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Subject: 
What is "powerful"?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.off-topic.fun
Date: 
Sun, 27 Jun 1999 11:02:09 GMT
Viewed: 
203 times
  
So I have a Pentium 450 with 12 Gb HD and 128 Mb RAM and Win98. It takes
two minutes from power-on to have get a blank notepad window opened.
Same thing takes less than a minute on my old Pentium 120 with Win95. It
took less than 20 seconds from power-on to launch Norton Commander on my
286, and my Luxor ABC-80 loaded its Basic compiler (well, sort of
Basic...) even before the monitor was lit.

So I have a 56k modem. It takes 43 seconds to get online. It also fails
occationally. My old USR 28.8 takes 34 seconds and makes a much more
reliable connection.

So I have a DVD player with a fantastic spin rate (I don't remember how
much). It takes 15 seconds to enter the file system on an average CD. It
even fails to read some commercial CD:s. My first CD player had 2x spin
and no servo motor to insert/eject the CD, but the file system was found
almost immediately.

So I have the latest Netscape Communicator. It won't even load on my 486
laptop and is painfully slow on my new "powerful" machine. Netscape
Navigator 3.0 for example, loads much, much faster on any Win3.x
machine.

And so on... What's the gain of "upgrading"?

For some reason, the word "powerful" seems to me more and more equal to
"slow". Yes, I know I'm not fair. The same POV rendering that took 5:57
on my P120 takes 1:03 on my P450. But while some "cool" effects like 3D
stuff get faster, it seems the basics like booting up, checking mailbox,
plain word processing gets slower the more "powerful" your hard- and
software is.


/Tore



Message has 3 Replies:
  Re: What is "powerful"?
 
(...) Isn't "progress" great? ;-) (...) Well, chalk that behavior up as being courtesy of your operating system vendor. They want booting and every other normal aspect of computing to be slower and slower each year so that you need to buy faster and (...) (25 years ago, 27-Jun-99, to lugnet.off-topic.fun, lugnet.off-topic.geek)
  Re: What is "powerful"?
 
On Sun, 27 Jun 1999 11:02:09 GMT, Tore Eriksson <tore.eriksson@mbox3...wipnet.se> wrote: Followup-to: .geek. (...) If this si true, there are configuration issues. Win98 is not much slower than 95. (...) Doesn't look as good, though, does it? (...) (...) (25 years ago, 28-Jun-99, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)
  Re: What is "powerful"?
 
(...) Is that a so-called "winmodem"? I was shopping for a modem not too long ago myself, but I almost exclusively found "winmodems", which are useless to me. I ended up with a second hand USR Sportster 33.6. What's wrong with winmodems? They're not (...) (25 years ago, 28-Jun-99, to lugnet.off-topic.fun)

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