What a difference a couple hundred megs makes

[w3jn]

I bought an old Dell 1 GHz computer for my lake place for $10 or $15 a year ago, and the thing has always been slower than molasses, to the point it would take literally 5-10 minutes to wake up from its sleep mode.  I knew one problem was memory; it only had 128K but didn't feel like spending another $30 to upgrade it.

I finally took the plung, TNX to HUZ's encouragement, and this thing sings like a brand new computer!  Just as fast as my 2.5GHZ P-4, at least with internet junk.  $30 for 512MB was certainly money well spent.

[N3DRB The Derb]

yep. I got 4GB in this G5, and 2 GB in the PC. Too bad it's going to be obsolete in a few years when Apple stops supporting PowerPC.

All my computers are getting long in the tooth. the PC is a AMD Sempron 3100+ socket 754, which is considered junk now.

My wife uses a 1Ghz P3 in the garage with win2K with wifi going back in here via 54G.

It's all crap. I doubt I've ever used more than 5% of this G5's capabilities. 90% of the time I'm doing things that could be done on a 700 Mhz machine. The only time I ever use this thing for real is when I'm doing video editing. Then you need all the horsepower you can get.

[WA1GFZ]

my 1 Gig dell in the shack has 512 meg of ram and dogs doing SDR demodulation.
I remember a Delco computer with 256K flew an airplane. ...and the software guys had to clean up after themselves for it to run properly.

[k4kyv]

My Dell has 512 mb of ram.  I tried to upgrade, but the memory sticks already in the computer are not compatible with what is available now.  I tried to purchase from Dell, and checked out several online sources, but no-one had any in stock. They told me the memory sticks in my computer are obsolete and no longer manufactured, even though the computer is only about 5 years old. I forget the exact technical specs and nomenclature of the sticks, and would have to start from scratch and look up the information all over again, unless I saved it somewhere. The problem is that it is not recommended to intermix the types of ram, so I would have to replace all the existing ram in the computer as well as purchase the additional memory sticks, and I am not even sure the mother board would be compatible with what is available to-day.

The main problem was apparently a well documented memory leak inherent to Firefox. I found out about a software trick that helps; by changing a couple of settings, minimising Firefox on the screen clears out the parasitic memory usage and the accumulation process starts over.  Whenever I run an application that requires a lot of memory, I make sure Firefox is closed.

Right now I am running at 141k of available physical memory, up from 67k before I just minimised and restored Firefox.

Supposedly, Firefox is working on the problem, but I still have it after downloading the latest version and its updates.  But despite the bug, FF still works better for me than IE.

[W2INR]

I just tried to add some RAM to my VIC 20 . I think all the slots are used up - - damn I guess I should upgrade to the Commodore 64.

[KA1ZGC]

Yep, that's Winders fer ya.

I built up two machines from 1GHz K7VMA motherboards with 128M each back in 2001. I kept one and gave the other to my mom.

I installed NT on hers and FreeBSD on mine. About a year ago, her power supply crapped out, so I decommissioned the BSD box and put that power supply in her machine.

While I was at it, I also installed XP. XP had been out long enough that they had it working half-decent. Still, it turned out to be a bad move.

Spy Sweeper (an absolute necessity for any Winders machine, unheard of for anything else) got very confused by suddenly waking up in a different operating system. So I upgraded Spy Sweeper.

The end result was a brand new OS that ran like cold molasses. Trouble was, Spy Sweeper wanted a host with 256M minimum, and it only had half of that. It pre-empted the OS to such a ridiculous extent that things took all day to run.

With no other choice, I uninstalled Spy Sweeper and told my folks to just be careful.

When I moved out of the Salem apartment, I took the opportunity to strip the BSD carcass and put its 128M stick in the Winders box alongside the two 64M sticks that were already there (remember when you couldn't get away with doing that?).

Now, at long last, XP and Spy Sweeper live in harmony. Good thing too, because the machine was downright infested by that point.

I have another FreeBSD box that was my firewall in Salem. 133MHz Pentium, 64M of RAM. The difference is that you don't have to run any kind of desktop package at all (let alone run only the one they ship with it), or any other kind of memory-hogging software, just the bare essentials to support whatever function you need the box to perform. Works like a champ to this day.

No idea how much I've got in the Linux boxes, probably 256M; but again, they don't have so much ridiculous overhead built in that you need multiple gigabytes of RAM just to boot the freakin' OS.

