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1801

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is my computer hiccuping every few seconds?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 02:51 PM »

3.5? or was it 3.6 - pretty sure there is some sort of vacuum magic build in. Mozillas interval for doing this is probably once a month or something.

-Bamse (February 09, 2011, 01:48 PM)

Are you sure about this? Doesn't seem to be enabled by default from upgraded installs, at least - my FF3.6 .sqlite files seem to just grow and grow and fragment if I don't manually vacuum.

1802

Living Room / Re: CPU Question: More Mhz per core or more cores?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 02:49 PM »

A general rule of thumb is that most software is at least a year behind in using the capabilities of the silicone it runs on.

-40hz (February 09, 2011, 01:40 PM)

If it's running on silicone, I sure as hell hope it's dual-core and nothing else - neither single nor quad

1803

Living Room / Re: CPU Question: More Mhz per core or more cores?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 01:30 PM »

Humm, I don't know how well Photoshop has been parallelized - but making things scale well isn't the easiest task in the world. Personally, I'd rather have a quadcore with more GHz per core than a 6-core machine... especially since 6-core implies AMD, and the Intel CPUs are faster per MHz - AMD's only selling point these days would be lower price.

1804

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is my computer hiccuping every few seconds?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 01:28 PM »

Bamse: even with a modest amount of tabs open, you can experience stuttering if the database file is fragmented enough

1805

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is my computer hiccuping every few seconds?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 11:55 AM »

Well, ramdisks aren't just for somewhat shoddily programmed applications (like FireFox), they're also great when you do I/O intensive stuff - like unpacking a huge source code archive, building ISO images, et cetera. And it's nice for %TEMP%.

Windows has FILE_FLAG_TEMPORARY, and linux does special handling of /tmp/, but they aren't guarantees that you won't hit disk - and even if the file data never hits the disk, I think the filesystem metadata might be updated.

Is the firefox memory issue something that mouser's Process Tamer can improve somehow?

-superboyac (February 09, 2011, 11:52 AM)

Nope, it handle CPU-based stuff, yours is an I/O issue.

Btw, is it only FireFox that hiccups, or your entire system? The saving of FF's session state shouldn't be affecting the entire system, but it will freeze the entire FireFox process.

1806

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is my computer hiccuping every few seconds?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 11:11 AM »

A ramdisk is a logical disk existing in your ram, meaning it's UBERFAST compared to a disk drive.

Very good for stuff like %TEMP%, even if there's a few retardo applications that try to store huge amounts of data in %TEMP%, meaning a 512meg ramdrive can be too little every now and then.

It'd be pretty sweet to move to 12 gigs of system memory and set aside 4-5 gigs for a ramdisk - in my 8gig system, I have a 512meg one.

1807

General Software Discussion / Re: Why is my computer hiccuping every few seconds?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 10:06 AM »

Hmm...seems like turning off session restore in firefox (using the about:config area) did the trick.  We'll see.

-superboyac (February 08, 2011, 08:57 PM)

Session restore regularly dumps your session info to it's backing store. The sqlite3 databases used by FF tends to be fragmented (internally as well as externally - so you need to both "VACUUM" the databases (there are tools for this) as well as defragment the file).

Personally I moved all my firefox profile & session stuff to a ramdisk to avoid the hiccups.

1808

Living Room / Re: NoteSlate - mono color tablet, nice price

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 07:37 AM »

Iirc the specs do mention a SD card slot - so it should be able to export? Otherwise, it's useless

1809

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 06:40 AM »

18MB/s is perfectly attainable with a 2.0 plug - I think one of my corsairs reach ~20MB/s for reads.

1810

Living Room / Re: NoteSlate - mono color tablet, nice price

« Last post by f0dder on February 09, 2011, 06:39 AM »

If it's real, I'd buy one to see if it works half as good as it looks. A 13-inch display would be awesome, since I'd use a tablet mostly to read .ePub books with.

-zridling (February 09, 2011, 06:27 AM)

I dunno if this particular device can be used to read ebooks - it seems focused solely on being a scratched that can save it's contents?

1811

Living Room / Re: USB 3.0 stick - anyone taken the plunge?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 08:12 PM »

I can't see why you'd need a 3.0 USB stick - 2.0 caps out at a theoretical ~60MB/s, and I haven't seen a single stick that even approaches that. Marketing weasels: I hate them.

1812

Living Room / Re: NoteSlate - mono color tablet, nice price

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 12:47 PM »

Their website doesn't inspire a lot of confidence in me - the language used almost makes it seem like a scam site.

But if the device was übercheap (and the act of drawing feels 100% normal, not like the laggy feel of all digitizing devices I've tried), it could be very interesting for notetaking at school.

