Hi,
The list has been quiet, time to start some correspondence on "Pet
peeves",
which is (according to Wikipedia)
"a minor annoyance that an individual identifies as particularly
annoying to him or her, to a greater degree than others may find it"...
You may have a different peeve, which should pertain to linux, which may
be of benefit to
someone on the list. Or maybe correct me on the points below...
For me - it is that machines are sold in store with not enough memory.
On asking the store
attendant that you want more memory, they will look at you and try to
tell you that there is enough
memory in the box for your task at hand..
My view,
Putting more memory onto a box is the simplest and most effective way of
improving the performance.
With more memory, the box is less likely to have swapped the task out of
memory and put it to disk.
Shops that attempt to bamboozle customers into buying a machine with
more mhz in the processor, when an extra
4Gb would have done a better job,
Linux has grown over the years into a beast that requires more and more
memory. If you ever get a chance,
put an oldish distro (eg centos 5.2) onto a box. It will be very very
snappy - far snappier than current modern
distros (like the latest suse, fedora, ubuntu). The improved snappyness
is mostly due to the increase in cpu speed,
but has some component in that nothing on the desktop is swapped out.
A linux box, with heaps of ram in it, is more likely to run the linux
distros of 2018.. - so a linux box can be made to last ages.
Windows boxes, with time gain more and more applications on them. Each
of the applications has a (at least one) dll, which is loaded
at boot. The DLL is always in Ram - taking up valuable space. So as time
goes by, there is less space for the application
to run in - which slows the apps. There are two fixes for this - put
more ram in the box when you buy it, or minimise the
number of applications you load onto the windows box. (or don't use
windows, but then we don't always have this choice)..
Since these boxes are sold with the minimum of ram, they very quickly
become "too slow" and sent to the dump. By putting
more ram in at purchase time, the box would have lasted longer. I think
you can see the point - more ram is actually an
environmentally friendly activity....
Cheers,
Derek.
--
Derek J Smithies Ph.D.
Christchurch,
New Zealand
-- "How did you make it work??" "the usual, got everything right"
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