Still a 6dB increase in RAM is never a bad thing!

--Thom
Kryptonte Amulet One Zircon Gem Collection
p.s. Psss... Johnny, I think you meant 128M, not 128k; unless that's really an 8088!

[KA8WTK]

I just tried to add some RAM to my VIC 20 . I think all the slots are used up - - damn I guess I should upgrade to the Commodore 64.

Gary,
  No Problem! I think I still have an extender board for one of them. 

[w3jn]

Yer right, Tom, 128 SCHMEGAbytes, not KILL-O-Bytes 

This thing runs FB indeed with XP, symantec, and zone alarm.

I made the mistake of hooking this machine to the internet before it was upgraded to SP 2 and no firewall.  Man that was like riding a horse across the Russian Front.  In the time it took to dowload SP2 and zonealarm symantec was alarming literally constantly with virus attacks.

[KA1ZGC]

The Windows XP OS is a memory HOG in itself and the silly page file system residing on hard drive slows things down.

If only it was a page file system. Winders is the only OS I can think of that does its paging to an ordinary file on the regular filesystem with everything else. The resulting overhead is absurd.

Most real operating systems will set aside a partition (or partitions) on whatever drive you want for paging purposes. No passing through the bloated filesystem codepath just to move some pages from active RAM to disk. It's a simple matter of read from here, write to there, and add an entry to an in-memory table so you remember where you put it. You don't need a filesystem for paging, all you need is raw disk space.

You can set up a "page file" in normal filesystem space on other OSes as well, if you really want to. Why anybody would want to is something I never really figured out, but c'est la vie.

Boot sequence loaded the old Windows OS and page file system into the RAM drive card and left all the motherboard RAM available for applications.

I'll bet that worked like a champ. The ultimate disk-based method was always to have your swap partition take up an entire dedicated drive which, in turn, was on a dedicated drive controller.

I don't know if anyone sells ATA controller cards these days, since most motherboards have ATA controllers built-in. A few servers that I maintained at previous jobs had built-in RAID arrays and a seperate SCSI controller (for tape backups and the like). I would find/fabricate someplace to mount a spare SCSI drive attached to the unused controller and dedicate that to paging. People thought I was nuts until we benchmarked two otherwise-identical servers side-by-side, where the performance gain was undeniable.

Too bad the days of disks with a second set of heads fixed over the VTOC are over.

We're right back to the stone age, just like in MS DOS with it's 640K RAM problems. UNIX/Linux OS and running Windows XP in a shell is looking better to me everyday.    

It's getting easier every day, too. VMWare isn't the only PC emulator out there anymore. For that matter, there are tons of emulators out there for various architectures. I've got one machine running DOS/VS R36 and MVS 3.8j, both of which run under VM/370, which runs under Hercules, which runs under Linux. Faster than the 3033 I grew up on, and faster than a 3090 as far as I can tell.

Winders, schminders.

--Thom
Killer Album One Zappa's Greatest Compositions

[k4kyv]

The end result was a brand new OS that ran like cold molasses. Trouble was, Spy Sweeper wanted a host with 256M minimum, and it only had half of that. It pre-empted the OS to such a ridiculous extent that things took all day to run.

I use two freebies, Spybot Search & Destroy, plus Ad-Aware, in addition to the Windows Defender, and they seem to keep my machine relatively free of rubbish.  I run a scan every couple of weeks, and about all it usually finds are a few low-risk "tracking cookies" which I always delete.

One of the best ways to protect your machine, in addition to anti-spyware, firewall and anti-virus, is to install a custom HOSTS file (free download).  Before I installed mine, the anti-spyware would find 30 or more "problems" every scan.  Now they rarely find even a half-dozen, even when I go past the normal deadline to scan.

In addition, HOSTS blocks many of the banner ads that show up on websites.  It gets rid of ALL the ones in my Hotmail account, so that it runs just as clean as my ISP e-mail account.  Web pages load up much faster, since it doesn't have to wait for all the banners to load up (these are separate url's that must load up in addition to the main page, and the page won't display properly until they are all loaded up).

For more information on the custom HOSTS file, check http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

After installing, be sure to follow these instructions at the middle of the page:

    Editors Note: in most cases a large HOSTS file (over 135 kb) tends to slow down the machine. This only occurs in W2000/XP/Vista. Windows 98 and ME are not affected.

