andrewducker | My computer's too slow

The speed is fine... sometimes I could do with more RAM or more bandwidth.

If the low level of RAM slows your machine down because it's swapping all the time, then I'd count that as low speed, in this context :->

(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.)

So it is possible to get a computer that is too slow to run word etc? I think our problems are RAM ones too - the old one (we need to load a new operating system (in fact you said a couple of months ago you had a disc you could lend us, is that still a thing?)) took a good five minutes simply to switch on and once you were in word was pretty much fine but just took forever to open it.

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

One thing about RAM is that it is incredibly cheap these days.

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.

What could I do?

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)

Nothing too esoteric, really, just games :-)

(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)

My new computer is quite fast enough for me... then again, it's insanely overpowered even for my current needs (who *needs* to run Crysis at 60fps?) built when drunk on an unanticipated cash bonus and the possibilities afforded by the Core i7 CPU.

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...

lizzie_and_ari are right on the money. People in general don't have enough RAM, simply because of the way PCs are sold: on the headline figure of CPU speed, so it looks like a good deal to half the RAM but squeeze an extra couple of MHz into a machine for the same price.

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.

windows will swap even when it doesn't need to, so if i have >2gb ram in a machine i'll turn off the swap file altogether, which provides a minor speed boost from windows waiting for the hard disk less. and on laptops it should also have battery life implications.

Oh, I'd probably be satisfied if my desktop could solve the travelling salesman problem deterministically in O(log_n) time. Doesn't have to be fast, just has to be able to do it ...

So you'd like it to have qbits, rather than the regular kind :->

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!

i just finished upgrading my desktop yesterday, so i've yet to discover what it can't do.

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.

EEE! Jealousy!

I basically just need more RAM, but the warranty runs out on my laptop in a couple of months so I'm hesitant to spend money (even just £40) on RAM for a machine that will just need replaced if it breaks any time after December.

That would seem crazy to me - except that your machine does seem to have fallen apart on a regular basis, which makes spending money on it a losing proposition.

So what would you be able to do on your computer if it was faster that you can't now?

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?!

Yeah - games are my only reason for wanting a faster computer too :->

same here, although the current one seems to be coping with the games that I'm running just now

I'll admit that speedier photoshop/ illustrator work would be an auxillary benefit, especially when it comes to large files. At the moment though, my computer is almost fast enough.

Mostly it's a case of doing the same things, faster. What's got me puzzled is that right now it's seriously unresponsive in a lot of text areas in Firefox - but not all. This one's fine, but usually on facebook and often in Gmail, I need to wait about half a second for each letter to appear (so if I want to type a string of 120 characters or so, I then need to occupy myself for a minute while I wait for them).

Otherwise it's mostly fine! Suspecting there's some kind of simple fix that I'm missing, but buggered if I know what.

Gmail and especially Facebook do special javascript things while you type. For example, Facebook's new @friend name feature requires it to watch for when you type the '@' character and present a dropdown menu when you do.

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.

My laptop is perfectly fine for running applications but a slow for running any games that have come out in the last couple fo years.

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.

Since it's quite possible the most intensive thing I actually ask my Lappi to do is play Peggle, or similar type games, I don't think I'm actually taxing it to it's potential I admit...

it's lack of disk space that is killing mine I think. Running Thunderbird seems to do horrible things to performance for some reason....

Runs smoothly for me - but then I have 46 emails in my inbox - the other 580MB is in folders.

Run more VMs - Two copies of ESX, a vCenter server, a DC, a Labmanager server, some guests... *dribble*

(hello btw :))

Hello to you too!

What would you run on all of these VMs???

A lot of it is what I do for work actually - i'd like to have enough RAM and IO to be able to model an entire environment on my laptop - basically be able to virtualise two or more VMware ESX cluster members, and all the management crap that goes along with them.

Basically i'd like to be able to run a virtualisation cluster entirely on my laptop ;)

My sole machine is a single-core 2GHz laptop with 1.5GB system RAM (upgraded from 512MB about a year ago) and 64MB of video memory. It's lasted me over four years, which is impressive, although the only original part remaining is the bottom of the case.

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.

My slightly ancient, but sadly missed dead ibook was just about fine for what I wanted to do. I am hugely, madly grateful to have a borrowed machine to work on, but it *churns* and wheezes when I'm working on big images. Press button and make strong cup of tea time.

I have a new laptop with 4 GB RAM but it still took about 45 minutes to render my video into a DVD image... or one of the steps of creating the DVD, anyway. The video editing itself didn't pose any problems.

If it wasn't in the last category, then I'd be upgrading it as a priority.

I suspect for everyone it's the OS and apps that are slow, not the computer.

Well, my OS is currently taking up less then 2% of CPU time, so it's not likely to be _that_.

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?

And your OS takes how long to boot? Why isn't it instantaneous after all these years of development?

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.

And your OS takes how long to boot? Why isn't it instantaneous after all these years of development?
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?

Taking two minutes to boot is utterly pathetic. It's just an acceptance that crap is the norm.

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.

Why do you believe this?

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...

Because it seems a reasonable thing to believe, given the speed of modern computers.

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.

Why does it seem reasonable? I can't see any evidence for it. I'd want to know of at least one example of something to consider it reasonable for it to exist.

I bookmarked this, in case of future developments. So...

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?

For an OS which does exactly one thing (run a full screen browser) and is still a year away from release?

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...

It's more than just pulling code out. They've ditched the hard-disk too, so no stupid virtual memory slowing everything down.

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.

Forgot the last question: I wish it didn't waste my time.

My computer's too slow

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