#i might write more disabled/disabled-coded reader stuff later | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

zerohour1974 · 4 years

Text

The Grumpy Git Returns 2

Why is the Tech world so fundamentally broken?

Hello readers I’m back after a major hiatus. What on earth is going on in the world of technology. It’s all going to hell.

You might think what the hell am I on about. It seems things in the industry are completely broken and for all the complaints out there no one seems to do anything about it.

Here are just a few examples...

1) Apple releases Mac Pro with a basic price tag of £5000

What on earth, I would understand such a price point if this was an amazing all singing all dancing machine, but its not. The basic system is an i5 system. Seriously then everything else can be upgraded by Apple or exclusive dealers or it invalidates your warranty and the machine locks you out using the T2 security chip.

Now Apple have been on shaky ground regarding tech for a number of years which problems such as lowering sales of iPhones because by the time they release them they have already been superseded by the competition.

Apple used to be seen as the innovative company of the world, the kings of aesthetic and cool. Now even the hipsters of the world are thinking Apple products are too expensive and not really giving much to the world.

It doesn’t help that every MacOS version is now more like iOS and they are locking you further and further into the Apple Garden. What i mean by that is blocking anything that is not in the Apple Play Store, not supporting hardware (Nvidia graphics cards, Wi-Fi etc.) and now preventing upgrades. Which is alienating their customers...

No one is going to buy the Mac Pro one because the price is ludicrous. Two everyone is speculating Apple is going to change to using ARM processors so the whole system is probably about to change. People got bitten with PPC, only for Apple to switch to Intel and abandon PPC. So they will not get away with it twice.

Apple admit too being a $1 trillion company but how long will it last considering you are further and further alienating your own customers. Now don’t get me wrong there will always be a hardcore group of loyal Apple consumers, but you have to wonder is it enough to keep Apple where it stands.

Personally given their listed losses it looks like the bubble is starting to burst. But equally getting back to the point who seriously believed a £5000 desktop would be seen and thought wow that’s a good idea. The mind boggles.

A lot of people are now building Hackintosh machines because one its cheaper to do so and two for less money you probably get more power than the Mac Pro. Crazy.

2) Software companies putting out totally broken games as full releases at full price.

This one is pretty obvious I can site many examples her but of course probably the biggest known was of course Bethesda’s Fallout 76. Now I’m not going to reiterate its story there has been plenty of coverage about it on YouTube.

Now before anyone starts yes I accept there is Early Access programs on Steam and the likes but they at least admit up front that the item you are purchasing is not the final game and may be subject to change.

However we are seeing more and more companies putting out games that require huge day one updates of several gigabytes. DLC breaking game elements in major ways and live services either not working or not being able to cope with the loads.

Now I admit I am not a programmer and maybe someone who is in the game will be able to shed a better light, but it seems these major corporations such as EA, Ubisoft, Activision Blizzard and more are making millions off the backs of programmers who are expected to deliver higher and higher standard stuff in less and less time.

These guys are being forced into working extraneous “crunch” hours being put under immense stress and not really seeing much in the way of benefits. They seem to take a lot of abuse if the programmer refuses.

2019 showed many cases of ex-employees reporting abuse. Now I know some could be put down to sour grapes but there is a lot to be said about there is no smoke without fire.

It seems many programmers are complaining about their immense pressure to perform. As I said I’m not a programmer so I can’t really say I know. They seem to have no representation in their corner to help them such a union and because a lot of them are freelance many corporations see them as disposable.

This to me is ludicrous. Without these programmers most of these corporations would not have a product to sell and equally wouldn’t exist. So why treat them like dirt, you are cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Also for all things like Fallout 76 proved for all they released a half arsed game and took controversy. Not once has someone said that this practice is unacceptable.

If you bought a Television and when you turned it on it showed BBC1 and BBC2 only and the rest was coming later in a software patch update. You would complain vehemently and take back the television for your money back.

So why can software companies get away with releasing a half finished product.... Which moves us on to...

3) New Linux phones been released unfinished

Linux phones are the latest and “greatest” thing since sliced bread if you believed the hype. Security conscious phones that don’t report everything about you, kill switches to disable base bands so you can’t be monitored at all times and of course its Linux based so the operating system is free.

All sounds good and hence why Purism Librem 5 and the Pine phone both have had a major interest shown in them.

Given all the concerns raised recently regarding Google and how it uses its data and problems such as the many data leaks of various sites. Privacy regarding your data is being raised.

Ironically Microsoft who have admitted they are having Windows 10 report back data are not in these investigations. But hey ho.

However its not the fact its Linux that’s a problem for me. I like Linux but what i don’t get is this new concept of the phone is taking longer than we thought and people are worried. SO what we will do is supply you your phone but most of the software doesn’t work but in the next few months we will implement various features to get it working.

They even give them titles such as the Pine Phone Braveheart Edition or the Librem 5 Spring. Basically a broken p[hone which you have paid money for hoping that eventually it may work.

Once again these phones are hardly cutting edge so even if they do get it working. Half of the tech is at least a generation back.

Now I understand creating a phone and its OS from scratch is hard work and such processed take time. However giving you a shell of a phone and leaving you to wait for the rest is a bit much.

This is similar to the TV but in this case because Linux is open source. Your TV now only has two channels and they want you to write the next bit of the code to sort the programs out. They say it’s a learning experience.

I’m waiting for someone to build a house and then if you want any windows, heating or electric you have to have to either build it yourself or wait for an upgrade. Madness.

4) Live services...

When I started in computing my first machine was a ZX Spectrum 48K it wasn’t amazing but it was a computer. You bought games, you could program it and it was yours to do with as you pleased.

Modern day systems both in the computing world and console world you are signed into agreements that no matter what the machine is. The code involved is the property of X company and although you physically own the machine you can not amend it, alter it, complain about it or they can withdraw your rights to said systems and lock you out.

What? I own a machine but if I do anything beyond your limitations you will sue me. How did this become a thing.

It was bad enough with Intellectual Copyright bullshit but this is getting ludicrous.

They have since took it one step further in games now several of them will not allow you to play them unless permanently connected to their servers or pay an ongoing subscription fee.

Which equally they can close at a moments notice because they decide they don’t like it and you have no recompense. How many games have we heard have been just abandoned by their publishers.

Especially in the MMORPG genre. Games are no longer purchased like tapes with physical medium as now most are download codes in physical cases. If you actually get a physical DVD you are lucky.

However it doesn’t mean squat if you buy the game and the servers no longer exist. Several games have managed to allow people to have their own private servers but many of them don’t exist.

How is this allowed to exist. How are the computer industry allowed to sell products which have no guarantee. Also why is no one questioning this...

If Valve decide enough was enough, they were sick of being blamed for the controversial games been stuck on its site by asset flippers etc., and decided to close down the service.

Sure they would have to give people notice but beyond that they have no obligation to make sure you have access to the games you bought. This to me seems a dodgy game.

And with more services such as the Epic Games Store, UPlay, Origin, and Google Stadia this is only going to get worse.

We need some form of legislation to prevent this from happening. We are losing more and more data everyday on the internet due to leaks, server closures and companies just going out of business. Very little of this software and data is being archived so is lost.

This is a problem. Now I understand people saying it’s my game. But equally you have been paid for said game and now they are saying we cant use it or access it.

Something is fundamentally wrong here.

I could go on with further points such as large corporations closing Software Studios making games and complaining they sold 7 million copies and didn’t sell 10 million copies. Major tech companies refusing to pay taxes but want tax breaks from major governments but that can be the topic for another day.

As I said the tech world is fundamentally broken and needs a shake up. Why are we paying the price for their inability to sort out their problems.

Until next time ...

#grumpy git #technology #broken #fundamentally flawed #steam #uplay #origin #epic games store #Apple Mac Pro #software #programmers #programming #sham #unbelievable

1 note · View note

askfrankpritchard · 7 years

Text

Francis Pritchard x Reader Chapter 1

P1TH0N’S JOURNAL: FEBRUARY 9TH 2027

7:38am

In the distance sirens can be heard as I made my way to Sarif Industries. The building reflects the face of Detroit, dismal but full of new hope. This new company just became well known only a year or two ago.

A motorbike coming to a stop in the underground parking garage barely lit by the lights embedded in the walls. The basement entrance unlocked with a triple beep granting access to the engineer room. Spacey and dark since none of the lights in the building have been turned on yet. Black lights can be seen out in the hallway running low on power.

I flip the switch fuses that give power to everywhere in the building. I squinted at the sudden brightness of the room as I hung my jacket on the coat rack.

The last Engineering manager disappeared and they needed a replacement asap, so they gave me the promotion to fill the position. My talent can go from fixing Coffee machines to hot wiring cars in hollywood movies. Speaking of coffee, I should go get some myself. I walk up the flight of stairs towards the Café, provided by Sarif himself, and to where the kitchenette can be found.

“Froger’s Instant Coffee.” Tastes just as good as its name. Cheap. Sarif may provide for the Café, but it doesn’t mean he has to get the good stuff.