    To resolve this issue (manually) open the "Services Editor"

        * Start | Run (type) "services.msc" (no quotes)
        * Scroll down to "DNS Client", Right-click and select: Properties
        * Click the drop-down arrow for "Startup type"
        * Select: Manual, or Disabled (recommended) click Apply/Ok and restart. [more info]

    When set to Manual you can see that the above "Service" is not needed (after a little browsing) by opening the Services Editor again, scroll down to DNS Client and check the "Status" column. It should be blank, if it was needed it would show "Started" in that column. There are several Utilities that can reset the DNS Client for you ...

You can subscribe to free updates via e-mail.  These come out about every 2 weeks, and once you get the hang of it, take less than 2 minutes to install.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Never found any spy ware on my machine. Never ran any spy ware checker crap programs either.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

No need to scan it. I'm not running a crap-o Windows machine. Some day you'll wise up. Till then, have fun running all that so call security software.

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

For sure. Nothing is 100% safe. Firewalls and NIDS in place here.

[KA1ZGC]

WARNING: Slightly-off-topic old-buzzard transmission follows, but I'll keep it to this one and take it offline if it goes any further.

Thom, those old fixed head disks were large, yeah and expensive, but there hasn't ever been a moving head disk that could even come close to their read & write times.

Well, that's debatable, actually.

The fixed heads were only used for read operations. The idea was to park them on the VTOC (Volume Table Of Contents) track so the flying heads didn't have to constantly seek to the VTOC track for read operations.

However, writes to the VTOC were still done with the flying heads, so those VTOC seeks were still necessary. Based on the nature of reads and writes done to the platters, the system engineer had to choose where to park the VTOC: on the outermost track, the innermost track, or right in the middle. Fixed-head drives came in one of those three configurations. Each of the three had its uses, middle-VTOC was most popular for highly-dynamic volumes (where data in various places on the platter was constantly being changed), because it meant the smallest seek interval from anywhere else on the platter. The others were mostly used for serialized fullpack volumes.

By the time the IBM 3350 rolled around, use of serialized fullpacks was already in a rapid decline. Many improvements were also made in platter speed and hardware caching from that point forward.

By the time the IBM 3380 rolled around (early 80s sometime, I forget exactly when), the performance was pretty close to fixed-head numbers for highly-volatile volumes (emphasis on volatile, the 3380's horizontal spindle was famous for wearing down bearings and eventually jettisoning them one at a time like bullets while the disk pack took up smoking; leaving you the choice of getting cut down by shrapnel as you ran out of the room, or hiding under the table when the halon came down).

I got out of the mainframe biz in the late '90s, and the 3390 was the indisputable leader of the mainframe HBA market. Picture a PC-style hard drive 14" tall, 18" wide, and about 24" deep, wheighing about 90 kg. Now picture 32 (IIRC) of those in a double-sided cabinet.

Unfortunately, the sheer mass of data being jammed on a single platter just doesn't lend itself to fixed-head technology anymore. The tracks are too small and the tolerances are too tight to keep a set of heads constantly over one track (assuming a VTOC could even fit in a single cylinder anymore). Also, since the very nature of disk I/O has changed drastically (even in the mainframe universe) from the days of fixed-head drives, any advantage seen would probably be negligible compared to advantages gained by other (more modern) tools/tricks.

They had huge advantages in their heyday; but between changes in disk formats, improvements in caching methods, and the raw volume of data being jammed into one platter these days, I'm afraid that heyday died of natural causes, but at least it lived a good life, and now we can all celebrate those wonderful years!

--Thom
Kleenex, Anyone? One Zippy Great Commemoration!
See? Now, that wasn't so bad, was it?

[WA1GFZ]

Imagine the day when some young kid comes along and makes an operating systme to blow the MS pig away.
MS is like driving a 1000 HP car with 4 inch wide tires.

[W3SLK]

Gary said:

I just tried to add some RAM to my VIC 20 . I think all the slots are used up - - damn I guess I should upgrade to the Commodore 64.

Hey Gary, I have a Commodore 128 laying around here that I'm not using. You're welcome to it

[WBear2GCR]

Very disappointed.

I expected to learn how this high ohm resistor was going to change my life!!
Not! 

Hmmm... it seems that Zero Goose Catch knows sumtin' 'bout confuzers! 

