access search from anywhere on the UI, nor add Google myself in the UI.

I got a Core 2 Duo from them and some DDR2 RAM. The prices for higher processors have since come down. I think they must have "recycled" old professionally used computers. Xeon processors are common. There were false listings of Pentium 4s, but they were obvious by the etchings. They can't do anything to fake the CPU like flash a "BIOS," and they are really not worth more than that.

NVidia and/or Microsoft Windows have overhauled this behavior in Windows NT 6. This explains to me why game modders hadn't addressed this. You could't possible talk about WinXP to them without being laughed back to the stone age like a hopeless git. Here is memory use under 2008 R2 after one loop on the highway in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. Nothing in the paged pool for NVidia. MmSt is some kind of file cache, and CM31 is probably the registry. At some point I've had full 8 GB of commit (out of 8 GB of RAM without a swap file) playing with PhotoPea, system uptime is about one and a half months. When alt-tabbing, video memory use remains 209 MB. Here is memory use under 2003 SP2 after launching the game: about 38 MB for NV_x, Dh 2, Gh05. After one loop around the Rosewood Highway 99 the memory use is about 59 MB for NV_x, Dh 2, Gh05. After alt-tabbing to the desktop, memory use drops to 19 MB. But I can still re-enter the game. NFS:MW is a reasonably well-behaved game, expected to work fine on an old PC, but probably not WinXP SP1 anymore. The driver in both cases is 368.81, but it acts differently depending on the Windows. Process Explorer with symbols reports that the maximum paged pool is 354 MB on 32-bit Windows 2003. https://imgur.com/a/qofoSUc But there is a saying that the coffin cannot remain empty. People on modern Windows report gigs of RAM being lost for another reason: https://www.google.com/search?q=nvidia+paged+pool

What I was saying is buy a Pentium-66 and a board that can take an upgrade. Then swap in a Pentium-133 or whatever is the highest for that socket, when nobody wants those processors anymore. The best at the given time CPU has an astronomical price. Now look how you can get capable processors on Ali for €5 or €10, same things that used to cost €250. If you bought a 486, then you'd be locked into that.

What does OnlyOffice do that old versions of Microsoft Office don't? It's online and therefore inefficient with resources, and not isolated from the browser crashing. I don't think high end hardware is ever a good deal. Look what happened to great flagship processors a few years later, how their value dropped. There are diminishing returns from paying more money: you don't get double the speed for paying 2x. I would buy a good board with open slots for memory, and a processor one level higher than than the basic one. Then upgrade the PC a few years later cheaply. Always use software that is a generation or more older than the PC and it will fly. My bank recently updated to a flat and white design, but I can still connect with New Moon.

Polymer capacitors were added on most boards around the CPU. Gigabyte and soon others added them all over the board. But the Ultra Durable™ was presented as a big deal. Pentium 4, one of the word CPUs of all time, on Socket 478 boards often could be seen cooking old style capacitors. But that is not the topic. There was another issue with cheap computer cases where the shield of the connector was not connected to the metal case because the whole front was plastic. It has a ground in one of those 4 wires and the a fifth that is the shield. That caused the PC to lock up when a device was plugged in (not removed like in my case) because static was discharged into the connector.

One of the things I really love about the New Moon browser is how easy it is to transfer everything to another computer. All cookies and settings still work. I don't need to log in to all the sites, the search toolbar and bookmarks are there. Losing the cookies is a disaster when some of the passwords have been forgotten. Opera (Opium) is deliberately giving me a hard time with a concept called "secure preferences", which make them tied to the Windows user account.

That comment was not constructive. I put together this system new and love it. It boots fast, and the BIOS is nice looking, and navigable with the keyboard like in old days. I've been a fan of the Gigabyte brand and bought into their ultra durable marketing (even though other boards soon had the same parts). It was my mom's PC and wasn't driven hard. It may have been "broken" years ago. I put XP on it because if familiarity, and accepted that USB didn't work. All boards have a bunch of extra unused USB headers. But the brackets never come with anything and must be ordered by mail.