I start the coffee maker and began digging through the cupboards for that one special mug. Scribbled on it was the word ‘coffee’, but in a /blue/ sharpie instead of black. I took a quick look inside and noticed something crusty in it, “JC. Whoever washes the dishes around here need more elbow grease next time.” I rinsed it quickly and watched the coffee maker…make coffee. Just as exciting as watching the scientists work, but eventually something good happens.

The coffee maker started gurgling and stopped making coffee, so I banged on it a few time just to get it going again. After ten minutes of a whistling solo the coffee maker beeps abruptly bringing me out of my wind concerto and over to the pitcher to get the daily dose of caffeine one needs if they wake up at 7am every morning for work.

The rest of the building was silent. Pretty peaceful unlike later in the day where everyone is running around like they’re trying to get someone to the moon in a day. BigBro cameras were the only thing making a noise at the moment buzzing as they scanned the areas. I inspected one that has been fizzling in and out just outside the dining area. It needs to be tweaked soon. It has been two weeks its been doing that. Maybe I’ll tackle it after I do something nice for my bosses. Besides give them more paperwork to fill out. Today is going to be slow and boring, so why not give them some encouragement.

I turned to read the clock on the microwave.

7:45am

“Crap, Pritchard will be here soon.” I hastily dig through the cupboard to find his mug which had the infamous Nucl3arSnake logo drawn on it. I did that for him since he was getting vexed at people stealing his mug, 'Just put my name on it or draw a logo on there or SOMETHING so they’ll know not to take it.’ He frantically said a few months ago.

I’ve been with SI since they started hiring advanced security back in 2026 in January and Pritchard joined in just at the end of July of the same year. He is the very same way today as he was a year ago, annoyingly snarky and dashingly clever. He’s recently been opening up a little more to me. Considerably everyday actually, I’m quite honoured.

Looking back at the mug and out of my day dream I look at the drawing again. It wasn’t the best and was quickly squiggled on, I’ll just put it on my to-do list to fix later. I filled the mug with hot coffee, spilling some on my hand in the process and opened the fridge to find the vanilla coffee creamers. It’s never another flavour is it. Hesitating a moment to think about two creams or three. Three of course, he has a sweet tooth and man he can be so cranky in the morning.

7:50am

I was about to book it with the coffee to his office until more hot liquid touched my hand. “Geez!” I politely cursed to the nonexistent audience that I write to while grabbing a small tea plate to put over the mug and run towards the Tech Lab. Almost tripping on the stairs going up, I safely managed to open the door with my free hand and speed walk inside to set the plate and coffee next to the computer. The only reason I know the code to his office is so I can make sure the cameras are facing the proper direction…and he secretly enjoys my late-night company, but he’s too proud to admit it.

The little Korean vacuum cleaner beeped at my presence upon entering.

7:55am

I hear his motorcycle rumbling underneath my feet even from the second floor. I quickly leave the office accidentally squishing the bot that followed me out the door. “Sorry buddy, you can’t come with.” I gently move it back in the office with my foot and close the door. Soft thumps can be heard from the bot and from the nearby stairs. I make a 180° in my tracks and take the scenic route to the stairs to avoid him for multiple reasons. Peering around the corner, I check to make sure he’s in his office before proceeding downstairs.

Now back in the dining area I take my coffee and go to my own office to begin a long and bland day. “Wait, I forgot Adam’s coffee.” I breathed in then clumsily got out of the Jetson chair and went kitchen bound, again. Finding the only other clean mug and /carefully/ filling it this time. Two creams, two sugars. I grabbed another small plate to hold the lava hot liquid in the mug then hurried onwards up an extra flight of stairs and to his office. “Oh geez,” I forgot his code… 0451…1723…? I only have one entry left. Do I risk the alarm system going off and having an even scarier morning Francis? Or do I just ask him…5375. “Oh thank god,” the door opened to reveal a very hot and humid office and a slightly dishevelled and sleeping Adam. He must have left his humidifier on by accident. I didn’t even realize he didn’t leave work last night either. I set the coffee on his desk and poked the cactus on my way out. They thrive off of negligence I heard.

Now finally in my office there’s a stack of paperwork I have to get to and a camera to fix later.

6:15pm

The fucking alarm system went off on the first floor. Where the café is with the busted camera of course. When I got to the area, Adam was already down there checking out the scene for clues as to why the alarms were going off.

All of the workers except for Francis, Adam, and I have evacuated the building to safety protocols. A walking turret was stalking about looking for the intruder that it will never find because there are none.

“What the hell is going on Jensen?”

“I might ask you the same thing since you have all the camera feeds in /your/ office, Francis” Major emphasis on his name.

“Well-”

“It’s not my division.”

“Damnit Jensen it /is/ a part of your division! You are a part of our security, tech or not!”

I figured I should do something before their quarrelling turns violent, so I disabled the bugged cameras making the alarm system shut off.

“Finally, could this day have anymore interruptions!” Francis’ ponytail swished as he walked off. How cute…I didn’t realize I was staring until Frank spoke up.

“And thanks (y/n) for doing something right unlike /some/ other people.” he glared at Jensen then disappeared up the stairs and probably to his office.

“Thanks (y/n), seriously. Im sure he was about to have a seizure from restraining himself from punching me.”

“Pfft, you’re welcome, but y’know he’s not as bad as people think he is.”

“Could be, but you have also been working with him and the company for quite some time. He knows you.”

I shrugged then walked back to my office broken camera in hand, “Maybe so.”

#francis #frank #wendell #pritchard #deus ex #human revolution #mankind divided #fanfic #fanfiction #self insert #reader #x

16 notes · View notes

kokania00 · 4 years

Text

Computer Optimization

PART I - INTRO & FRAGMENTATION

Many people are under the impression that a computer's performance deteriorates with age. I'd like to dispel that myth: computers are mostly solid-state technology that is largely unaffected by age. I'm not saying that older computers don't run more slowly, but once we correct the notion that the slow-down is caused by its unalterable age, the problem becomes one that can usually be remedied without buying a newer computer.

First, let's understand what doesn't cause a computer to slow down:

Computer processors are digital electronic transistor-like switches, sealed in a hard plastic package; these are solid-state devices that either work or don't. They may get fried if exposed to a power surge, but otherwise, they don't slow down.

Computer memory is comprised of similar components and works or doesn't work, just the same.

A computer motherboard is nothing more than wire traces on a piece of plastic, usually with more solid-state devices plugged into it or soldered to it. Motherboards don't slow down, either.

Computer power supplies are exposed to some of the most extreme conditions of computer experiences. That's why they burn out more frequently than most other parts, but even they don't cause performance reductions; they either work or they don't.

So what does cause a computer to slow down with age?

The biggest culprit is data storage. Imagine trying to look for something in a file cabinet if it was the only item in the drawer; it would be pretty easy to find, right? If there were even just a few items in the drawer, it would still be simple to thumb through them to find the one you wanted. What if the drawer was completely filled? It might take a little longer, right? That's what happens on a hard drive when you install an operating system, applications, and data on it. Every time you download more.mp3 songs, import more.jpg photos from your camera, or type up the new word processing documents, you're stuffing more things in the file cabinet which is your hard drive.

Unlike the processor or memory, the hard drive is usually not a solid-state device; it has moving parts. Consequently, the time it takes to read or write hard drive data is on the order of 1,000 times slower than solid-state devices like RAM or a USB thumb drive. Couple that with the fact that you keep adding more and more stuff to it, and you can begin to understand the problem.

In reality, it's even worse than you imagine. When you save a document to the hard drive, it gets stored in a specific space on the drive. The computer tries to allocate hard drive space as efficiently as possible, so if more stuff gets written to the drive after that, it's stored in the next-available sequential space. (For the hard-core techies reading this, yes, I know that this explanation severely oversimplifies the process.) Unfortunately, that means that when you next edit that initial document, there isn't any contiguous space on the drive for the new data to be stored, so it ends up getting stored elsewhere, separated from the first part of the document. Later, when you try to read this document back into memory, it takes a little longer than it would for a contiguously-stored document because the computer must make a jump in the middle of reading it to find the rest of it. This is known as fragmentation. Another cause of fragmentation is when files are deleted, as that creates holes the computer tries to fill with subsequently-saved data, but the holes are almost never the right size for the new files being saved, so the newly-saved files also get broken up into noncontiguous pieces.

Don't think your use is the only force causing fragmentation on your drive, either. Virtual memory, pointers to recent files, various cache files, and updates/patches use and release hard drive space all the time, causing fragmentation, even if you never intentionally save another file to your computer. Fortunately, fragmentation is relatively easy to cure. Microsoft Windows comes with a tool that does it for us - all we have to do is use this tool from time to time, and it rearranges the files on the disk to do its best to store them all contiguously. Lucky for us, a lot of the stuff we store on our hard drives doesn't change all that frequently. Operating system files, installed applications, and even our music and photos rarely change in content or size, so once they get defragmented into less-dynamic areas of the hard drive, they should be fine.