1813

General Software Discussion / Re: Should MS open up Windows Update to 3rd parties?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 03:30 AM »

Yes, the problem is that each and every update would have to be verified by MS, which would be quite a burden, and would slow down updates. Either that, or updates would only be from very big vendors.

1814

General Software Discussion / Re: Should MS open up Windows Update to 3rd parties?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 03:09 AM »

Isn't that where DCUpdater comes in and fills a niche?

-Ath (February 08, 2011, 03:07 AM)

DCU is better than every DoCo tool by different authors having their own autoupdater, but it's still Yet Another Autoupdater when viewed in the bigger picture...

1815

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 03:01 AM »

64bit Win7 (and Vista, for that matters) runs just fine with 2GB, even for heavier work than simple browsing & office.

1816

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 02:57 AM »

Hrm, I haven't looked at VMX support since I got my Q6600, but "random" sounds stupid - there surely must be some rationale? Or are you saying that, for instance, some i5's have VMX and others don't?

As for tooling, various chip configuration can be done post-fab, after testing. Like, the silicon for a quadcore and dualcore could be the same, but with half the cores disabled after hardware test that shows one set of cores fail. Or failing bits of cache memory, etc. Might be the same with VMX support.

1817

General Software Discussion / Re: Should MS open up Windows Update to 3rd parties?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 02:54 AM »

Renegade: the whole point would be getting rid of all those FSCKING LAME "so ein ding mussen ich auch haben" 3rd-party auto-update tools, and have one centralized & stream-lined process to handle all updates. It would be very++ nice for the end-users.

1818

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 08, 2011, 01:45 AM »

I like building with AMD chips - and feel Intel is the chip manufacturing quivalent of MS !!

-Carol Haynes (February 07, 2011, 06:18 PM)

You mean, like, producing superior quality to the competition?

(I go for best bang for the buck, and have been through various Intel and AMD CPUs. AMD haven't been doing much good lately - same goes for AMD/ATI vs. nvidia, with nvidia also having the upper hand wrt. stable drivers).

Plus you can guarantee with AMD systems that you activate VM technology - with Intel it is hit and miss even within the same product series.

-Carol Haynes (February 07, 2011, 06:18 PM)

How bad is this, really? Don't you just have to look up the CPU model on Intel's site?

1819

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 05:20 PM »

Vid cards are easy once you get over that nasty bruise on your credit card.

-40hz (February 07, 2011, 05:05 PM)

On dekstop machines, anyway

1820

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 02:28 PM »

Depends on which size you're going from and to, as well as which OS you're using, and your workloads (for sequential reading or writing, HDD cache shouldn't matter a lot - smaller and/or scattered reads/writes is a different matter). Can't remember the URL of the article, but it's probably been Anandtech or Tomshardware that found almost no difference when going from 8meg cache and beyond.

PS: a drive so old that it only has 256kb buffer might mean it's only capable of doing PIO access mode, whereas 2meg cache could be a DMA mode... which means a lot, especially CPU usage wise.

1821

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 02:06 PM »

Not sure how much harddrive buffer size matters, tbh, at least not above the 8meg mark. When comparing a 2meg vs. 8meg buffer size harddrive, the drive with 8meg cache is almost guaranteed to be larger. This means more platters (and thus more read/write heads) and/or higher data density, which by itself means higher data transfer rate. Also means a 500gig 5200rpm drive is likely to be faster than a 200gig 7200rpm drive.

1822

General Software Discussion / Re: Should MS open up Windows Update to 3rd parties?

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 01:21 PM »

I really don't know.

It would definitely be great to receive updates for 3rd party programs from a single (and trusted) source with plenty of bandwidth, and not having a zillion different applications wanting to use their own auto-update tools and call-home checks... but I wonder if it would be feasible.

1823

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 01:19 PM »

Gothi[c]: if you were doing any of that, you wouldn't be on a system with a GPU without dedicated vram, and with a mere 512megs of sysram - just sayin'

1824

Living Room / Re: Porn for Geeks (Kind of SFW)

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 07:45 AM »

Umm, Dirt slow? If this is across the internet, 11MB/s isn't half bad - at least not if we're talking a home connection

1825

Living Room / Re: which is more important, system ram or video ram?

« Last post by f0dder on February 07, 2011, 06:48 AM »

It really all depends on what the system is going to be used for. What kind of work is the machine used for?

In your case, I assume we're dealing with a machine that uses system memory for the GPU, and lets you tweak the amount of memory allocated in the BIOS. Probably not used for gaming or any kind of intensive graphics use... With so little system memory, I'd select the minimum possible amount to be reserved for the GPU.