They don't work in Windows and can't be used to boot the computer in BIOS. When plug in a mouse, the mouse lights up, but Windows doesn't see it. The LED on a storage device initially comes on and goes out immediately. The motherboards are: GA-B75M-D3H (American Megatrends EFI BIOS) and DH77KC (Intel Visual BIOS / grey AMI). I fear that I may have damaged the B75M now. The Kingston DataTraveller 111 now doesn't connect to the USB 3.0 port at all even when the computer has been just turned on. It works in the USB 2 ports; but it can also disable them. (Mouse is powered on but not seen by computer.) It still works in DH77KC. The speed is increased to 70 MB/s from 32 MB/s in USB 3.0 mode. This DataTraveller might be a cancer and somehow shorting the port when unplugged. In the BIOS I have the following settings: XHCI Pre-Boot Driver: Enabled XHCI Mode: Smart Auto HS Port {1..4} Switchable: Enabled XHCI Streams: Enabled

Well, New Moon won't win any special olympics. I use it because I like the traditional GUI. Hardware acceleration in New Moon has problems for me: 1) font weight increases, 2) it seems to require new video adapter and drivers, 3) vsync for some reason gets disabled in other programs. Outputting a text doesn't require acceleration, nor should it need particularly new hardware. The bottleneck is the javascript almost always. Very big and simple pages like old reddit with 100 posts feel a tad slower. It's a bit strange that print screen doesn't work. In media players it tends to always work nowadays, since we no longer use Overlay Mixer. Maybe it is crippled intentionaly for those movie playback sites.

I have made the following observation. I have two computers with the Panther Point chipset that have some blue USB 3.0 ports. They have no drivers and work in USB 2.0 mode for booting and in Win 2003. (I only found a driver recently.) If I pull out a USB drive without using Safely Remove Hardware, the port stops working until the machine is powered down. A reboot is not enough. It feels like there is something like a resettable fuse. They are normally grounded to the case. One set is on the front_panel cable and another is on the i/o shield. Initially I thought that the USB 3.0 ports wouldn't work at all because of no drivers, which would suck because of only 2 or 4 ports remaining, until observed the pattern. If I use Safely Remove, there is no problem. I was told by another person that he has not encountered this. But he is the kind of person who would not admit that any item he owns has any kind of flaw. Have you seen this behavior?

Does Supermium have built-in certificates? Yeah, the certificate aspect of XP has become obsolete. I used to use them for streaming media players like SMPlayer. But those stopped being able to open most media for various reasons. Facebook has started showing me a message about New Moon being obsolete. It can be dismissed. https://i.imgur.com/jQxMpmt.png

The XP-style unclear toolbar images is one of the reasons why I don't use Office 2003. And it is slightly bigger and doesn't bring any functionality that I need. Vector images are anti-aliased, I think, but I tend not to use clipart except charts in serious documents. Isn't the OfficeXP theme private to the application (Office XP) and not actually the Luna theme? Around that time there were several 3rd party applications with flat toolbars made to resemble XP. In some Delphi software you could switch the skin in and out without reconfiguring the OS. Office XP is inferior today because I doesn't have the XML compatibility pack.

The toolbar images are likely an atlas in the DLLs and hard to get at. The flat panels is probably not something than can be directly swapped in. Why can't you use Office 2000? It also has the XML compatibility pack. Or Office XP?