PART II - DIGITAL HOARDING

After fragmentation, the next issue to discuss about how hard drives slow down our computers is the increasing volume of data being stored on them. If you've seen a phonograph turntable, you have a rough notion of how a hard drive operates, but imagine it spinning much faster. Instead of 33 or 45 revolutions per minute, hard drives operate at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000, or even 15,000 revolutions per minute. For even the slowest hard drive to spin around to the complete opposite side of the disk may take under 1/100th of a second, but like a phonograph turntable, rotation isn't the only motion the drive makes; the head also moves in and out, radially, and that motion is significantly slower. When a hard drive has little data on it, that data is generally stored close to the center, so the head only needs to traverse a tiny fraction of the radius of the disk, but as more and more data get stored, more of the radius of the disk is used, so the portion of the radius that the head must travel gets longer, making data reads and writes slower.

Fortunately, this type of performance degradation can frequently be mitigated, too. People tend to be terrible pack-rats about what they store on their computers. Hard drives become like black holes, collecting years of data that may never be used, needed, or even seen again. If the computer was faster when it was new, before it had all this data on it, you may well be able to restore it to that level of performance if you could clean out some of this data. There are countless ways to identify and remove unneeded data from a hard drive. Windows comes with a few tools that may help:

Disk Cleanup searches for several categories of junk left on your drive and enables you to remove them.

Add/Remove Programs helps you find and remove old applications and Windows Components that you no longer use or need.

Even your own old documents, music, movies, and photos can be parsed and either deleted or moved to offline storage (such as burned to CDs/DVDs or uploaded to network or even Internet storage facilities).

In extreme situations, you can also reduce some of the cache sizes, such as the System Restore cache size or even the Recycle Bin. By default, these take up 12% and 10% of your hard drive, respectively, and unless you're prone to deleting things you shouldn't have, cutting these in half frees up 1/9 of your hard drive, immediately and without undue risk.

Professionals may also be able to help you identify more ways of freeing up space, such as disabling Offline Files if the feature isn't needed, deleting old user profiles, removing old printers, reducing Internet cache settings, etc. Frequently, programs leave remnants of themselves behind on your hard drive, even after being uninstalled; these may also be deleted. Misconfigured virtual memory settings may also hog up more of your hard drive than is actually needed.

PART III - APPLICATION CREEP

Besides hard drive data storage, there is another area in which computer performance may become degraded, appearing to be due to age: increasing demands on the processor and memory. We must divide this issue into two categories, though. One may be resolvable without upgrading your computer, whereas the other likely would not be.

The resolvable category is what I refer to as "Application creep." Your computer probably came with a bunch of free and free-trial programs installed that you've never used. Most of these lie dormant on your hard drive until invoked, but some, like printer drivers, malware detectors, and hardware and software updaters load into memory every time you boot your machine. On top of these, you've probably installed more, whether you realized it or not. If you installed Adobe Reader, there's a little piece of code that probably loads up on every restart of your PC - it makes it quicker for you to open.pdf files because part of the Reader is already in memory, but what about the 99% of the time that you're not using it? Well, it still sits there, taking up resources, making other operations slower. Lots of other common applications have such components that automatically run when you boot your PC (aka "AutoRuns"), such as iTunes, Safari, QuickTime, Java, and more. Besides these AutoRuns, other unwanted programs sneak in, piggy-backed alongside programs you use. Those extra toolbars in your Internet Explorer window were the carefully-concealed payloads of lots of other programs you installed, and guess what - they use up resources unnecessarily every time IE is running. It's not a big reach to realize that when unneeded things are using up resources, desirable operations work less efficiently.

The category that's more difficult to resolve is the result of technological advancement. You bought your computer eight years ago, before Netflix ever started streaming movies, and now you expect it to do things it wasn't intended to do. You finished the games you were playing and bought newer games, even though they demand more RAM, more hard drive space, and faster processors. You had a film camera before, but now you're importing your digital cell phone photos from all of your trips, and you've started taking short videos, too!...and even if you don't actively update any of your software or increase your utilization of it, updates may be happening behind the scenes. Microsoft Windows can update itself automatically, and in fact, many Microsoft software titles can be configured to do so. Adobe, Java, Real Player, iTunes, and Quicken prompt you for updates, and you just click "OK" without even thinking about it. Bug fixes come out, updated drivers are released, and you don't want to be left vulnerable or outdated, so you accept them. Each of these updates places additional demands on your computer's resources.

Look, we don't all still carry around our first, brick-sized, analog-only, battery-guzzling cellular phones - we want the latest features, so we upgrade. At some point you have to make the decision to do that with your computer, too. Ultimately, you may find that even after thinning out your data, deleting your unwanted applications, and cleaning up your AutoRun programs as far as you reasonably can that your computer is still too slow for your taste. At that point, either upgrade or replace it. Hopefully, following the advice above will at least increase the amount of time between computer upgrades, saving you money.

PART IV - WHAT TO UPGRADE

So you've tried all the optimizing you could, and you're still unsatisfied with the performance of your computer. Now what? Maybe it's time to upgrade, but what should you upgrade? The whole system? Just some components? If time and money was no object, you'd just go buy the latest greatest system out there and hire someone else to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications and transfer all of your data. Unfortunately, for many of us, that's not the case. When faced with limited resources, we have to make decisions about the best ways to employ them. You'd hate to spend four-digits on a whole new computer system if all the old one needed was a memory upgrade. However, you'd also hate to waste money on RAM only to find that you're still unsatisfied and still faced with the need to buy a whole new system. How can you tell what to do?

Windows comes with several tools to help us identify bottlenecks. Armed with that information, we can make better decisions about what to do to resolve them. Here's a list of several of the more common bottlenecks:

Network Connection - a low-speed network connection will make Internet access and any other network resource utilization slower.

Main Memory - having insufficient RAM forces the PC to use a swap file on the hard drive instead, slowing down processing, task switching, and read/write operations.

Processor - having too slow a processor or too few processors will impact the performance of virtually all operations. Less-expensive processors also lack L1 cache, which reduces their performance further.

Hard Drive - slower hard drives affect the speed of all read/write operations, including cache files and virtual memory. Space utilization is also a consideration; the guideline is to utilize less than 50% of any hard drive's capacity.

To diagnose these issues, first try to notice patterns. If your performance complaints predominantly pertain to the speed at which Web pages load, they're more likely indicative of a problem with the speed of your Internet connection. If performance gets sluggish when you have more applications running, you may have insufficient memory or a slow processor. If the hard drive activity indicator light stays lit frequently, it may indicate insufficient memory or too slow or too full a hard drive. Once you have your guess as a starting point, you'll want to find evidence for or against your thesis. A good place to start is the Windows Task Manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, and you should see the task manager or a link to it, depending on which version of Windows you're running. The Performance tab shows processor and memory utilization and the Networking tab shows network connection utilization.

Let's start with the Performance tab; it provides lots of good information. First, the number of panes of CPU Usage History shows you how many CPU cores your system has. Utilization should normally be low unless you have a ton of stuff actively running. If any of the graphs are pegging the needle at the top of the chart, there is more demand being placed on your processor than it can handle. The PF Usage charts show how much RAM is being used. Ideally you want this to be low, too. The more applications you have running, the more RAM is required. As we mentioned, once the computer runs out of actual memory, it makes more room by moving less-frequently-used data into "virtual memory," which is actually stored on the hard drive. When it needs it back, it swaps the next-least-frequently-used data to the hard drive to make room to swap the needed data back in. All of these operations take time, so if the PF Usage is up at or near the top of your graph, you have insufficient RAM to meet your demands.

Another helpful tool to see the processor and RAM that are installed in your PC is the System Properties in the Control Panel. Press Windows-Break as a shortcut to bring that up. The Pentium-4 processor is today's standard, and if you have an older one, I wouldn't bother trying to upgrade - just replace the PC. Different operating systems have different memory requirements, but having at least 1 GB of RAM is pretty common nowadays.

Back to the Task Manager, on the Networking tab, don't be surprised if your network utilization is frequently at or below one percent. A typical desktop computer has a network interface card (NIC) capable of communicating at 100 or even 1,000 million bits per second - even older NICs could communicate at 10 Mbps. A typical broadband Internet connection (such as a cable modem, high-speed DSL, or fiber optic connection), however, operates in the vicinity of 1 Mbps, and that's only when downloading large files under perfect conditions. If you're connected to other local network resources, such as servers or network printers, you may be able to use more of your available bandwidth, but if your sole network utilization is your Internet access, the bottleneck will always be the Internet connection rather than the computer's network connection. Now that we've cleared that up, if you find the graph showing utilization at or near 100%, your network card may be too slow for your requirements, but if you're unhappy with the speed of Web pages loading despite low network connection utilization, you need to upgrade your Internet connection instead of your PC.

