Skipware level, late 2012

On 13 October 2012 21:09, Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote: IKWYM. From about 2006-20010 I used a friend's discarded old AthlonXP 3200+. Then I got a different friend's discarded Athlon64 X2 4400+, an old graphics card for it from another friend and 2GB of DDR RAM from my dead iMac G5. That machine served as my main one from about 2010 (when he replaced with with a Core i7) until yesterday - but I must admit, in the last 6mth or so, it's been getting noticeably slow. I wiped & reinstalled Ubuntu but 12.04 seems to be a bit much for a 7YO AMD chip. It was perfectly usable, just not as responsive as I'd like. I am amazed, really - given that I use Ubuntu on a much slower netbook, for instance. A 64-bit dual-core multi-gigaHertz class CPU with 4GB of RAM should not be inadequate for a single-user desktop machine. But my highest-end notebook - Core 2 Duo, 3GB RAM, Toshiba desktop-replacement type machine from about 4y ago - was /noticeably/ quicker. On my Thinkpad X31 (Pentium M 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, ATI Radeon Mobility) I've had to drop back down to Lubuntu to keep it usably responsive. Software bloat continues to be a serious problem. The thing is, chips stopped getting massively faster about 5-6y ago now. Things doubled every 18mth up to 2005 or so, then it was 50% for the next generation, then 25% for the one after that, then ~12% for, say, 2nd-gen Core i5/7 over the 1st gen, and <10% for 3rd gen over 2nd. All we're getting is more and more cores and smaller and more electricity-efficient chips. The programmers have not caught on to this yet. Oh, total agreement there! -- Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven Tel: +44 20-8685-0498 ? Cell: +44 7939-087884