I believe that the main CPU/memory hog is the XUL user interface layer in Firefox and Mozilla.
The K-Meleon browser http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/, is built on the same rendering engine as Firefox and Mozilla, but uses a native Windows user interface. It runs very lean and fast, quite usable on a Pentium 133 with Win98 Lite and 72MB of RAM. Firefox can barely be started on such a machine.
In particular, it causes neighboring FM stations to disappear if they are lower-powered or further away (a common experience when listening in the car). For example, when 107.7 in San Francisco turned on IBOC, it made 107.5 from Santa Cruz (the famous KPIG) disappear from the south bay.
In my experience, it also degrades the analog FM signal (of the IBOC broadcaster) with additional multipath.
It's sad that the FCC will go after 2 watt pirate broadcasters, but not care about interference on a much larger scale. And, as mentioned elsewhere, the codec is proprietary, and widely considered to sound like crap.
I once built a very similar antenna from plans described in Popular Electronics (1970s). Its components are a correct length of wire wound around a large frame and a tuning capacitor from an AM radio. It worked like a charm, and due to its directionality it was good for nulling out interference sources. My biggest catch was WSB Atlanta from the San Francisco area.
The Gateway I remember in 1991: PCs with very crappy keyboards The Gateway I remember in 1999: PCs with very noisy fans
My overall impression: shaving off every last penny for the bottom line by using the cheapest parts
The Dell I remember in 1991: excellent keyboards The Dell I remember in 1999: quiet PCs, long before they became popularized (I might add, they remain quiet after years of use)
My overall impression: cutting costs in mass production / efficient designs, use good quality for the parts that matter
While these machines may not have super secret military plans, they may contain such vitals as your social security number, mothers maiden name, address and phone number.
That's just the kind of information you want lying around unencrypted on a rootkitted machine, what with the current prevalence of "identity theft".
(not to minimize all of the corporate PCs, with the same types of information, that similarly get compromised)
There is also a premise of merchantability. My understanding (from reading the Nolo Press book on Small Claims Court) is that the merchant is responsible to sell merchantable wares.
ie. Requiring you to go to the manufacturer for something that fails after a month or two is probably legit. Refusing to accept a return (or charging a restocking fee) on something that fails right away is not legit, and can be argued in Small Claims Court in the USA.
With regards to the mailbox not shrinking when you delete the spams, Mozilla requires you to "Compact this folder".
The reason for this is performance: if Mozilla had to rewrite a multi-hundred MB file every time a message were deleted, it would be extremely slow (likely, as long as it takes to run "Compact this folder"). Instead Mozilla uses indexes to keep track of the messages.
Regarding 700MB per CD, you can upgrade to DVD and get more than 4GB. DVD writers can be had for under $100 these days, and media is cheap. A 16x DVD writer can write a full disc in under 10 minutes.
For backups larger than 4GB, your best bet is probably a hard drive, preferably on another machine in another geographic location. If you want to get fancy, there is a very cool incremental backup solution for UNIX/Linux that can be set up using "rsync":
I was recently surprised to learn first-hand that K-Meleon, a free browser based on the Gecko renderer used in Mozilla and Firefox, is an excellent browser for older PCs running Windows.
Apparently the XUL user interface in both Mozilla and Firefox is the main resource hog, and K-Meleon substitutes it with a native Windows UI. (Linux has a similar Gecko-based browser called "Galeon", and MacOS has "Camino")
With the "Flashblock" extension enabled, K-Meleon surfs quite pleasantly on an old 133MHz Dell laptop with 72MB of RAM. I dare say it's similar in speed to Opera, but works on a lot more sites.
(On the same machine, Firefox is slower than a snail.)
From the Microsoft California Standard Claim Form instructions:
Qualifying hardware includes new desktop, laptop or tablet computers and the following peripheral hardware products: printer, scanner, monitor, keyboard or pointing device (e.g. mouse or trackball). [... more restrictions regarding claims >= $950 ]
Qualifying software includes any non-custom software used on qualifying computer hardware.
I believe this means that I cannot buy any computer peripherals, ie. memory, hard drive, printer ink, USB keychains, cables. The next time I buy qualifying hardware might be several years from now.
Marketing is not Sun's only problem. Sun also has some serious "fit and finish" issues.
For many years they shipped systems where the backspace key did not work properly on their login screen since they switched to a PC style keyboard without bothering to change the tty driver.
They also do not bother to ship their systems with any useful tools such as the GNU utilities, such as even a basic C compiler.
Sun does have smart engineers. They contributed to the UNIX world with network protocols like NFS, and they continue to maintain a well optimized kernel. However, Microsoft has taught us that a polished user interface on an unstable kernel wins over more users than a notoriously crufty, inconsistent user interface on a good kernel.
What's everyone's general opinion of the Windoze key?
I find them occasionally handy, but I overall do not like them since I hit them by mistake all the time. The old Ctrl-Esc shortcuts are good enough for me.
I really dislike the cluttering of keyboards in recent years. On my old work machine I had a keyboard where they put the "Sleep" key right below to the Delete key. You guessed it, I'd put my computer in Sleep mode all the time. What was worse was that Sleep mode could not be disabled on that machine.
I strongly agree with what you say about clicky keyboards.
I have some permanent muscle damage from using bad keyboards in the past (tvi912c anyone?), and currently the only keyboards that I can use for more than about five minutes without pain are the clicky ones.
What's really sad is that ten years ago clicky keyboards were easy to find. Today they're nearly impossible to find since no one wants to spend $5 extra to manufacture a keyboard any more. I'm convinced that if they were sold again at Fry's, they could easily command a $20 premium once people have experienced them.
