Re: Pirates of Silicon Valley

[sweitc@smurf.lab2a.unve.edu (Charly Sweitzer)]

In article <377abd72@news1.jps.net>, iamdavid@iname.com says...
>
>> sheercon@earthlink.net wrote:
>> 
>> That is rubbish !  Whether I am using Windows 3.x, or 98 or NT, Netscape is
>> the only
>> application on my PC's which I would consider "unstable".  Mind you, I do
>hammer my
>> PC's ......
>>
>> Mike
>>
>
>I agree this is a sensible thing to do....
>
>Whenever I use a PC I am very tempted to hammer it, with a BIG hammer.
>
>And for a lot of good reasons. Not the least of which is it might speed it
>up. In my personal experience a brand new, (and not loaded with everything
>ever written for a PC) 400MHz Presario with 96Mb RAM  is slower in actual
>use (forget benchmarks) than a 120MHz Mac PPC, even in simplest of tasks,
>like opening a window, which takes up to a second.
>
>And my old 266MHz Pentium machine takes longer to open the "My Computer"
>window than my 400MHz B&W G3 Mac does to open Netscape..... this is NOT an
>exaggeration, but a practical, timed, actual, and repeatable situation.

That's odd, I had a 60MHz pentium setting next to an 8100/100 and the pentium
was faster at booting, opening windows, accessing drives, etc, etc than the
mac. Both had 32 MB of memory, 2GB scsi drives, both came from the local
authorized apple dealer. I finally had to up the memory in the Mac when I
went to 8.5, Netscape would refuse to print due to not enough memory and
8.5 slowed everything down even worse. I would hate to see how bad virtual
memory would make it. But if I was interested in how many integer operations
I could do in a second, the 8100 should be over twice as fast! Unfortunately
the feel was that it was twice as slow (and cost almost three times as much).

My 300 MHZ Pentium II and my 300 MHZ G3 both with 96MB of memory & 4 GB hard
drives seem to be "feel" about equal in speed and responsiveness.

If you have a drive that spins down on the Wintel machine, opening My Computer
will wait for it to spin back up before it opens.

Charly