PART V - UPGRADING

Now that you've identified the problem, you need to decide how to deal with it. Some issues can be overcome by minor upgrades, but others aren't worth the cost or trouble, and are an ideal opportunity to replace the PC.

If you've decided that you don't have enough RAM, that's usually the cheapest and easiest upgrade you can make to your PC. Depending on how much you have and how many slots your motherboard has, you may be able to install additional DIMMs or you may need to replace existing lower-capacity DIMMs with larger-capacity ones. There are dozens of incompatible varieties of memory, so if you're not sure what you need, the best thing to do is to check the owner's manual that came with your PC when you bought it. You still have it, right? If not, either take a DIMM out and bring it with you to the store or if you're buying online, search by the make and model of your PC, rather than for the type of memory.

If you've decided that your network card is too slow, you can probably install a faster one into a card slot or even a USB port - this, too, is a relatively inexpensive and easy upgrade to perform. Most PCs built in the last 10 years have PCI slots, so you can probably look for a PCI-technology network interface card (NIC) at your local computer store or online. They come in wired or wireless varieties, depending on how you'll be connecting your PC to your network. If you'd rather not open your PC, both wired and wireless NICs come in USB varieties nowadays, too. If your Internet connection is too slow, you won't have to do a thing to your computer - just contact your ISP and discuss your options for upgrading your service to a higher bandwidth - or shop around to see what the other ISPs are charging.

If you decide that your processor is insufficient, it's usually best to just replace your PC. Motherboards are designed to work with a small range of different model processors, and even if yours was the low-end model, the cost and trouble to upgrade to the high-end processor wouldn't produce a noticeably-worthwhile improvement; trade up for a PC with more processor cores, instead. The only exception to this rule might be if your motherboard allowed you to upgrade from a processor without L1 cache (such as a Celeron) to a processor with L1 cache - that could produce a noticeable-enough improvement to warrant the cost and difficulty. If so, check your owner's manual (or specs online) to see which processors your motherboard will accommodate, and if you decide to do it, once you factor in the cost of your time and effort, it's probably best to just upgrade to the best and fastest one available - you don't want to have to do this again in a year when you outgrow a tiny incremental improvement.

Historically, when a computer's hard drive became the bottleneck, it was usually a point at which we recommended replacing the entire system. In some cases, however, the rules have changed today. Replacing a hard drive involves reinstalling the operating system and all the applications, as well as transferring all the personal files and data, so it's usually such a labor-intensive process as to make it the ideal time to upgrade the rest of the PC along with it. Today, however, with the popularity of digital photography,.mp3 music files, videos, and other space-hogging multimedia data, it's frequently possible to optimize an existing hard drive by offloaded all such personal files and data to external storage. USB flash drives are now available in 64 GB or more, and external USB hard drives exceed 1 TB (which is 1,024 GB). It's a pain in the butt to have to change the installed location of most applications and Windows components, but to move data files is significantly less trouble. In fact, to further improve performance, you could even offload your PC's virtual memory file to a second (internal) hard drive without too much trouble. As we discussed earlier in this treatise, the more stuff you have on your hard drive, the less efficiently it operates, so by moving all this type of non-system-critical data off of the hard drive that contains the operating system and the applications, you may be able to restore most of the PC's youthful performance without too much trouble.

Ultimately, all of these optimizations and upgrades are only stop-gap measures. Software patches and updates will continue to require increasingly-more space on your main hard drive, and you'll probably add more features and applications over time. Even if you're terribly miserly with space on your main hard drive, there are still increasing demands. It's also one of the few mechanical components in your computer, so its lifespan can already be expected to be shorter than any of the solid state components. At some point you're going to need a new main hard drive, and at that point, I'd still stick with my position that it's a good opportunity to replace the whole PC.

0 notes

giveuselife-blog · 7 years

Text

Computer Optimization By Upgrading Making Connection

New Post has been published on https://giveuselife.org/computer-optimization-by-upgrading-making-connection/

Computer Optimization By Upgrading Making Connection

Element I – INTRO & FRAGMENTATION

Many humans are underneath the impression that a computer’s performance deteriorates with age. I’d like to dispel that fantasy: computer systems are in the main strong-country technology that is basically unaffected by way of age. I’m now not saying that older computer systems do not run extra slowly, but as soon as we correct the notion that the gradual down is because of its unalterable age, the problem turns into one that could commonly be remedied without buying a newer computer.

First, allow’s understand what does not reason a laptop to gradual down:

laptop processors are digital electronic transistor-like switches, sealed in a difficult plastic package; those are strong-nation gadgets that both work or do not. They will get fired if exposed to a strength surge, however otherwise, they do not slow down. laptop reminiscence is comprised of similar components and works or doesn’t work, just the equal. A laptop motherboard is nothing extra than wire strains on a piece of plastic, normally with extra strong-kingdom devices plugged into it or soldered to it. Motherboards do not sluggish down, either. laptop power materials are uncovered to a number of the most intense situations a computer revel in. That is why they burn out extra often than most different elements, however even they don’t reason performance reductions; they either work or they do not. So what does motive a computer to sluggish down with age? The biggest culprit is recorded garage. Consider trying to search for something in a file cabinet if it became the simplest object inside the drawer; it would be quite easy to locate, right? If there had been even only some items inside the drawer, it might nevertheless be easy to thumb through them to discover the only you desired. What if the drawer became completely stuffed? It might take a little longer, proper? That’s what happens on a tough force while you install an operating gadget, packages, and information on it. Whenever you download extra.Mp3 songs, import greater.Jpg photos out of your digicam, or kind up new word processing files, you’re stuffing extra matters in the file cabinet which is your tough power.

Not like the processor or reminiscence, the hard drive is usually not a solid nation device; it has shifting components. Consequently, the time it takes to examine or write tough force records is on the order of 1,000 times slower than stable-state devices like RAM or a USB thumb drive. Couple that with the reality that you maintain including increasingly more stuff to it, and you can begin to understand the trouble.

In reality, it is even worse than you Believe. whilst you store a report to the difficult pressure, it receives stored in a specific area of the force. The computer attempts to allocate hard drive space as successfully as feasible, so if extra stuff gets written to the pressure after that, it’s stored in the next to be had sequential space. (For the hard center techies reading this, yes, I know that this rationalization seriously oversimplifies the manner.) Alas, which means that when you next edit that initial document, there is not any contiguous area of the power for the brand new facts to be saved, so it ends up getting stored somewhere else, separated from the first part of the report. Later, whilst you try and study this report lower back into memory, it takes a bit longer than it would for a continuously saved record due to the fact the laptop must make a leap in the center of analyzing it to discover the relaxation of it. This is referred to as fragmentation. Every other motive of fragmentation is while files are deleted, as that creates holes the laptop attempts to fill within the end saved records, but the holes are almost by no means the proper size for the new documents being stored, so the newly-stored documents additionally get

Element II – digital HOARDING

After fragmentation, the following trouble to speak about how tough drives sluggish down our computer systems is the growing volume of records being stored on them. in case you’ve visible a phonograph turntable, you have got a tough perception of the way a difficult force operates, however, Consider it spinning plenty quicker. Rather than 33 or forty-five revolutions according to the minute, difficult drives function at five,400, 7, two hundred, 10,000, or even 15,000 revolutions in keeping with a minute. For even the slowest hard pressure to spin around to the exact opposite facet of the disk may additionally take underneath 1/100th of a 2nd, however like a phonograph turntable, the rotation is not the simplest motion the force makes; the pinnacle additionally actions inside and out, radially, and that movement is drastically slower. while a hard power has little statistics on it, that statistics is usually saved near the middle, so the pinnacle simplest wishes to traverse a tiny fraction of the radius of the disk, however as increasingly records get saved, more of the radius of the disk is used, so the part of the radius that the top need to tour gets longer, making facts reads and writes slower.

Thankfully, this type of performance degradation can regularly be mitigated, too. people have a tendency to be terrible p.C.-rats about what they save on their computer systems. tough drives turn out to be like black holes, accumulating years of facts which could by no means be used, needed, or maybe visible once more. If the computer changed into faster whilst it changed into new, before it had all this data on it, you may properly be capable of restoring it to that level of performance if you may clean out a number of this records. There are endless methods to become aware of and remove unneeded facts from a hard force. Windows comes with some gear that may assist:

Disk Cleanup searches for numerous categories of junk left to your power and enables you to take away them. Add/cast off Packages enables you to discover and put off old applications and Windows components which you do not use or want. Even your own vintage files, tune, films, and photos may be parsed and both deleted or moved to the offline garage (including burned to CDs/DVDs or uploaded to the community or even Net garage facilities). In intense conditions, you may additionally reduce some of the cache sizes, such as the machine restore cache length or maybe the Recycle Bin. by way of default, these absorb 12% and 10% of your difficult force, respectively, and unless you are prone to deleting things you should not have, slicing these in 1/2 frees up 1/nine of your difficult force, right away and without undue danger.

