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It's Too Slow


raymac46

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My wife was down at her mother's house for a couple of days. During that time she had to use an Atom powered netbook with 2GB of RAM and a 5 Mbit Internet connection.

Normally she has a quad core desktop with 16 GB of RAM and a 100 Mbit connection.

So she complained that things were too slow. Interesting what you get used to.

Edited by raymac46
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My wife was down at her mother's house for a couple of days.
And your wife still loves you??? :whistling: o:)

 

Interesting what you get used to.
We definitely get spoiled. I will never go back to hard drives after getting used to SSDs.
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The funny thing is the netbook does have an SSD so it could be worse. I think my wife is just used to very high bandwidth so when she doesn't have it. forget it.

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I was comfortably using 56K dialup until 2014....

 

Ever since then, every year when my "Introductory promotion rate" is about to expire, I call my ISP and ask to be downgraded to their lowest speed tier (10/1 M). When they ask why, they hear about the difficulties of being a retiree on a fixed income in an inflationary economy, etc, etc. .... Then they transfer me to someone who offers to extend the introductory rate for another year, and "throws in" a speed increase at no extra charge. I allow him/her to talk me into it.....

 

The trick to making this work, is to NOT be bluffing. You have to be fully committed to downgrading your service, and reluctantly let them talk you into letting them extend the promotion.

 

They keep "spoiling" me with higher speeds... I've been wondering how well I'm going to adjust to 10M if they ever call my bluff :)

Edited by Pete!
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When our power was out for more than 8 1/2 days in 2011. I got out my old external 56K modem to go online. (I think there is 1 remaining computer in the house with a dialup modem). No way could I stand even waiting for email to load! I gave up on ever using dialup again. We decided every evening we'd go out to McD's. They had light, heat, tv and internet.

Edited by zlim
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When our power was out for 3 days and the power company saying it would be another 7 - 10 days, I bought 5KW generator. Power was restored the next day. :rolleyes: Oh well.

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When our power was out for 3 days and the power company saying it would be another 7 - 10 days, I bought 5KW generator. Power was restored the next day. :rolleyes: Oh well.

Fueled by Propane or Natural Gas?

After "Sandy" a lot of the people in my area, with gasoline fueled generators, found out that the pumps at gas stations don't work without electricity :(

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Assuming you have enough RAM in the system, I find that the biggest influences on perceived "snappiness" are the presence of an SSD and a high speed Internet connection.

Even a machine with an AMD Bulldozer based processor - which got a resounding "fail" from the computing community - can still look to be fast and powerful if the above criteria are satisfied. Of course if you are a gamer at high res you likely want Intel/Ryzen and a high end graphics card - but that is another topic I think.

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Fueled by Propane or Natural Gas?
Gasoline. I live in Tornado Alley in the Omaha metro area of eastern Nebraska. While our weather is often influenced by hurricanes, we don't get hurricanes here. We do get destructive straight-line winds and of course, tornadoes. While they may take out the power for 10s or even 100s of thousands of customers, the swath of destruction is relatively narrow, compared to hurricane damage. So if the gas stations in my town are all without power, I can go 10 miles over to the next town and get gas there.

 

My next home, however, will [hopefully] have a built-in, natural gas backup generator for the whole house.

 

Assuming you have enough RAM in the system, I find that the biggest influences on perceived "snappiness" are the presence of an SSD and a high speed Internet connection.
While a SSD really only improves performance on disk related tasks, it is surprising how it can improve overall performance. No doubt this is because OS tasks, which tend to be disk intensive, take advantage of SSDs' improved performance. I have a 72 page Word document I use regularly for forum canned texts, links, and other references. I have a shortcut to this doc in my "Quick Launch" tool bar on my desktop. When I click on that shortcut, Word starts and that document "pops" open and is sitting there waiting for me before I have a chance to move my cursor from the Quick Launch shortcut icon to the open doc! I still find that amazing and I've been using SSDs for over 5 years now.
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Normally I would get a relatively small SSD for the operating system and dump all my data onto a larger HDD, but on my main Windows desktop I like to run a couple of train simulation programs. These things have massive databases of routes, locomotives, scenery and rolling stock plus all the physics and weather conditions needed.

So I got a bit larger SSD and keep the sims on it along with Windows. This cut the load times of the programs and associated scenarios by about 75%.

Once things are loaded I don't see a big change but if additional scenery is needed, it seems to appear quicker with fewer stutters.

 

mikado-1024x576.png

Edited by raymac46
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Normally I would get a relatively small SSD for the operating system and dump all my data onto a larger HDD
My first SSD was configured that way, but not anymore. I can easily justify in my mind spending more on a large SSD by reminding myself how much big hard drives used to cost. In 2007, for example, when Hitachi first introduced the 1TB hard drive, it cost (an attractive at the time) $399. Today, you can get a 1TB WD SSD for $290.

 

If I use this inflation calculator, $399 in 2007 would be a whopping $474.97 today! So it is easy in my mind to see that a name brand 1TB SSD today costs me less than a 1TB HD back then (with or without factoring in inflation).

 

And of course, it is not just about capacity. The slowest SSD today can run circles around today's fastest HDs (even hybrid drives). At the same time, the SSD consumes less energy and generates less heat. It takes up much less space in our computer cases, weighs less and makes no noise or vibrations either. Plus, because there are no moving parts, a SSD is more rugged (less susceptible to damage due to bumps and drops) and has a considerably longer life expectancy (noting modern generation SSDs do NOT suffer from crippling write limits that first generation SSDs did).

 

So to me, it is a no brainer. When I factor in the lower energy costs and heat generation, and spread those costs over the longer life expectancy of the SSD, "strategically" speaking I see the initial cost of SSDs washes out over time. And if I factor in the significantly faster wake/boot and file load times over potentially 1000s of wakes/boots and years of service, SSDs are the bargain mass and long term storage device.

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I see the sense in your argument. I have not built a new machine but if I did I would likely go all SSD. Up until now I have been layering an SSD onto an already in-place 1 TB HDD.

Prices aren't quite as nice in Canada where a 1 TB SSD is approx. $375 and a 1 TB HDD is around $65. But if I had to replace an HDD today I would still give serious consideration to an SSD.

Edited by raymac46
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Well, to me, as a hardware enthusiasts, it is not entirely about practicality. I want my material things to "look" nice but in reality, aesthetics don't concern me. I am not into fancy lighting, for example - because they do nothing all for performance. I have a more powerful Intel i5 than I "need", but I did not go overboard with an i7 I would never fully utilize. Same with my graphics.

 

So do I really "need" a SSD? Practically speaking? No. But I have worked hard all my life so I can reward myself and enjoy some of the finer things my hard work has afforded me. As long as I don't waste my money on frivolous things, and I can find some justification beyond just because "I want it", I am okay with splurging every now and then.

 

And when it comes to things that I can expect to use for many years, I find I can justify spending more up front that much easier.

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I do believe you get what you pay for, and I've always made sure whatever computer I buy or build will meet my requirements and then some. That said I am not an early adopter - largely because I run a lot of Linux machines. These benefit from stepping back a bit from the bleeding edge.

This past year I bought a Thinkpad to run Linux on - it's something I always wanted to do and an off lease T430 did the job at about 20% of the cost of a new machine.

I probably will build a new Ryzen system someday for Linux but I can wait another 18 months or so before diving in.

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I do believe you get what you pay for
For the most part, I agree. But it is also common to end up paying a little extra for the brand name on the label. If the company stands behind that name with a quality product, good warranty, and excellent after-sell support, I am okay with that.
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