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Less Might Be More
Quantum Skyline writes "Most of us are running on a newer Pentium 4/Athlon 64 box with lots of RAM and a 7200 RPM drive and a uber-sweet graphics card that pushes 100 FPS in Doom 3. Our parents are probably running an old Athlon 700 with half the RAM and a Rage128 videocard, and some think that's overkill while the parents think its not enough. Why debate this? DevHardware has an opinion piece on 'leaner computing' and the author thinks that less might be more." This reminds me of a modern desktop system I saw sitting in a store, running Windows XP just so that it could connect via a terminal to another server and run the store's application. It would seem that even an old VT100 would have sufficed, but someone was able to sell the store a full blown PC.
Recently, during a home improvement trip to Lowe's Home Improvement Warehouse, I noted that the terminals their employees use are running some version of Linux with WindowMaker as the X11 interface. They of course mainly use an IBM TN3270 application to access inventory and supply data, but I'll bet that their version of Linux is not a full-blown distro.
In any case, they definitely subscribe to the less is more principle... Have you seen the crappy PCs they have there?
I am a geek and I am looking for a useful life. Hell, I was running my machines with 128MB of RAM until I found some on the side of the road (no joke) and my father gave me some of his slower RAM when he upgraded MBs on my mother's machine.
:)
I have been using a Abit BP6 2x400 Celeron w/128 (and now 384MB) since the boards were released (sometime in 1999?)
I don't want to upgrade. This machine runs XP just fine and it is only feeling slower now that I use a 2.66ghz w/1024MB at work. I wouldn't have noticed the slightest difference if I was only using a P3-700.
I am all for using a machine until it's dead. My machines aren't for games or graphics. They're for work and they do that well
glad to see someone bring thing topic up. For the "normal" computer user, think about it, you play MP3s, use some type of IM, web browse, check email... All things that work fine on anything higher than lets say a 500MHz... As far as I've noticed, the average user's complaints of a slow computer is actually the disk access, and not the actual processor.
It just seems lately they just have been coding software to be so bloated you need a faster computer to run it.
A REAL geek is running a web server on a 386SX. Personally, I don't understand all of this dick waving about fast computers. Any moron with a few hundred bucks can buy a fast computer. Big fucking deal. I'm always impressed by somebody using ancient, ancient hardware, held together with duct tape. Geekiness is all about resourcefulness, not running out to Best Buy every week like a fucking lemming.
Leaner is more. Leaner is cooler. If you can get done what you want to get done by being smart as opposed to throwing soon-to-be-overpriced hardware at the problem, all the better.
I don't respond to AC's.
My desktop is a dual processor PIII 750 that I built a few years ago (upgraded from a dual Celeron 400). For all practical purposes, it's not really all that much different than the dual Celeron box, except that I've added more RAM and a faster drive. All my apps run smoothly, my games (albeit limited) run well, and it's a super Web-browsing machine. I even run a small website from it, simultaneously.
Now, I did have a mini-ITX machine awhile back. P4 2.4ghz, 1 gig of RAM, 7200 RPM HD. I did not notice a single bit of difference between the two machines except my framerate was a bit highter on the P4 (better graphics card installed). So I sold it. I'm still using the dual PIII.
Earlier this year, I picked up a used iBook G4 800mhz. Ancient CPU technology, by most PC standards. And yet, it is also 100% sufficient (enough to say it's not DEFICIENT) for anything that do. A Voodoo or Alienware laptop would be more than enough machine for me, at a higher price tag. Performance I don't need. Performance I suspect others don't need, as well.
I also agree with the author of the article. CPU's are growing faster and faster, and are consuming more and more power. I'd really like to see more "Power consumption" aware options (like a desktop based on the P-M), because frankly I don't like my computer to be a space heater (actually, the 2 21" CRT's in front of me are probably more to blame than anything). It really has gotten to the point that buying a new machine today is not really all that "special" as it was a few years ago. (With the exception of the G5 in the Apple lineup, or maybe the Opterons or Athlon64 machines, but the general public doesn't seem too enamored with the latter 2).
