[AfxToo]

The issue with E-Bay is mostly due to their heavy use of Adobe Flash Player 10. That's what sucks up all that CPU since regular HTML rendering takes a trivial amount of CPU and memory capacity. This issue can also be impacted by how well the Adobe Flash Player interacts with your browser and OS. I'm running Safari 4.0.3 on Snow Leopard 10.6.1 with Adobe Flash Player 10 and it's very responsive, even with multiple tabs open with other tabs running video streaming. This was not the case with Snow Leopard 10.6 (RTM) and the previous version of Safari. The current Safari/Flash 10 combination is now noticeably faster than the Firefox/Flash 10 combination on my Mac. On my Windows 7 (RTM) netbook running Chrome 3 with Flash 10, E-Bay's site is downright snappy even with a measly Atom processor and only 2 GB of RAM.

I guess you can blame E-Bay for putting a lot of Flash content on their web site. But more and more sites are doing it in their quest to provide a slicker and more visually appealing user experience. This just means that you'll need a reasonably fast computer with as much general purpose and video processing capacity and memory as you can stuff in it and as fast of an Internet connection as you can afford if you want to enjoy the (or being subjected to) the online experience that web sites are providing these days. Then you have to find the right combination of operating system, browser, and flash player plug-in (which in turn is also dependent on the underlying Java runtime environment) to get everything running smoothly. Then you have to hope that one of the many system, browser, and plug-in updates that are getting pushed down to your computer doesn't break the magic combination that works well.

Keep in mind that these big browser plug-ins, like Adobe Flash (and AIR), Microsoft Silverlight, and JavaFX are really like small operating systems. That's "small" by today's behemoth OS perspective. By legacy OS standards, they are larger than most older operating systems. The system requirements for some of these plug-ins may exceed the system requirements for your base operating system.

 

[AfxToo]

Too funny Joe. I understand your sentiment. My original PC, which was equipped with a 30 Meg hard disk would today hold a whopping 3 or 4 high fidelity MP3 files. A 40 pound beast for playing less than half an LPs worth of music. Only trouble is, the pokey old 8088 wouldn't be up to the task of decoding the files, much less driving the audio circuitry at a data rate fast enough to produce decent playback quality. A modern PMP like the iPod Touch, which is running a fairly beefy version of OS X, which is built on Unix, and the Zune HD which has a multi-core are full blown multi-processor equipped computers that are orders of magnitude faster than my first PC and fit in my pocket. So there are reasons for bringing more power to bear in computing. Yeah, a 1950s record player can serve this application using vinyl platters with grooves stamped in them. No gigabytes and gigahertz involved but it won't fit in your pocket, especially if you have several dozen albums you want to carry around with you all the time.

Bottom line is that it all comes down to what you want to do with a computer. If you have a 1970s vintage mainframe computer in your garage and just need to run 1970s applications, and don't mind the power bill, then there is no compelling reason to update your setup.

If you can figure a way to run You-Tube from a teletype terminal and do email using punch cards, now that's something I'd like to see.

 

[AfxToo]

"... still smarting from the whoopin' I just took at the feet of the gang of jack booted g-men who kicked in my door and forced me to log on and read my email and check out the HT postings. Ouch. Pretty brutal. I'm thinking of turning Amish, but I'm just not digging the color choices they give you on your ride. Black or, um black, one horsepower, and no wheel spinners. But who knows, maybe I will give up the accoutrements of modern society for a little more control over my technology choices...

Hi, I'm a Mac.

And I'm a PC.

Howdy, I'm a Yoder, and I like pie.

"

 

[AfxToo]

Corporate PCs are always bloated up with all kinds on "inventory control" and configuration management software, plus all the services for connecting to the corporate LAN and domains.

Win7 on my netbook booted from cold iron to login prompt in 26 seconds and is ready to go with the full desktop running in 51 seconds, which included the time it took me to login. This is a low end box. On a faster, higher end multicore PC (like a $400 bargain box PC) I'd expect it to be even faster.

When looking at old PCs you also have to keep in mind that you probably paid a lot of money for precious RAM and hard disk space back then. Today, 2 gigs of RAM will set you back $80 and a 1.5 terrabyte hard disk, all of $125 (this month - next month it will be less). Hardware costs have plummeted dramatically and the hardware itself has become commodity. Even low end gaming video cards have 512 meg of RAM, with high end cards having 2 gigs. Unless you're a hard core gamer the greatest expense in a Windows based home PC is or will soon be the software, with the OS itself being a big part of the total software cost.

