On 01/11/2010 17:01, Michael Watterson wrote:
>    On 01/11/2010 16:22, Oli Glaser wrote:
>>     I guess I'll just have to keep on buying a new faster PC every 12
>> months if I want to keep on using a few programs at once (on windows - I
>> may go back and try linux on one of my other latops though)
> No need. My 1.8GHz P4 Laptop is 8.5 years old and faster than most
> netbooks. Faster than quite a few laptops, except now it's 32M GEforce 4
> Graphics is suitable for newer games, though CIV IV does work.
>
>    Only high end Gamer machines etc with insane graphics cards get much
> faster each year, and only really on specialist shader support etc.
>
> Win7 is nearly as good as XP SP3, but not quite, hence plenty small
> netbooks are still XP. Much better than Vista.
>
> The last two Ubuntu versions run faster than Win 2000 on the 10 year old
> PIII laptop 450MHz and 128M RAM. Previous versions slower.
>

Maybe it's just Vista itself that's bugging me most then - I find it=20
okay (the user account control really annoys me but I live with it), but=20
it seems a lot more sluggish than XP, which I really liked and have on=20
my workroom PC.

Is it worth upgrading to Win7? From what I hear it seems people are=20
genrally positive about it. I'm only interested in speed really, with=20
Vista I have all the graphics enhancements turned off as it performs a=20
lot better - the graphics card in my main laptop is not that good (sony=20
vaio 2 Ghz dual core) so it's the weak link in the machine (no RAM of=20
it's own, standard ATI thing)
I guess if a 1.8 Ghz P4 is working for you then you must be running=20
different stuff to me or splitting software over a few machines - I tend=20
to try and use one machine for everything and have many apps open at=20
once (I have about 8 open now, including MPLAB, Chrome, Thunderbird,=20
Foxit, LTSPice, VIsual Studio etc)
I don't think there is any other option than to run a fast machine if=20
you want these capabilites really - I could not do this on my 1.5 (I=20
think, or 1.8) Ghz XP laptop, it only manages around 2 or 3 large apps=20
before slowing down noticably. Of course it's not just the processor,=20
there's the RAM, FSB etc etc. I built a 3GHz P4 machine from scratch=20
around 6 yrs ago for use in my recording studio (decent sound processing=20
needs similar grunt to high end gaming) I bet would still beat this=20
machine, might try it out a some point.
I general I'm pretty happy with my setup at the moment but it never=20
stays that way for too long thanks to speedy advancements and the latest=20
fancy offerings from MS and others.. :-)





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