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
"I've had at least 15 PCs over the last 20 years, usually have 4 or so in service at any one time. Not one of them have I had to replace because it "wore out". I've replaced many worn out cars in that same period."
You've replaced the computers because they became useless before they wore out. But computers do wear out. Typically the motherboard fails first because manufacturers use cheap electrolytic capacitors that leak (because they don't expect anyone to be using the hardware after 5 years).
Two Quantum hard drives, a Seagate, a Sony and Apple monitor, Microsuck ergo keyboard and intellimouse all failed. My point was the the Mac itself isn't a problem and if I were less tech savvy I would have thrown out a perfectly good computer long ago, which likely adds to the Joe six pack need to buy a new comp when the previous one conks out after warranty.
Compared to gamers, people who encode video streams or compile code are very few, and as such pretty in significant. I'm aware there are those and that they need better computers, but I see no reason why such computers shouldn't be the niche, instead of the mainstream.
As the article suggest, I would love to see a desktop PC running on a Pentium M (or any other mobile version of a CPU): less heat, less power, reasonable performances.
It would be also very good if desktops' MB and CPU may implement frequency and voltage scaling on the CPU (as is done in notebooks).
Unfortunately most desktop systems do not allow it (but I heard that some newer models will).
I use Linux on my notebook, and I have instructed the daemon "cpufreqd" to scale down on voltage (when the CPU is not very busy) *even* when I am on AC. This way, the CPU operates at an average of 60Celsius (compared to the 70C that I see under WindowsXP): saving the heat is very nice, the fan operates much less, less noise; and you can really keep your laptop on the lap.
Moreover: do you know that CPUs evaporate? Yes, they run so hot that the tiny metal strips forming the VLSI circuitry do evaporate, (or if you prefer, diffuse) : if you keep your desktop on 24/7, in ~2 years, a Pentium or Athlon at 3000Mhz will stop working....
But if I could scale it down when I do not need the CPU full power (and this means, most of the time) the problem would be much diminished.
Summarizing: CPU scaling = less heat, less power, less AC bill, more life of CPU
It came with 9 drives, I added three and haven't done anything else except fill up the hard drives. This old stuff can work fine for a long time depending on what you need it for.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
"She was very upset because the one that had just 'died' was only a few months old. The way she described the 'deadness' reminded me of whatever the Windows virus was that rebooted your PC right after you started up."
This is an excellent point. Of all the clueless users I have ever met who had told me about their plans to buy a new computer, the primary reason that most of them had for wanting to do so was because thier old one was "broken", where broken=infected with virus's, spyware and broken apps. It didn't seem to matter at all to them when I explained that the computer was not broken, but only the software was. To clueless users, there is little definition between hardware and software in their minds. To them it is all just part of a homogonous whole called "the computer"
Thay almost all ended up goiing out and buying a new one (and unless the person was a close friend or relative, I didn't go out of my way to dissuade them. I just gave them some good advice and promptly left them to their own devices)
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"
"I haven't seen a solid state part of a PC die. I always use a UPS, dust the insides once a year, and never overclock."
In fact, I often underclock the firewalls I build. I've found that if you take something like a Pentium MMX 200 and underclock it to something like 1.5x50Mhz (75Mhz) you can drop the vcore and run it without a CPU fan at all. Stick a "silent" fan in your PSU and you can have a perfectly adequete Smoothwall box that is damn near silent. 75Mhz is more than adequete to serve up packets over your typical ADSL line. Even when you are maxing out your bandwidth, CPU usage barely ever makes it over 15% (assuming you are using PCI NICs, old ISA NICs are more CPU dependant, so CPU usage will be higher but even then it won't ever hit 100%)
"You can't fight in here, this is the war room!"