VP9 with profile 0 works in MPC-HC 1.7.13. There seems to be a regression in Windows 2008 R2 and newer drivers. Only DXVA2-copyback works. Others show erratic jumping pictures and high load. The memory use has increased. Note that the picture size of this example is extreme. Seeking on Windows 2003 is not stable though. The picture gets lost sometimes. But there are only a handful of VP9 videos to be found. This codec only exists because of Not Invented Here syndrome and patents for which we don't pay anyway. VP9 with profile 1 (10-bit) does not work. Windows 2003: https://i.imgur.com/WtLktKo.png Windows 2008: https://i.imgur.com/RLX3foN.png

You write many words. The "Video Engine" in the context of nVidia is part of the GPU processor, which is talked to by CUDA. OpenGL or Direct3D can be used to put the decoded picture on screen with acceleration: allowing to rotate and stretch it for free without using the CPU. Very minimal functionality is needed. "X" doesn't do the decoding. It draws two triangles or one rectangle with the raw video as texture for them. OpenGL is supplied entirely as part of the driver as a giant DLL (Installable Client Driver). It works on WinXP. Since OpenGL is practically no longer developed in favor of Vulkan, it works on XP as well as it can. OpenGL is awesome because it doesn't need any updated Microsoft components that they use to sell new Windows. It also uses less memory by keeping the game in video memory without using Paged Pool, which is importat on 32-bit Windows and big games. To retrieve the picture from the Video Engine, the CUVID API has to be set up in a certain way, which needed some changes for 10-bits. MPC-HC uses FFMPEG for decoding. That is its "engine". Many years have gone into development of FFMPEG, and almost all players now use parts of it instead of writing their own. It is more or less self-contained because the DLLs are supplied with the player and don't need to be registered in the system.

The linked thread claims that the "undocumented" feature of downconverting 10-bit video already existed in CUVID in 2016 (maybe not in the XP branch of driver), so perhaps the driver doesn't need a modification. But I don't know anything about programming if CUVID. 10-bit h.265 was added in LAV 0.70.0 (MPC-HC 1.7.13), but apparently not on XP, which it still supported in this version. I don't have any VP9 samples to check that. It was a short lived Web codec. "- NEW: CUVID support for VP9 8/10-bit and HEVC 10/12-bit decoding" It is probably time for XP users to update if not for this alone then collectively for other reasons.

When you go from RGB to Y'CbCr, you immediately lose some accuracy because there is a many to one relationship. Think what happens if Y is at 0 for minimum brightness, a variation in Cb (blue) or Cr (red) will give some negative colors, which will get clipped to black. Same happens at white. Then the range of video only utilizes values between 16 and 240 instead of 0 to 255, which is a legacy of TV where signal below black had other meanings. Here you compress the remaining values again. The range of blue and red is also smaller because more perceptual weight is given to green. When YCbCr is expanded back for display, some RGB combinations will never occur. Here is Y'CbCr conversion loss visualized: https://webdesignerdepot-wp.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/2023/11/28121730/rgb-ycbcr.png In HCenc MPEG-2 encoder, a choice between 8, 9, 10 and 11 for DC precision is given. Even if YV12 is passed directly from one program to another without conversion to RGB, the extended precision of DC (average color for the block) is lost. I've heard from encoders of Anime content that they can produce smaller files at 10 bits because the quality factor can be lower and dithering doesn't need to be added. It used to be that grain needed to be added to combat banding. There is now a JPEG encoder called Jpegli, which can preserve more accuracy by doing the intermediate calculations at higher precision. But to recover the data a JpegLi decoder is needed.

On Windows 2008 R2 10-bit h.265 works with 442.74. Six 50 fps videos playing. I can't even play 1 on CPU. Even screenshot works. https://i.imgur.com/p5S3PTa.png

I don't think there is progress because the threads I found were from 2016. It was found to be possible then by Philipl from nVidia, but there was no interest putting it into MPC-HC. Something was done in ffmpeg, but I think that doesn't apply to us. I think 10-bit exists because during mixing and prediction of successive frames error accumulates, and the bottom 1 or 2 bits are not accurate anymore. So instead of losing bit 8, we lose bit 10, which is much smaller. DVD MPEG-2 video was also partially 10-bit, I think only in the DC coefficient, but don't quote me on that. This is why you didn't see banding on DVD, but the banding appeared in H.264 DVDrip, which was only 8-bit. If you boost a dark JPEG with curves, you can also find that the bottom 0..2 levels are blocky at maximum quality. Regardless of the reasons, 10-bit exists for quality encodes, and we should ideally be able to watch it.