Professionals may additionally have the ability to help you become aware of more approaches of releasing up area, including disabling Offline files if the feature isn’t always wished, deleting old consumer profiles, getting rid of antique printers, decreasing Internet cache settings, and many others. often, Programs leave remnants of themselves behind in your difficult drive, even after being uninstalled; those will also be deleted. Misconfigured Virtual reminiscence settings may additionally hog up extra of your difficult force than is really wished.

Element III – Utility CREEP

Besides difficult drive information storage, there may be Every other place wherein computer overall performance may additionally grow to be degraded, appearing to be because of age: growing needs at the processor and memory. We have to divide this difficulty into two classes, although. One can be resolvable without upgrading your computer, while the alternative in all likelihood could no longer be.

The resolvable class is what I refer to as “Utility creep.” Your computer in all likelihood got here with a bunch of free and unfastened-trial Programs set up that you’ve never used. most of those lie dormant to your tough drive until invoked, however, some, like printer drivers, malware detectors, and hardware and software updates load into memory Whenever you boot your device. On top of these, you have in all likelihood established greater, whether or not you realized it or now not. if you hooked up Adobe Reader, there may be a little piece of code that probably hundreds upon every restart of your computer – it makes it quicker if you want to open.Pdf files due to the fact part of the Reader is already in memory, but what approximately the 99% of the time that you’re now not using it? nicely, it still sits there, taking on assets, making different operations slower. Plenty of different common applications have such additives that mechanically run whilst you boot your Laptop (aka “AutoRuns”), inclusive of iTunes, Safari, QuickTime, Java, and extra. Except for these AutoRuns, other unwanted Applications sneak in, piggy-sponsored along Programs you use. The ones more toolbars on your Net Explorer window have been the carefully-hid payloads of Lots of different Applications you mounted, and guess what – they dissipate resources unnecessarily On every occasion IE is walking. it is no longer a large reach to recognize that after unneeded matters are using up sources, ideal operations paintings less successfully.

Appearance, we do not all still deliver around our first, brick-sized, analog-most effective, battery-guzzling cell phones – we want the latest functions, so we upgrade. At some point, you have to make the choice to do that along with your computer, too. In the long run, you may locate that even after scaling down your facts, deleting your unwanted applications, and cleaning up your AutoRun Applications as ways as you moderately can that your laptop continues to be too slow to your flavor. At that factor, both improve or update it. Optimistically, following the recommendation above will at least growth the quantity of time among laptop upgrades, saving you cash.

Element IV – WHAT TO improve

so you’ve attempted all the optimizing you may, and you’re nevertheless unhappy with the performance of your computer. Now what? Perhaps it is time to improve, however, what must you improve? The entire machine? Just some components? If money and time have been no objects, you’d just go purchase the cutting-edge best machine-accessible and hire a person else to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications and transfer all of your records. Lamentably, for many of us, It really is not the case. whilst confronted with constrained assets, we need to make selections approximately the first-rate ways to rent them. you’ll hate to spend four digits on an entirely new computer system if all of the vintage one wished was a reminiscence improve. However, you’ll additionally hate to waste money on RAM handiest to locate which you’re nevertheless unsatisfied and nevertheless confronted with the want to buy a whole new device. How are you going to tell what to do?

Home windows come with numerous tools to help us become aware of bottlenecks. Armed with that information, we can make higher decisions approximately what to do to resolve them. Here is a listing of several of the extra common bottlenecks:

community Connection – a low-speed community connection will make Net access and every other network aid utilization slower. Primary reminiscence – having insufficient RAM forces the computer to use a switch report on the difficult pressure alternatively, slowing down processing, mission switching, and examine/write operations. Processor – having too sluggish a processor or too few processors will affect the performance of without a doubt all operations. less-steeply-priced processors additionally lack L1 cache, which reduces their performance further. tough power – slower difficult drives affect the velocity of all read/write operations, which include cache files and Digital reminiscence. space usage is also a consideration; the rule is to make use of less than 50% of any hard force’s potential. To diagnose these troubles, first, try to be aware styles. If your overall performance lawsuits predominantly pertain to the rate at which Web pages load, they may be much more likely indicative of a trouble with the rate of your Net connection. If performance receives gradually when you have more programs going for walks, you can have inadequate memory or a sluggish processor. If the difficult pressure pastime indicator mild remains lit frequently, it could simply inadequate memory or too sluggish or too full a hard power. as soon as you’ve got your wager as a place to begin, you may want to discover proof for or in opposition to your thesis. A terrific location to start is the Windows venture Supervisor. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, and also you ought to see the task Manager or a hyperlink to it, depending on which model of Home windows you are strolling. The overall performance tab shows processor and memory usage and the Networking tab shows community connection usage. let’s start with the performance tab; it affords Lots of excellent facts. First, the range of pages of CPU Usage History suggests you what number of CPU cores your machine has. utilization ought to generally below except you’ve got a ton of stuff actively walking. If any of the graphs are pegging the needle at the top of the chart, there is more call for being positioned on your processor than it may deal with. The PF Utilization charts show how a whole lot RAM is being used. Ideally, you want this to be low, too. The greater packages you’ve got jogging, the greater RAM is needed. As we noted, as soon as the laptop runs out of real reminiscence, it makes greater room by transferring many less-frequently-used records into “Virtual memory,” which is honestly stored on the difficult drive. while it desires it back, it swaps the subsequent-least-often-used records to the tough force to make room to swap the wanted records back in. All of those operations take time, so if the PF Usage is up at or close to the pinnacle of your graph, you have got inadequate RAM to meet your needs.

Any other helpful device to peer the processor and RAM which might be established for your Pc is the machine Homes inside the Control Panel. Press Windows-Ruin as a shortcut to convey that up. The Pentium-four processor is today’s fashionable, and if you have an older one, I wouldn’t hassle looking to improve – just update the Laptop. Exceptional working structures have Distinctive reminiscence requirements, but having at the least 1 GB of RAM is pretty not unusual in recent times.

again to the undertaking Supervisor, at the Networking tab, don’t be surprised In case your network utilization is regularly at or below one percent. A regular computer has a network interface card (NIC) able to speaking at 100 or even 1,000 million bits in keeping with 2nd – even older NICs should talk at 10 Mbps. An ordinary broadband Net connection (inclusive of a cable modem, high-velocity DSL, or fiber optic connection), But, operates within the region of 1 Mbps, and that’s simplest while downloading huge files underneath best conditions. in case you’re related to other local community resources, along with servers or network printers, you may be able to use greater of your to be had bandwidth, but If your sole community usage is your Net get admission to, the bottleneck will constantly be the Internet connection in place of the PC’s network connection. Now that we’ve got cleared that up, if you locate the graph displaying utilization at or close to 100%, your network card can be too sluggish on your requirements, however, if you’re unhappy with the velocity of Web pages loading notwithstanding low network connection utilization, you need upgrading to windows 10 problems your Net connection As opposed to your computer.

Part V – UPGRADING

Now that you’ve diagnosed the hassle, you need to determine how to address it. a few issues can be overcome via minor enhancements, however, others aren’t worth the cost or hassle and are a perfect possibility to update the Laptop.

if you’ve decided which you do not have enough RAM, That’s commonly the most inexpensive and easiest improve you may make for your Computer. relying on how a whole lot you’ve got and how many slots your motherboard has, you will be capable of install extra DIMMs or you can need to replace current lower-ability DIMMs with large-capacity ones. There are dozens of incompatible varieties of reminiscence, so in case you’re now not sure what you want, the nice element to do is to test the owner’s guide that got here with your Computer while To procure it. You still have it, right? If now not, both take a DIMM out and convey it with you to the shop or in case you’re shopping for online, search through the make and version of your Computer, in preference to for the form of memory.

if you’ve decided that your network card is just too sluggish, you could probably install a faster one into a card slot or even a USB port – this, too, is an extraordinarily inexpensive and easy improve to perform. maximum Desktops built in the final 10 years have PCI slots, so you can possibly look for a PCI-generation community interface card (NIC) at your nearby computer keep or on-line. They arrive in stressed out or wireless sorts, depending on how you may be connecting your computer in your community. in case you’d rather now not open your Laptop, both stressed out and wi-fi NICs come in USB types in recent times, too. If your Net connection is too sluggish, you won’t need to do a component to your computer – simply contact your ISP and talk your alternatives for upgrading to windows 10 problems your career to a higher bandwidth – or keep around to see what the alternative ISPs are charging.

If making a decision that your processor is inadequate, it is commonly nice to just update your Computer. Motherboards are designed to work with a small range of different model processors, or even if yours become the low quit version, the cost and hassle to upgrade to the excessive-cease processor wouldn’t produce a quite worthwhile improvement; exchange up for a computer with extra processor cores, as an alternative. The simplest exception to this rule might be If your motherboard allowed you to upgrade from a processor without L1 cache (including a Celeron) to a processor with L1 cache – that might produce an important sufficient development to warrant the cost and issue. In that case, take a look at your proprietor’s manual (or specs online) to see which processors your motherboard will accommodate, and if making a decision to do it, when you thing in the price of your time and effort, it is likely satisfactory to just improve to the nice and quickest one available – you do not need to have to try this once more in a yr while you outgrow a tiny incremental development.

