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Making Operating Systems Faster
mbrowling writes "In an article over at kernelthread.com Amit Singh discusses 'Ten Things Apple Did To Make Mac OS X Faster'. The theme seems to be that since you won't run into 'earth-shattering algorithmic breakthroughs' in every OS releases, what're you gonna do to bump your performance numbers higher? Although the example used is OS X, the article points out that Windows uses the same approach."
Check out www.blackviper.com, it's one of the better sites dedicated to tuning and increasing performance of Windows 2000/XP
1) Don't install so much crap on your computer. 5 megapixel photos set as wallpaper along with Real Player, Gator Spyware Crap, Quicktime Task, HP scanner registration reminder sofware, webshots, Norton anything, MS office bar etc running on startup will make your nice shiny new computer run like an arthritic snail on sleeping tablets.
2) Turn off some of the eyecandy. All those fades and whooshes and stuff don't actually do anything useful, they just consume CPU cycles and waste your time.
3) Use Ad Aware and SpyBot regularly to keep scumware out of your computer. I had to clean up a PC this morning which had stopped working because the BASTARDS at NewDotNet wrote some software which fucked the TCP/IP stack backwards.
4) Defrag regularly and run MSCONFIG to check what crap is sneaking back on to your Startup scripts.
BTW, Windows 3.1 sitting on MSDOS 6.2 ran like shit of a stick on my old P133. I wonder if/how it would run on a modern system?
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I dunno about all that but OS X doesn't seem slow at all to me.
... but I do have to admit that in all my computing experiences, OSX seems to be the one OS that is more 'acceptably mediocre', performance wise, than any other.
... that there are 'unutilized registers' in the PPC architecture when it is running OSX.
...
Try running LinuxPPC on your mac some day, and you will see a huge difference in general snappiness.
I'm not saying OSX is un-usably slow, or even slow at all - heck my Rev. A tiBook, beaten and aged, is still all the computer I need, and I am very productive with it
On the register side of things, I can't for the life of me remember the full details, but I believe that the ABI for OSX only uses a sub-set of the PPC's full register set, and thus this means more swaps in/out
This is separate from AltiVec, which is an instruction set, not just a register setup
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I know it was a joke, but apple's GUI is rendered using the video card's processing power, not your CPU's. So such fancy effects are using cycles that would otherwise be idle, giving no performance hit at all, and making it look fricking cool at the same time.
There are easier ways to enable these "features" than creating a ton of hoops for BOTH sides of users.
What fucking hoops?
Right-click My Computer->Properties->Advanced->Settings button.
Choose either "Best Performance" or "Best Appearance." Or check each option individually. What a non-issue.
If this was KDE, someone would have already answered with this, but because it's Windows, everyone just nods with the rest of the flock, "Baa, baa, yes, there are hoops to jump through, baa."
Speaking of KDE, talk about fucking hoops. You've got a completely horrible control center, with three different areas for changing the looks of things like window styles, widget styles, and so on. Why the hell isn't that all integrated into one configuration dialog? Oh, I forgot, ease-of-use is a criticism we only reserve for non-issues on the Windows platform like checking a radio button to get rid of a blue theme.
"Sufferin' succotash."