Geekery, thou art a harsh mistress

[andrewducker]

Currently I am:
Downloading music from AllofMP3.com that is at a higher bit-rate than the music I had (discovered that all of my Sisters of Mercy was at 56kbps, having been encoded about 9 years ago when space was at a higher premium than quality).
Copying all of the music I like onto my new 8GB iPod Nano.
Converting this fantastic talk on MITs fabrication labs into avi (so I can watch it on TV rather than the PC). (cheers to heron61 for that one)

Strangely, my PC has ground to a near halt. If I did this kind of thing a lot then I suspect I'd need one of those fancy multi-core things I've heard so much about :->

Comments

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

Having been using Windows at work for a couple of months, I've found that it seems to cope miserably with having more than one process demanding CPU at the same time. It's most strange, even with do disk access my workstation can become unresponsive when I'm running 3 or 4 compute-intensive things at a time.

Manually tweaking the process priorities in Task Manager to keep them below interactive levels helps a bit, but not that much. I find it very... perplexing. Scheduling CPU for interactive systems is supposed to be a solved problem, goddammit. And in fact some of the people that helped solve it are working for Microsoft Research.

And while I'm at it, how on earth am I supposed to get Windows to swap the caps-lock and control keys round? I still haven't figured that out...

[alpha-c3ntaur.livejournal.com]

Why would you want to do that. It would make it so much more difficult to press Ctrl + Alt + Del

[recycled-sales.livejournal.com]

I've noticed it's mainly down to USB devices. As soon as there's a sustained transfer over the USB bus it seems to nerf performance.

Then again, nerfed performance with 2Gb of RAM and an A64 3500 isn't too bad :)

[andrewducker]

Yeah, it seems to be IO that really blocks windows. If it's reading from the disk (or USB) then things really slow to a halt.

[andrewducker]

Google is your friend:
http://www.manicai.net/comp/swap-caps-ctrl.html
http://johnhaller.com/jh/useful_stuff/disable_caps_lock/

You didn't look very hard, did you? :-P

[call-waiting.livejournal.com]

zounds! Page last updated, October 2006... round about just after the last time I looked. Awesome!

With one fell swoop, Windows on my ThinkPad becomes usable. Ta.