Historically, while a PC’s hard drive became the bottleneck, it was usually a factor at which we encouraged changing the entire device. In some cases, However, the guidelines have modified today. replacing a tough force involves reinstalling the running device and all the applications, in addition to transferring all the personal documents and facts, so it’s usually any such exertions in depth technique as to make it an appropriate time to improve the relaxation of the Pc at the side of it. today, But, with the popularity of digital pictures,.Mp3 tune files, films, and other area-hogging multimedia information, it is often viable to optimize an existing tough drive with the aid of offloaded all such personal files and facts to outside storage. USB flash drives are actually to be had in sixty-four GB or greater, and outside USB hard drives exceed 1 TB (which is 1,024 GB). it’s a pain in the butt to ought to trade the setup vicinity of most packages and Windows additives, but to transport statistics documents is drastically less trouble. In reality, to similarly enhance performance, you can even offload your computer’s Digital reminiscence file to a 2d (inner) difficult power without an excessive amount of problem. As we discussed earlier in this treatise, the more stuff you have for your tough force, the much less efficiently it operates, so by way of shifting all this kind of non-machine-important records off of the tough power that includes the working device and the applications, you’ll be able to restore maximum of the Pc’s youthful performance without an excessive amount of trouble.

Ultimately, all of these optimizations and enhancements are best forestall-gap measures. software connection and updates will retain to require more and more area in your Most important tough pressure, and you will likely Add extra functions and packages through the years. Even in case you’re extraordinarily miserly with the area for your Foremost tough pressure, there are still growing demands. It is also one of the few mechanical additives in your Computer, so its lifespan can already be anticipated to be shorter than any of the strong country components. Sooner or later, you’re going to want a new Most important difficult pressure, and at that factor, I’d still stick with my role that it’s An awesome possibility to replace the complete computer.

Many humans are comfy enough with defragmenting their own tough drives and putting in their personal RAM DIMMs, however, if you’d favor to go away it to a professional, Maverick Answers could be happy to help. In truth, for our unswerving readers (at least our neighborhood ones), we are even imparting a free Pc Music-Up or we are able to assist with different styles of upgrades. if you’ve tried all of the optimizing you may and still are not getting excellent performance from your old Computer, we’d suggest one in all our reliable refurbished computer systems to provide you the maximum price in your era investment.

0 notes

baburaja97-blog · 7 years

Text

New Post has been published on Vin Zite

New Post has been published on https://vinzite.com/computer-optimization-support/

Computer Optimization Support

Computer Optimization & Online Optimization

Many people are under the impression that a computer’s performance deteriorates with age. I’d like to dispel that myth: computers are mostly solid-state technology that is largely unaffected by age. I’m not saying that older computers don’t run more slowly, but once we correct the notion that the slow-down is caused by its unalterable age, the problem becomes one that can usually be remedied without buying a newer computer.

PART I – INTRO & FRAGMENTATION

First, let’s understand what doesn’t cause a computer to slow down:

Computer memory is comprised of similar components and works or doesn’t work, just the same.

A computer motherboard is nothing more than wire traces on a piece of plastic, usually with more solid-state devices plugged into it or soldered to it. Motherboards don’t slow down, either.

Computer power supplies are exposed to some of the most extreme conditions a computer experience. That’s why they burn out more frequently than most other parts, but even they don’t cause performance reductions; they either work or they don’t.

So what does cause a computer to slow down with age?The biggest culprit is data storage. Imagine trying to look for something in a file cabinet if it was the only item in the drawer; it would be pretty easy to find, right? If there were even just a few items in the drawer, it would still be simple to thumb through them to find the one you wanted. What if the drawer was completely filled? It might take a little longer, right? That’s what happens on a hard drive when you install an operating system, applications, and data on it. Every time you download more.mp3 songs, import more.jpg photos from your camera, or type up new word processing documents, you’re stuffing more things in the file cabinet which is your hard drive.

In reality, it’s even worse than you imagine. When you save a document to the hard drive, it gets stored in a specific space on the drive. The computer tries to allocate hard drive space as efficiently as possible, so if more stuff gets written to the drive after that, it’s stored in the next available sequential space. (For the hard-core techies reading this, yes, I know that this explanation severely oversimplifies the process.) Unfortunately, that means that when you next edit that initial document, there isn’t any contiguous space on the drive for the new data to be stored, so it ends up getting stored elsewhere, separated from the first part of the document. Later, when you try to read this document back into memory, it takes a little longer than it would for a contiguously stored document because the computer must make a jump in the middle of reading it to find the rest of it. This is known as fragmentation. Another cause of fragmentation is when files are deleted, as that creates holes the computer tries to fill with subsequently-saved data, but the holes are almost never the right size for the new files being saved, so the newly-saved files also get broken up into noncontiguous pieces.

Don’t think your use is the only force causing fragmentation on your drive, either. Virtual memory, pointers to recent files, various cache files, and updates/patches use and release hard drive space all the time, causing fragmentation, even if you never intentionally save another file to your computer. Fortunately, fragmentation is relatively easy to cure. Microsoft Windows comes with a tool that does it for us – all we have to do is use this tool from time to time, and it rearranges the files on the disk to do its best to store them all continuously. Lucky for us, a lot of the stuff we store on our hard drives doesn’t change all that frequently. Operating system files, installed applications, and even our music and photos rarely change in content or size, so once they get defragmented into less dynamic areas of the hard drive, they should be fine.

PART II – DIGITAL HOARDING

After fragmentation, the next issue to discuss how hard drives slow down our computers is the increasing volume of data being stored on them. If you’ve seen a phonograph turntable, you have a rough notion of how a hard drive operates, but imagine it spinning much faster. Instead of 33 or 45 revolutions per minute, hard drives operate at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000, or even 15,000 revolutions per minute. For even the slowest hard drive to spin around to the complete opposite side of the disk may take under 1/100th of a second, but like a phonograph turntable, a rotation isn’t the only motion the drive makes; the head also moves in and out, radially, and that motion is significantly slower. When a hard drive has little data on it, that data is generally stored close to the center, so the head only needs to traverse a tiny fraction of the radius of the disk, but as more and more data get stored, more of the radius of the disk is used, so the portion of the radius that the head must travel gets longer, making data reads and writes slower.

Disk Cleanup searches for several categories of junk left on your drive and enables you to remove them.

Add/Remove Programs helps you find and remove old applications and Windows Components that you no longer use or need.

Even your own old documents, music, movies and photos can be parsed and either deleted or moved to offline storage (such as burned to CDs/DVDs or uploaded to network or even Internet storage facilities).In extreme situations, you can also reduce some of the cache sizes, such as the System Restore cache size or even the Recycle Bin. By default, these take up 12% and 10% of your hard drive, respectively, and unless you’re prone to deleting things you shouldn’t have, cutting these in half frees up 1/9 of your hard drive, immediately and without undue risk.

Professionals may also be able to help you identify more ways of freeing up space, such as disabling Offline Files if the feature isn’t needed, deleting old user profiles, removing old printers, reducing Internet cache settings, etc. Frequently, programs leave remnants of themselves behind on your hard drive, even after being uninstalled; these may also be deleted. Misconfigured virtual memory settings may also hog up more of your hard drive than is actually needed.

PART III – APPLICATION CREEP

The resolvable category is what I refer to as “Application creep.” Your computer probably came with a bunch of free and free-trial programs installed that you’ve never used. Most of these lie dormant on your hard drive until invoked, but some, like printer drivers, malware detectors, and hardware and software updates load into memory every time you boot your machine. On top of these, you’ve probably installed more, whether you realized it or not. If you installed Adobe Reader, there’s a little piece of code that probably loads up on every restart of your PC – it makes it quicker for you to open.pdf files because part of the Reader is already in memory, but what about the 99% of the time that you’re not using it? Well, it still sits there, taking up resources, making other operations slower. Lots of other common applications have such components that automatically run when you boot your PC (aka “AutoRuns”), such as iTunes, Safari, QuickTime, Java, and more. Besides these AutoRuns, other unwanted programs sneak in, piggy-backed alongside programs you use. Those extra toolbars in your Internet Explorer window were the carefully-concealed payloads of lots of other programs you installed, and guess what – they use up resources unnecessarily every time IE is running. It’s not a big reach to realize that when unneeded things are using up resources, desirable operations work less efficiently.

