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Ancestry Daily News
8/15/2002 - Archive
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Rootsworks: Operating System Upgrades |
Rootsworks: Operating System Upgrades
"Upgrading an operating system is a terrifying thing to do. Very
few people back everything up the way they should, and the potential for data
destroying accidents is high." - Larry Seltzer, ZDNet
To the extent that computers can truthfully be said to have any architecture
at all, they have a layered architecture. In the last article, we talked about
upgrading the hardware. Today, we'll talk about the next layer up from the hardware,
the operating system. Upgrading your operating system is still one of the dark
arts, requiring experience or a good relationship with someone who has done
it before. Operating systems, as a commercial product, will probably not last
through my lifetime. The need for help to update an OS will last well beyond
that point in time.
What Is It?
Last time, I defined the Operating System Layer as "a set of programs that communicates
between the Program Layer and the Drivers Layer. Examples would be Mac OS X
or Windows XP Home, or Linux."
A generic example of an operating system function is a "print spooling routine."
You might remember DOS, and printing directly to printers. Your word processing
program would run a little ahead of the printer, maybe a page or so, and then
slow down and run at the same speed as the printer until the report was finished.
With the addition of a "print spooling routine," the word processing program
no longer writes directly to the printer. Instead, it writes to a temporary
disk file, which is "fed" to the printer by the spooling routine. The user "gets
the screen back" in a few seconds, even if the printer is going to run for several
more minutes. Spooling routines are also helpful for sharing printers with other
users. The spooler manages the traffic.
An upgrade to an operating system is 1) a change to the basic programs that
operate the system, that helps you use your computer better; and 2) a marketing
opportunity for a commercial operating system vendor.
Name Two of Them
There are two popular commercial operating systems being sold today:
- Windows XP from Microsoft. I'll only discuss the Professional version, and
will ignore the Home version.
- Mac OS X from Apple.
If you are running Windows 95, 98, or ME, you probably have to restart your
computer several times each day. If your hardware is sufficient, you could upgrade
to Windows XP Pro and find yourself operating for months without restarting.
How much hardware is sufficient? A 500 MHz Processor and 256MB of RAM, for starters.
Beyond the stability issue, some people find the new user interface pleasing.
In addition, Microsoft has clearly fallen in love with "threads" and has made
it easier for developers to perform multiple functions at the same time. One
of the first examples that many genealogists see is the performance of the pedigree
view in Ancestry Family Tree software from Ancestry. When you add ancestors,
a "thread" in the background checks the Ancestry databases and updates the pedigree
with the Trees and Records indications for the persons who have been added.
This concludes an eleven-year detour for Microsoft, in which they have supported
two OS platforms: NT and Windows 9x. This came about by accident. The intended
follow on to Windows 3 was Windows OS/2. But Windows 3.0 caught fire in the
market place, and IBM and Microsoft parted ways. IBM made an attempt to put
OS/2 in the marketplace, but that's a sad chapter of computing history for another
day. Microsoft has been supporting a "small office -- home office" platform,
Windows 9x; and a large enterprise platform, Windows NT / Windows 2000, for
years. They want to get back to a single core OS, and XP is that product.
Other added features that will eventually find common use are remote desktop
and customization. They sound like strange words or security headaches today,
but teenagers and IT staffers will be changing the look and feel of Windows
and you'll eventually adopt it and forget what things were like before.
I'm not implying that the upgrade is easy or automatic. I'm just listing the
reasons why you might want to try to live through an upgrade to XP Pro.
Mac OS X is a completely new OS for Apple. The interface, Aqua, is new, but
I understand that a Mac user wouldn't upgrade just for the eye candy. Under
the hood, OS X is built on a Unix based core operating system called Darwin.
Apple says Darwin provides "advanced features such as protected memory, preemptive
multitasking, advanced memory management, and symmetric multiprocessing--making
your Macintosh more responsive, faster, and more reliable than ever before.
How hard is the upgrade? According to Apple, "Best of all, Mac OS X is simple
to install and easy to learn. The Classic technology lets you run thousands
of existing Mac OS 9-compatible applications, while the powerful features of
Mac OS X provide a foundation for great new applications that are "Built for
Mac OS X."
When It Works, What Does It Do?
Windows has an "upgrade advisor" that will run online, and tell you what
problems you have. A "blocking issue" is something that will prevent the OS
from installing. A "warning issue" identifies a hardware or software component
that may not work under XP.
Next Time
In Part 2, we'll address the down side of OS Upgrades, and include some links
for more information and some final thoughts.
Beau Sharbrough is the former president of GENTECH, and the founder of the
GENTECH and FGS websites. The RootsWorks series of articles focuses on genealogical
applications for generic technologies. Beau is the father of two college-age
girls who make excuses adroitly, and is a proud graduate of Texas A&M University.
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