My computer's too slow
Sep. 24th, 2009 02:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
[Poll #1461959]
You can't buy a computer nowadays that's too slow to run Word Processors/Spreadsheets/Web browsers on.
So what would you be able to do on your computer if it was faster that you can't now?
You can't buy a computer nowadays that's too slow to run Word Processors/Spreadsheets/Web browsers on.
So what would you be able to do on your computer if it was faster that you can't now?
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Date: 2009-09-24 01:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 01:07 pm (UTC)(Julie's Mum was sold a machine that should have been lightning fast for her use - with 256MB of RAM in it. I could have killed the shop assistant when I found out.)
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Date: 2009-09-24 01:33 pm (UTC)Our new one is much, much better but could be more so. Generally speaking what I want speediness in are: switching on time, opening a programme time, and loading new internet pages time.
There needs to be a general better understanding of RAM and what it is/ how it works amongst the Ordinary People.
Is what I think
Lxxx
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Date: 2009-09-25 11:32 am (UTC)I just updraded my home PC from 1GB to 3GB RAM and it made a pretty decent improvement in everyday use.
A grand cost of about £30.
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Date: 2009-09-24 01:37 pm (UTC)Play Bejewelled Blitz without the machine freezing for up to seven seconds at a time.
Convert all my US TV AVIs to iPod and iPhone compatible MP4s for watching while travelling.
Create complex multi-part musical pieces with "live" effects on each track so they could all be tweaked/remixed later.
A lot of things don't *need* speed, they can just take two-to-ten times as long to complete ... but that really screws around with workflow because it means some things are too painful to do, other things aren't "instant" so you lose focus or momentum.
A lot of multi-tasking things (watching video while converting other videos, downloading multiple torrents, have gmail updating, virus checker updating, java updating etc.)
My main PC is seven years old now (2.4Ghz Pentium 4 with 1.5Gb of RDRAM) and even disk transfers are really going very very slowly now ... (yes, I've defragmented the disk, doesn't seem to have had much effect)
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Date: 2009-09-24 01:50 pm (UTC)(Supreme Commander is mostly ok, but SupCom: Forged Alliance seems to be harder on it, I get pauses and slow-downs sometimes - still, not bad for a laptop)
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:12 pm (UTC)My previous six-year-old one, though, had become too slow for modern games and video/audio editing... and would've laboured mightily under Windows 7 had I upgraded the ancient thing.
-- Steve's now reminded that he hasn't installed CueBase on his new system yet. Ah, a project for the weekend...
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:29 pm (UTC)I frequently refer to the HDD light on the front of PC cases as the "Buy More RAM" light. Because if it's blinking, chances are you need to buy more RAM.
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 02:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 02:41 pm (UTC)As an aside, part of the bit I quoted in my previous post (on high performance computing) reminded me of you:
And, finally, someone said: What an incredible opportunity! You get to make totally outrageous statements that you’ll never be held accountable for! How about offshore data centers, powered by wave motion, continuously serviced by autonomous robots with salamander-level consciousness, spidering around replacing chicklet-sized compute units, all made by the world’s largest computer vendor – Haier! [They make refrigerators.] And lots of graphs, all going up to the right!
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:38 pm (UTC)so far, on some benchmarks it is 8x the speed of my old setup (athlon 64 3000 -> core i5 750), it doesn't stutter when playing high res bbc iplayer, and copying files across the gigabit network is twice the speed it used to be. which is nice.
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 07:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 02:40 pm (UTC)Play Crysis at 1600x1200 with 16xAA & AF above 60fps, damn things struggles to go above 20 at the moment - clearly that's just ruining my life right?!
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Date: 2009-09-24 02:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 02:53 pm (UTC)Otherwise it's mostly fine! Suspecting there's some kind of simple fix that I'm missing, but buggered if I know what.