The category that’s more difficult to resolve is the result of technological advancement. You bought your computer eight years ago before Netflix ever started streaming movies, and now you expect it to do things it wasn’t intended to do. You finished the games you were playing and bought newer games, even though they demand more RAM, more hard drive space, and faster processors. You had a film camera before, but now you’re importing your digital cell phone photos from all of your trips, and you’ve started taking short videos, too!…and even if you don’t actively update any of your software or increase your utilization of it, updates may be happening behind the scenes. Microsoft Windows can update itself automatically, and in fact, many Microsoft software titles can be configured to do so. Adobe, Java, Real Player, iTunes, and Quicken prompt you for updates, and you just click “OK” without even thinking about it. Bug fixes come out, updated drivers are released, and you don’t want to be left vulnerable or outdated, so you accept them. Each of these updates places additional demands on your computer’s resources.

Look, we don’t all still carry around our first, brick-sized, analog-only, battery-guzzling cellular phones – we want the latest features, so we upgrade. At some point, you have to make the decision to do that with your computer, too. Ultimately, you may find that even after thinning out your data, deleting your unwanted applications, and cleaning up your AutoRun programs as far as you reasonably can that your computer is still too slow for your taste. At that point, either upgrade or replace it. Hopefully, following the advice above will at least increase the amount of time between computer upgrades, saving you money.

PART IV – WHAT TO UPGRADE

So you’ve tried all the optimizing you could, and you’re still unsatisfied with the performance of your computer. Now what? Maybe it’s time to upgrade, but what should you upgrade? The whole system? Just some components? If time and money were no objects, you’d just go buy the latest greatest system out there and hire someone else to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications and transfer all of your data. Unfortunately, for many of us, that’s not the case. When faced with limited resources, we have to make decisions about the best ways to employ them. You’d hate to spend four digits on a whole new computer system if all the old one needed was a memory upgrade. However, you’d also hate to waste money on RAM only to find that you’re still unsatisfied and still faced with the need to buy a whole new system. How can you tell what to do?

Windows comes with several tools to help us identify bottlenecks. Armed with that information, we can make better decisions about what to do to resolve them. Here’s a list of several of the more common bottlenecks:

Network Connection – a low-speed network connection will make Internet access and any other network resource utilization slower.

Main Memory – having insufficient RAM forces the PC to use a swap file on the hard drive instead, slowing down processing, task switching, and read/write operations.

Processor – having too slow a processor or too few processors will impact the performance of virtually all operations. Less-expensive processors also lack L1 cache, which reduces their performance further.

Hard Drive – slower hard drives affect the speed of all read/write operations, including cache files and virtual memory. Space utilization is also a consideration; the guideline is to utilize less than 50% of any hard drive’s capacity.

To diagnose these issues, first, try to notice patterns. If your performance complaints predominantly pertain to the speed at which Web pages load, they’re more likely indicative of a problem with the speed of your Internet connection. If performance gets sluggish when you have more applications running, you may have insufficient memory or a slow processor. If the hard drive activity indicator light stays lit frequently, it may indicate insufficient memory or too slow or too full a hard drive. Once you have your guess as a starting point, you’ll want to find evidence for or against your thesis. A good place to start is the Windows Task Manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, and you should see the task manager or a link to it, depending on which version of Windows you’re running. The Performance tab shows processor and memory utilization and the Networking tab shows network connection utilization.Let’s start with the Performance tab; it provides lots of good information. First, the number of pages of CPU Usage History shows you how many CPU cores your system has. Utilization should normally be low unless you have a ton of stuff actively running. If any of the graphs are pegging the needle at the top of the chart, there is more demand being placed on your processor than it can handle. The PF Usage charts show how much RAM is being used. Ideally, you want this to be low, too. The more applications you have running, the more RAM is required. As we mentioned, once the computer runs out of actual memory, it makes more room by moving less-frequently-used data into “virtual memory,” which is actually stored on the hard drive. When it needs it back, it swaps the next-least-frequently-used data to the hard drive to make room to swap the needed data back in. All of these operations take time, so if the PF Usage is up at or near the top of your graph, you have insufficient RAM to meet your demands.

Another helpful tool to see the processor and RAM that are installed in your PC is the System Properties in the Control Panel. Press Windows-Break as a shortcut to bring that up. The Pentium-4 processor is today’s standard, and if you have an older one, I wouldn’t bother trying to upgrade – just replace the PC. Different operating systems have different memory requirements, but having at least 1 GB of RAM is pretty common nowadays.

Back to the Task Manager, on the Networking tab, don’t be surprised if your network utilization is frequently at or below one percent. A typical desktop computer has a network interface card (NIC) capable of communicating at 100 or even 1,000 million bits per second – even older NICs could communicate at 10 Mbps. A typical broadband Internet connection (such as a cable modem, high-speed DSL, or fiber optic connection), however, operates in the vicinity of 1 Mbps, and that’s only when downloading large files under perfect conditions. If you’re connected to other local network resources, such as servers or network printers, you may be able to use more of your available bandwidth, but if your sole network utilization is your Internet access, the bottleneck will always be the Internet connection rather than the computer’s network connection. Now that we’ve cleared that up, if you find the graph showing utilization at or near 100%, your network card may be too slow for your requirements, but if you’re unhappy with the speed of Web pages loading despite low network connection utilization, you need to upgrade your Internet connection instead of your PC.

PART V – UPGRADING

Now that you’ve identified the problem, you need to decide how to deal with it. Some issues can be overcome by minor upgrades, but others aren’t worth the cost or trouble and are an ideal opportunity to replace the PC.

If you’ve decided that you don’t have enough RAM, that’s usually the cheapest and easiest upgrade you can make to your PC. Depending on how much you have and how many slots your motherboard has, you may be able to install additional DIMMs or you may need to replace existing lower-capacity DIMMs with larger-capacity ones. There are dozens of incompatible varieties of memory, so if you’re not sure what you need, the best thing to do is to check the owner’s manual that came with your PC when you bought it. You still have it, right? If not, either take a DIMM out and bring it with you to the store or if you’re buying online, search by the make and model of your PC, rather than for the type of memory.

If you’ve decided that your network card is too slow, you can probably install a faster one into a card slot or even a USB port – this, too, is a relatively inexpensive and easy upgrade to perform. Most PCs built in the last 10 years have PCI slots, so you can probably look for a PCI-technology network interface card (NIC) at your local computer store or online. They come in wired or wireless varieties, depending on how you’ll be connecting your PC to your network. If you’d rather not open your PC, both wired and wireless NICs come in USB varieties nowadays, too. If your Internet connection is too slow, you won’t have to do a thing to your computer – just contact your ISP and discuss your options for upgrading your service to a higher bandwidth – or shop around to see what the other ISPs are charging.

If you decide that your processor is insufficient, it’s usually best to just replace your PC. Motherboards are designed to work with a small range of different model processors, and even if yours was the low-end model, the cost and trouble to upgrade to the high-end processor wouldn’t produce a noticeably-worthwhile improvement; trade up for a PC with more processor cores, instead. The only exception to this rule might be if your motherboard allowed you to upgrade from a processor without L1 cache (such as a Celeron) to a processor with L1 cache – that could produce a noticeable enough improvement to warrant the cost and difficulty. If so, check your owner’s manual (or specs online) to see which processors your motherboard will accommodate, and if you decide to do it, once you factor in the cost of your time and effort, it’s probably best to just upgrade to the best and fastest one available – you don’t want to have to do this again in a year when you outgrow a tiny incremental improvement.

Historically, when a computer’s hard drive became the bottleneck, it was usually a point at which we recommended replacing the entire system. In some cases, however, the rules have changed today. Replacing a hard drive involves reinstalling the operating system and all the applications, as well as transferring all the personal files and data, so it’s usually such a labor-intensive process as to make it the ideal time to upgrade the rest of the PC along with it. Today, however, with the popularity of digital photography,.mp3 music files, videos, and other space-hogging multimedia data, it’s frequently possible to optimize an existing hard drive by offloaded all such personal files and data to external storage. USB flash drives are now available in 64 GB or more, and external USB hard drives exceed 1 TB (which is 1,024 GB). It’s a pain in the butt to have to change the installed location of most applications and Windows components, but to move data files is significantly less trouble. In fact, to further improve performance, you could even offload your PC’s virtual memory file to a second (internal) hard drive without too much trouble. As we discussed earlier in this treatise, the more stuff you have on your hard drive, the less efficiently it operates, so by moving all this type of non-system-critical data off of the hard drive that contains the operating system and the applications, you may be able to restore most of the PC’s youthful performance without too much trouble.

Ultimately, all of these optimizations and upgrades are only stop-gap measures. Software patches and updates will continue to require increasingly more space on your main hard drive, and you’ll probably add more features and applications over time. Even if you’re terribly miserly with space on your main hard drive, there are still increasing demands. It’s also one of the few mechanical components in your PC, so its lifespan can already be expected to be shorter than any of the solid state components. At some point, you’re going to need a new main hard drive, and at that point, I’d still stick with my position that it’s a good opportunity to replace the whole PC.

Many people are comfortable enough with defragmenting their own hard drives and installing their own RAM DIMMs, but if you’d prefer to leave it to a professional, Maverick Solutions would be happy to help. In fact, for our loyal readers (at least our local ones), we’re even offering a Free PC Tune-Up or we can assist with other types of upgrades. If you’ve tried all the optimizing you can and still aren’t getting satisfactory performance out of your old PC, we’d recommend one of our reliable refurbished computers to give you the most value for your technology investment.