The Fora forums have improved. The pages don't hang anymore while they still have the giant icons.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/will-hevc-main-10-profile-decoding-work-using-cuvid-when/44981 "the developer has no interest in exposing 10bit support as long as it doesn’t return 10bit output frames" "What you can do it is convince it to decode the 10bit content and then dither it down to 8bit to return as NV12. This is undocumented, and I discovered it by accident" "I am not sure if LAV Video Decoder’s developer will do" - of course Nev can afford a €2000 GPU from NASA and has no interest. https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/hevc-main-10-profile-decoding-using-vdpau-unsupported-on-gtx-950-361-28/41557 "Today, the driver doesn’t support MAIN 10, although the hardware does (hence why MAIN 10 works on windows)." So from what I hear it does work, but you have to use Microsoft's interface on new Windows. Of course at the quality of web video there are no more tha 8 good bits, so stupid for Nvidia not to give the video.

I have found useful benchmarking software. Here is 3DMark '03 with a serial number. One of the tests is fillrate which directly measures the speed of rendering. https://benchmarks.ul.com/legacy-benchmarks Ivy Bridge graphics are slightly worse than GT 610. There is no support for video decoding. YV12 upsampling is nearest neighbor. It can do one HD video with CABAC on the CPU, so it is usable. But GT 610 can do at least two HD videos for free, and reds are smooth in all. (It can be worked around with a CPU hit by selecting only RGB32 for output.) Ivy Bridge: 9600 marks, fill rate 1900/3600 Mtexels. = No difference between the "new" and the 2013 driver on Win 7 (15.33.8.3345). GT 610: 11000 marks, fill rate 1200/5000 Mtexels GTX 750Ti: 58000 marks (cpu bound), fill rate 16000/43000 Mtexels GTX 960: 92000 marks, fill rate 33000/67000 Mtexels There is a little oddity comparing "CPU Score" in 3DMark '03 and '05. It supposedly describes the portion of the work done by the CPU while rendering a low res picture. It might be an artifact of the program, but occurs on multiple runs. It seems that Windows Seven works significantly better. Windows 2003 x86 SP2: 841 marks ('03), 2975 marks ('05). Windows 2008 x64 SP1: 2175 marks ('03), 16525 marks ('05) Windows 2022 x64 Oct 24: 241 marks ('03), 847 marks ('05) I have now put in a GTX960 as a useful upgrade. These can be had for surprisingly cheap now and run cool while idle. And only need 1 6-pin power. Apparently the last cards with a VGA out, which is always useful as a backup when you have no other monitor on hand. PhysX has no business being in a work computer. If I have about 20 various games, it's likely none of them will require PhysX. It is therefore a good idea not to install it by default.

GTX960/CUVID seems to only work with 8-bit H.265. Higher crashes or falls back to software. This is disappointing because most h.265 is 10-bit. Although most content I care about is still available in h.264. 10-bit h.264 is also not handled on the GPU. I launched seven Web-grade 8-bit videos, video engine load 44%, power draw 40 watts. The eighth video shows black screen, lol. It can also do seven decent full HD h.264 videos with CABAC with about 50% engine and 60% GPU usage. One video draws 30 watts, quiet as a mouse. Does h.265 work with a later version of Windows NT on GTX960? I don't have time to install a new OS now, and I'm tired dealing with its flat/white/permissions issues. Could it be that CUVID wasn't updated because the Nev guy has deprecated it? He has shown much disdain towards old technology. There still seems to be vocal support for h.264 among film archival sites, even though they don't care about WinXP per se.