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Date: 2009-09-24 04:05 pm (UTC)Making sure you are running the latest version of Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera helps, as they've all been doing a lot of work to make Javascript faster.
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Date: 2009-09-24 03:16 pm (UTC)It's the 256Mb VRAM that lets me down. Everything else is more or less great. If I had a better card, I'd play DOOM3 at max settings, I'd play Crysis, Fallout 3, GTA:IV, possibly subscribe to Aion.
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Date: 2009-09-24 03:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 03:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 06:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-24 07:08 pm (UTC)What would you run on all of these VMs???
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Date: 2009-09-24 07:20 pm (UTC)Basically i'd like to be able to run a virtualisation cluster entirely on my laptop ;)
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Date: 2009-09-24 07:32 pm (UTC)The only things that bother me performance-wise are editing HD video, processing large numbers of raw DSLR photos, and running anything particularly graphical in a VM.
But then, I don't play games - or haven't since Portal, at least, which ran fine.
I've looked at replacements, but it looks like all I'd really gain is an extra core, which for much of what I'm doing might not really help much.
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Date: 2009-09-24 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-25 05:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-26 11:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-09-26 12:03 pm (UTC)And I'm not sure what the difference is between slow apps and a slow computer - if your computer isn't running apps then what is it doing?
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Date: 2009-09-26 12:21 pm (UTC)And your browser - how long does that take to launch?
It's all bloat. Like American cars from the 50s that just had to have yards of tailfins just to keep them on the road. We're currently all driving the equivalent of those in rush-hour traffic.
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Date: 2009-09-26 12:34 pm (UTC)Because it does far more than it used to, back in ye olden days? I takes less than two minutes, despite connecting to wireless internet, my online backup, multiple chat systems, Steam, and starting up about 10 little helper apps I find it handy to have running. Sure, I could cut it down (TinyXP booted in about 45 seconds before I started adding functionality back into it) - but I reboot about once a month. The rest of the time the machine is just suspended - which takes less than five seconds to resume from.
My browser just shut down and restarted in 20 seconds - and that included reloading the 13 tabs I had sitting open.
I'm sure there are things they could do to make it boot faster (Windows 7 boots faster on Julie's machine than Vista does on mine - but then it's a massively more powerful machine) - but so far as I can tell the operating system isn't doing anything excessive on boot up, and stays out of my way 99% of the time when I'm running.
What does the OS do that you wish it wasn't doing?
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Date: 2009-09-26 12:52 pm (UTC)And 20 seconds for your browser might be reasonable considering the 13 tabs open, but if from scratch, how long would it take? There shouldn't be time to think of other things between clinking on an app's icon and it being up and running, and that time's less than a second.
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Date: 2009-09-26 12:54 pm (UTC)There are no operating systems that boot this fast into a GUI environment - so either every single person writing an OS is incompetent or it's actually something that takes time to do...
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Date: 2009-09-26 01:05 pm (UTC)For instance, I won't be surprised if the Google OS running on a netbook designed for it boots in under five seconds. I'll consider Google incompetent if they don't manage that. Too.
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Date: 2009-09-26 01:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-11-20 01:38 am (UTC)http://blogs.zdnet.com/open-source/?p=5312&tag=nl.e589
"Google also provided an early demonstration of the web operating system, which sports a Chrome browser-like interface that features application tabs instead of web page tab and a seven second bootup time that is expected to be much faster on its release."
Another two seconds off that and they're there, right?
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Date: 2009-11-20 09:16 am (UTC)If you pull enough code out of a program you can make it as small as you like, and that's what Google seem to have done here. I do think it's fantastic that they're producing a web-appliance OS, but I won't be switching to it...
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Date: 2009-11-22 09:31 am (UTC)It looks to be a computer spec that's designed right. ie. for now and the future, not for the 90s. Not that the buyers will know what's right about it - they'll just prefer it because it doesn't waste their time.
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Date: 2009-09-26 12:54 pm (UTC)