About the Author:

Brian Blum is the founder, president, and chief consultant at Maverick Solutions IT, Inc. Maverick Solutions provides affordable IT consulting and technology support services, primarily to schools, NFPs, and SO/HOs in the New York Metro Area. Maverick Solutions is the alternative to keeping your own in-house IT staff, and we’d be happy to help you get more value from your existing technology investment. Visit our Website to learn about the services we offer, or read our blog, Maverick Ramblings, for assorted tips, tricks, and information of technology interest.

0 notes

netmaddy-blog · 7 years

Text

Computer Optimization Windows

New Post has been published on https://netmaddy.com/computer-optimization-windows/

Computer Optimization Windows

First, let’s understand what doesn’t cause a computer to slow down:

Computer processors are digital electronic transistor-like switches, sealed in a hard plastic package; these are solid-state devices that either work or don’t. They may get fired if exposed to a power surge, but otherwise, they don’t slow down. Computer memory is comprised of similar components and works or doesn’t work, just the same. A computer motherboard is nothing more than wire traces on a piece of plastic, usually with more solid-state devices plugged into it or soldered to it. Motherboards don’t slow down, either. Computer power supplies are exposed to some of the most extreme conditions computer experiences. That’s why they burn out more frequently than most other parts, but even they don’t cause performance reductions; they either work or they don’t. So what does cause a computer to slow down with age? The biggest culprit is data storage. Imagine trying to look for something in a file cabinet if it was the only item in the drawer; it would be pretty easy to find, right? If there were even just a few items in the drawer, it would still be simple to thumb through them to find the one you wanted. What if the drawer was completely filled? It might take a little longer, right? That’s what happens on a hard drive when you install an operating system, applications, and data on it. Every time you download more.mp3 songs, import more.jpg photos from your camera, or type up new word processing documents, you’re stuffing more things in the file cabinet which is your hard drive.

PART II – DIGITAL HOARDING

After fragmentation, the next issue to discuss how hard drives slow down our computers is the increasing volume of data being stored on them. If you’ve seen a phonograph turntable, you have a rough notion of how a hard drive operates, but imagine it spinning much faster. Instead of 33 or 45 revolutions per minute, hard drives operate at 5,400, 7,200, 10,000, or even 15,000 revolutions per minute. For even the slowest hard drive to spin around to the complete opposite side of the disk may take under 1/100th of a second, but like a phonograph turntable, the rotation isn’t the only motion the drive makes; the head also moves in and out, radially, and that motion is significantly slower. When a hard drive has little data on it, that data is generally stored close to the center, so the head only needs to traverse a tiny fraction of the radius of the disk, but as more and more data get stored, more of the radius of the disk is used, so the portion of the radius that the head must travel gets longer, making data reads and writes slower.

Disk Cleanup searches for several categories of junk left on your drive and enables you to remove them. Add/Remove Programs helps you find and remove old applications and Windows Components that you no longer use or need. Even your own old documents, music, movies and photos can be parsed and either deleted or moved to offline storage (such as burned to CDs/DVDs or uploaded to network or even Internet storage facilities). In extreme situations, you can also reduce some of the cache sizes, such as the System Restore cache size or even the Recycle Bin. By default, these take up 12% and 10% of your hard drive, respectively, and unless you’re prone to deleting things you shouldn’t have, cutting these in half frees up 1/9 of your hard drive, immediately and without undue risk.

PART III – APPLICATION CREEP

The resolvable category is what I refer to as “Application creep.” Your computer probably came with a bunch of free and free-trial programs installed that you’ve never used. Most of these lie dormant on your hard drive until invoked, but some, like printer drivers, malware detectors, and hardware and software updaters load into memory every time you boot your machine. On top of these, you’ve probably installed more, whether you realized it or not. If you installed Adobe Reader, there’s a little piece of code that probably loads up on every restart of your PC – it makes it quicker for you to open.pdf files because part of the Reader is already in memory, but what about the 99% of the time that you’re not using it? Well, it still sits there, taking up resources, making other operations slower. Lots of other common applications have such components that automatically run when you boot your PC (aka “AutoRuns”), such as iTunes, Safari, QuickTime, Java, and more. Besides these AutoRuns, other unwanted programs sneak in, piggy-backed alongside programs you use. Those extra toolbars in your Internet Explorer window were the carefully-concealed payloads of lots of other programs you installed, and guess what – they use up resources unnecessarily every time IE is running. It’s not a big reach to realize that when unneeded things are using up resources, desirable operations work less efficiently.

PART IV – WHAT TO UPGRADE

So you’ve tried all the optimizing you could, and you’re still unsatisfied with the performance of your computer. Now what? Maybe it’s time to upgrade, but what should you upgrade? The whole system? Just some components? If time and money were no object, you’d just go buy the latest greatest system out there and hire someone else to reinstall and reconfigure all of your applications and transfer all of your data. Unfortunately, for many of us, that’s not the case. When faced with limited resources, we have to make decisions about the best ways to employ them. You’d hate to spend four-digits on a whole new computer system if all the old one needed was a memory upgrade. However, you’d also hate to waste money on RAM only to find that you’re still unsatisfied and still faced with the need to buy a whole new system. How can you tell what to do?

Network Connection – a low-speed network connection will make Internet access and any other network resource utilization slower. Main Memory – having insufficient RAM forces the PC to use a swap file on the hard drive instead, slowing down processing, task switching, and read/write operations. Processor – having too slow a processor or too few processors will impact the performance of virtually all operations. Less-expensive processors also lack L1 cache, which reduces their performance further. Hard Drive – slower hard drives affect the speed of all read/write operations, including cache files and virtual memory. Space utilization is also a consideration; the guideline is to utilize less than 50% of any hard drive’s capacity. To diagnose these issues, first, try to notice patterns. If your performance complaints predominantly pertain to the speed at which Web pages load, they’re more likely indicative of a problem with the speed of your Internet connection. If performance gets sluggish when you have more applications running, you may have insufficient memory or a slow processor. If the hard drive activity indicator light stays lit frequently, it may indicate insufficient memory or too slow or too full a hard drive. Once you have your guess as a starting point, you’ll want to find evidence for or against your thesis. A good place to start is the Windows Task Manager. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del, and you should see the task manager or a link to it, depending on which version of Windows you’re running. The Performance tab shows processor and memory utilization and the Networking tab shows network connection utilization. Let’s start with the Performance tab; it provides lots of good information. First, the number of panes of CPU Usage History shows you how many CPU cores your system has. Utilization should normally be low unless you have a ton of stuff actively running. If any of the graphs are pegging the needle at the top of the chart, there is more demand being placed on your processor than it can handle. The PF Usage charts show how much RAM is being used. Ideally, you want this to be low, too. The more applications you have running, the more RAM is required. As we mentioned, once the computer runs out of actual memory, it makes more room by moving less-frequently-used data into “virtual memory,” which is actually stored on the hard drive. When it needs it back, it swaps the next-least-frequently-used data to the hard drive to make room to swap the needed data back in. All of these operations take time, so if the PF Usage is up at or near the top of your graph, you have insufficient RAM to meet your demands.

Another helpful tool to see the processor and RAM that are installed in your PC is the System Properties in the Control Panel. Press Windows-Break as a shortcut to bring that up. The Pentium-4 processor is today’s standard, and if you have an older one, I wouldn’t bother trying to upgrade – just replace the PC. Different operating systems have different memory requirements, but having at least 1 GB of RAM is pretty common nowadays.

PART V – UPGRADING

If you decide that your processor is insufficient, it’s usually best to just replace your PC. Motherboards are designed to work with a small range of different model processors, and even if yours was the low-end model, the cost and trouble to upgrade to the high-end processor wouldn’t produce a noticeably-worthwhile improvement; trade up for a PC with more processor cores, instead. The only exception to this rule might be if your motherboard allowed you to upgrade from a processor without L1 cache (such as a Celeron) to a processor with L1 cache – that could produce a noticeable-enough improvement to warrant the cost and difficulty. If so, check your owner’s manual (or specs online) to see which processors your motherboard will accommodate, and if you decide to do it, once you factor in the cost of your time and effort, it’s probably best to just upgrade to the best and fastest one available – you don’t want to have to do this again in a year when you outgrow a tiny incremental improvement.

Ultimately, all of these optimizations and upgrades are only stop-gap measures. Software patches and updates will continue to require increasingly-more space on your main hard drive, and you’ll probably add more features and applications over time. Even if you’re terribly miserly with space on your main hard drive, there are still increasing demands. It’s also one of the few mechanical components in your PC, so its lifespan can already be expected to be shorter than any of the solid state components. At some point, you’re going to need a new main hard drive, and at that point, I’d still stick with my position that it’s a good opportunity to replace the whole PC.

0 notes