Joe, I know you'll be disappointed to hear that Win7 (64-bit) can only take 192 gigabytes of RAM. I know, disappointment is hard to swallow. Someday the 128 bit systems arrive and we'll be able to break free from the nasty 192 gigabyte bottleneck. It will happen, be patient.

 

[AfxToo]

software is out of control

Au contraire my punch card and paper tape heathen. It may appear that way to an outsider. But there has never been, and never will be, anything created by man that has more potential to change the way we live our lives than software. From a computer engineering and architecture perspective, there has been very, very little progress on the hardware side of computer design in nearly 50 years. Most of the advances in capacity and performance are a consequence of vast improvements in material science, fabrication technology, and manufacturing technology.The latest multi core, multi gigahertz CPUs are largely built around the same architecture and design patterns that were devised in the 1950s. Rather than taking up an entire room, they now take up only a few square microns on a silicon wafer. Very impressive evolution, but one that is starting to hit a wall due to absolute physical constraints and lack of evolution of computer architectural design.

Software on the other hand is still at the caveman rubbing two sticks together to make fire level. There's no denying the apparent sophistication of some software today, Leisure Suit Larry notwithstanding, but where software is today versus where its potential resides, that's a huge delta almost beyond human comprehension. Software is infinitely malleable and extensible, unlike any other tool that man has ever devised.

Still, the potential and the manifestation of the potential into everyday utility is still one that may elude our best intentions. The most remarkable computing entity that's ever been assembled, or evolved, is the human brain. But anyone who has been behind the guy in the checkout line who is taking 20 seconds to make the "paper or plastic" decision using that remarkable cognitive machine may wonder how we'll ever get beyond the rubbing two sticks together level with software technology.

 

[AfxToo]

If you are using Firefox...

1) Install AdBlock Plus (this works on all operating systems)
2) Install and run this: http://www.crystalidea.com/speedyfox

Firefox uses SQLite and over time it gets fragmented and needs to be optimized. That's what SpeedyFox does. Run it periodically.

 

[AfxToo]

No reasonable person would still be using Internet Explorer 6 if they have a choice.

It's not an IE versus Firefox versus Safari versus Chrome thing either, IE6 is simply a horrible piece of technology that has done more to sully Microsoft's reputation than anything that's come out of Redmond. Yeah, Windows Me was a train wreck too, but it went away on its own rather quickly. IE6 needs to be killed before it inflicts any more damage. If you must use a Microsoft browser, use IE8. Otherwise, take your pick and make your pick your new default browser.

I am not alone in my assessment of IE6: (there are many more)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/internet/we-come-to-bury-ie6
http://ripie6.com/

This is obviously a case where the "It needed killin' " defense would most certainly lead to an acquittal.

 

[AfxToo]

I think IE8 requires Windows XP minimum, even though the hardware requirements are low, in the range that you would be able to use. A better solution with Windows 2000 is Firefox 3, which has a recommended configuration (not minimum) of 500 MHz CPU, 128 MB RAM, and 52 MB disk space. An added bonus of Firefox is its huge plug-ins library, the first of which to install is Adblock Plus. It removes most all banner and animated ads from web pages, further speeding up your surfing. I use FF3 on all of my computers, the lowest end one being a PIII-550 with 384 MB RAM running XP. It runs fine.

The issues with IE6 are mostly due to its noncompliance with web standards (which is why no web developer wants to develop web sites for it) and it opens up big security holes in your computer unless you keep up with all of the updates, 150+ security holes in IE6, and still counting.

Dial-up is a huge problem with any computer these days, but especially Windows machines with the constant updates and patches. The last time I installed a fresh copy of XP on a machine with a modem I calculated that it would take between 40 and 60 hours of modem download time just to bring it up to snuff on all required security updates. That was a few years ago too, the situation would only be worse today. This situation has gotten so bad that next week, when Windows 7 is released with much fanfare, users are going to install this brand spanking new ("cough cough") OS on their machine and find out that it already has many megabytes of required updates waiting for them. Brand new and already broken before you get it out of the box. By the way, there is no direct update path from XP or earlier to Win7. It will not bring over any of your existing applications or settings unless you are upgrading from Vista. Monty, please queue the donkey behind door number one ...

Incidentally, the situation with the Mac is not much better. Snow Leopard required a huge update (~60 MB) within a few days of its release to fix bugs in Safari. Same with Ubuntu, constant updates that force you to have a high speed connection just to keep up with the constant changes. The big difference though, with Windows you pretty much HAVE to install all security patches. With Mac and Ubuntu (Linux), nobody is out there trying to break them or hack into them all of the time like they are with Windows. Windows, with its near 90% market share, is under constant attack.