Well, MS is bloatware to the max.
They have assumed the mantle that IBM once wore.
I recall the "manual" for a typical IBM OS - at least a small book case worth of binders.
Then there came UNIX.
One small book.

Odd.

How can that be possible??

And, even worse, you could actually write your own functions for UNIX - if you somehow wanted to... imagine the heresy in that!

If I could afford a Mac that now runs stupid windoze under the underlying UNIX (I hope that's what they are doing!!) I'd get one in a hot second. That's not to say that there can't be attacks on UNIX, I guess there can, but the OS is so very much more stable and so much less bloatware that it isn't funny...

               _-_-bear

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

The Mac runs Mac OS X (a UNIX OS). No Windows, unless emulation/virtual machines are involved.

[WBear2GCR]

I am led to believe that "Leopard" or some such does or will...

              _-_-bear

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Does what? Run Windows. No. Windows can be run under OS X only via emulation/virtual machine. You can boot directly into Windows on Mac hardware using Boot Camp (but only on those machines with Intel processors - anything made in the last 2-3 years).

I am led to believe that "Leopard" or some such does or will...

              _-_-bear

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

Yea, really. System V books, BSD books, and now Linux books.

[KA1ZGC]

Yeah, Bear... appearently you were never in any Unix mainframe shops. They required the same truckloads of manuals to detail every last function down to every last detail. Every operating system does, to this day.

You're thinking of the Installation and Usage guides for more modern systems like GNU/Linux (which contains no original Unix code whatsoever) and FreeBSD/OpenBSD/NetBSD (which shot off from BSD Unix using what bits of code AT&T finally dropped their king's-ransom licensing fees for). Mac OS X is also an offshoot of the Big BSD Emancipation.

But I got news for ya: that "one little book" that comes in the box? That is all you need if you're just going to fire it up using the default desktop software and surf the net with it. That just scratches the surface enough to get you on your way. If you're really going to stick your face down into the moving gears, you need more than that. Lots and lots more.

The same is true for any operating system on any hardware platform. A user guide can be small, an administration guide can be reasonable. Get into what was once called "systems programming" and you're going to need a forklift to move all your books around, no matter what operating system you're talking about.

Beleive me, I'm glad I kept all my manuals from my IBM mainframe days, because I'm running those IBM mainframe OSes at home now.

By the way, you can write your own functions for any operating system there is. They wouldn't be much use to anyone otherwise.

--Thom
Killer Agony One Zipper Got Caught

[Steve - WB3HUZ]

The cool thing about Unix (Unix like) systems is the man command. Type it and any command and you get a ton of info on it.

From my terminal:

stephen-ickes-computer:~ steve$ man ls

LS(1)                     BSD General Commands Manual                    LS(1)

NAME
     ls -- list directory contents

SYNOPSIS
     ls [-ABCFGHLPRTWZabcdefghiklmnopqrstuwx1] [file ...]

DESCRIPTION
     For each operand that names a file of a type other than directory, ls
     displays its name as well as any requested, associated information.  For
     each operand that names a file of type directory, ls displays the names
     of files contained within that directory, as well as any requested, asso-
     ciated information.

     If no operands are given, the contents of the current directory are dis-
     played.  If more than one operand is given, non-directory operands are
     displayed first; directory and non-directory operands are sorted sepa-
     rately and in lexicographical order.

     The following options are available:

     -A      List all entries except for . and ...  Always set for the super-



and so on....

[KA1ZGC]

The cool thing about Unix (Unix like) systems is the man command. Type it and any command and you get a ton of info on it.

You'd think someone would have figured out hot-linking over the decades the man(1) command has been around. They've got full-screen paging man programs, xman programs, and on-and-on, and not one of them that I ever saw allowed you to put the cursor on a man page that was being referenced and have it go to that page.

The man-to-html packages do this (somewhat), but it's not like it wasn't an easily-done thing prior to the advent of html. I mean, geez... it's just another markup language, fer peetsake!

I mean, hey... the VM/CMS HELP package did it! 

--Thom
Killer Aircraft One Zeppelin Goes Crash
p.s. Love the 1x1 call, BTW...

[KA1ZGC]

Screw it all, I'm going back to CPM & Basic!

Would you like some links to some emulators?

--Thom
Kraft Advertisement One Zesty Grated Cheese
That's not a joke, they're out there.