Seriously, I don’t get it. My computer has 4 fucking processors, each of them bigger than the single processor my previous computer had. I have over 2 gig of ram in my computer and a video card with more ram than all of my previous computer combined AND STILL I am stuck with a computer which takes minutes to really boot up windows, and then chokes while trying to load Winamp.
Oh sure, I know, I’m trying to do too much at once – but WTF is the point of having four processors and 2gig of ram if I can’t open Skype, MSN, Firefox, iTunes and Winamp all at once? What is it that these programs are trying to do which is so god damned amazing that it requires all of my god damn resources?
How is it that, in essence, my computer now runs just as slowly and annoyingly as it did back in 2005, 2000 and 1995? The computer has improved SIGNIFICANTLY every step of the way – but the performance has somehow managed to pretty much stay the same. Oh sure, the software has got prettier, and sometimes even managed to do more stuff (not all of it desired), but really, has the software gotten the 1000 times more complicated that they would need to in order to keep up with the 1000 times improvements in processing speed and memory? Really?
I don’t get it, and it pisses me off that I can’t get a god damned computer system which will just run quickly and smoothly when doing simple tasks – like booting windows.
WTF is Going On with Computers?,
The answer is simpler than you realise! This has been the source of my irritation for some time too. Processors keep getting faster, we jumped from 32mb of RAM to 6GB and everything still runs the same speed, despite the fact that Windows hasn’t changed *that* much.
Well, the reason that even with your new processor and more RAM etc. everything still runs the same speed – aside from the fact that Windows itself does require a lot more power these days (for some reason) – is the fact that the hard drive is what’s causing the slow-down, not the other parts. When you have a fast computer, the hard drive is usually the bottleneck, and it’s the source of all the problems you raised – loading programs up, starting the computer and waiting for Windows to load, etc.
Unfortunately hard drives really haven’t gotten much faster in the last 10 years, however you can now get an SSD which is a hell of a lot faster .. and more expensive, to boot (pun not intended). Seriously though, with a fast computer, you stick an SSD in it and run Windows off it and suddenly you’re not waiting for things to load any more.
I bought an SSD recently. Hit me up on Facebook if you have any other questions about it.
Hey, don’t wanna sound like a smartass, but have you tried Mac’s?
I believe they’re a better choice not only because they have a more stable OS, but also because the OS is optimized for the hardware. This means that it uses the hd, ram, vcard, mboard, ecc… at the best of its potential.
On the other hand, Windows is made to work with ALL the hardware out there: every motherboard, cpu, ram, v-cards… there’s no way it can be optimized for all the endless combinations of hardware.
On a last note, what really slows down PC’s is spyware and viruses, which are mainly written for Windows in order to hit as many computers out there. Mac has virtually no virus written for it.
Being a minority has it’s advantages sometimes. 🙂
Hope it helps,
Ian
Simple answer … multicore suits throughput, not latency. There’s a reason data parallelism is easy compared with algorithmic parallelism. Moore’s Curve only reflect the cost/density of transistors on a chip, for a long time Intel focused on raw clock speed (which gave near linear performance improvement) until they found out that what you end up with is a really compact heater element. Other computer manufacturers (eg SGI which focused on balanced memory hierarchies) got swamped under the marketing hype.