Instead we are left with abominable mushy membrane keyboards that hurt my hands within minutes.
The ideal combination for me would be clicky keyboard, split layout, and no windows keys (order of importance from highest to lowest).
Footnote: If you find yourself using a bad keyboard at work or school, do something about it before you damage your wrists, even if you have to buy a replacement with your own money. I didn't do this - the wrist pains suddenly started one day and then it was too late.
Haha. I spent an entire Sunday, about 15-16 hours, several weeks ago to transfer 120 diskette sides from my old Commodore 1541 disk drive to my PC (using COM1541 provided with the C64S emulator).
My entire collection of 15-20 year old diskettes worked out to be around 19MB.
About five of the disks didn't read properly, but they were written at a time when my floppy drive was misaligned.
The funniest part is that I can now "grep" the entire collection in a few seconds to find out which diskette has which program.
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I believe that the main CPU/memory hog is the XUL user interface layer in Firefox and Mozilla.
The K-Meleon browser http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/, is built on the same rendering engine as Firefox and Mozilla, but uses a native Windows user interface. It runs very lean and fast, quite usable on a Pentium 133 with Win98 Lite and 72MB of RAM. Firefox can barely be started on such a machine.
In my experience, it also degrades the analog FM signal (of the IBOC broadcaster) with additional multipath.
It's sad that the FCC will go after 2 watt pirate broadcasters, but not care about interference on a much larger scale. And, as mentioned elsewhere, the codec is proprietary, and widely considered to sound like crap.
I think you're thinking of the Select-A-Tenna:
http://www.selectatenna.com/
I once built a very similar antenna from plans described in Popular Electronics (1970s). Its components are a correct length of wire wound around a large frame and a tuning capacitor from an AM radio. It worked like a charm, and due to its directionality it was good for nulling out interference sources. My biggest catch was WSB Atlanta from the San Francisco area.
The Gateway I remember in 1991: PCs with very crappy keyboards
The Gateway I remember in 1999: PCs with very noisy fans
My overall impression: shaving off every last penny for the bottom line by using the cheapest parts
The Dell I remember in 1991: excellent keyboards
The Dell I remember in 1999: quiet PCs, long before they became popularized
(I might add, they remain quiet after years of use)
My overall impression: cutting costs in mass production / efficient designs, use good quality for the parts that matter
Hence, Gateway:Chevy Dell:Toyota
1. Buy CD with Sony rootkit on it for $16.99
2. accidentally infect your PC with it
3. ?!??!?!?
4. Take Sony to Small Claims Court
5. Profit!
That's just the kind of information you want lying around unencrypted on a rootkitted machine, what with the current prevalence of "identity theft".
(not to minimize all of the corporate PCs, with the same types of information, that similarly get compromised)
ie. Requiring you to go to the manufacturer for something that fails after a month or two is probably legit. Refusing to accept a return (or charging a restocking fee) on something that fails right away is not legit, and can be argued in Small Claims Court in the USA.
The reason for this is performance: if Mozilla had to rewrite a multi-hundred MB file every time a message were deleted, it would be extremely slow (likely, as long as it takes to run "Compact this folder"). Instead Mozilla uses indexes to keep track of the messages.
Regarding 700MB per CD, you can upgrade to DVD and get more than 4GB. DVD writers can be had for under $100 these days, and media is cheap. A 16x DVD writer can write a full disc in under 10 minutes.
For backups larger than 4GB, your best bet is probably a hard drive, preferably on another machine in another geographic location. If you want to get fancy, there is a very cool incremental backup solution for UNIX/Linux that can be set up using "rsync":
http://www.mikerubel.org/computers/rsync_snapshots
http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net/
Apparently the XUL user interface in both Mozilla and Firefox is the main resource hog, and K-Meleon substitutes it with a native Windows UI. (Linux has a similar Gecko-based browser called "Galeon", and MacOS has "Camino")
With the "Flashblock" extension enabled, K-Meleon surfs quite pleasantly on an old 133MHz Dell laptop with 72MB of RAM. I dare say it's similar in speed to Opera, but works on a lot more sites.
(On the same machine, Firefox is slower than a snail.)
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns999 94567
"It's not a car. It's a Volkswagen."
Marketing is not Sun's only problem. Sun also has some serious "fit and finish" issues.
For many years they shipped systems where the backspace key did not work properly on their login screen since they switched to a PC style keyboard without bothering to change the tty driver.
They also do not bother to ship their systems with any useful tools such as the GNU utilities, such as even a basic C compiler.
Sun does have smart engineers. They contributed to the UNIX world with network protocols like NFS, and they continue to maintain a well optimized kernel. However, Microsoft has taught us that a polished user interface on an unstable kernel wins over more users than a notoriously crufty, inconsistent user interface on a good kernel.
What's everyone's general opinion of the Windoze key?
I find them occasionally handy, but I overall do not like them since I hit them by mistake all the time. The old Ctrl-Esc shortcuts are good enough for me.
I really dislike the cluttering of keyboards in recent years. On my old work machine I had a keyboard where they put the "Sleep" key right below to the Delete key. You guessed it, I'd put my computer in Sleep mode all the time. What was worse was that Sleep mode could not be disabled on that machine.
I strongly agree with what you say about clicky keyboards.
I have some permanent muscle damage from using bad keyboards in the past (tvi912c anyone?), and currently the only keyboards that I can use for more than about five minutes without pain are the clicky ones.
What's really sad is that ten years ago clicky keyboards were easy to find. Today they're nearly impossible to find since no one wants to spend $5 extra to manufacture a keyboard any more. I'm convinced that if they were sold again at Fry's, they could easily command a $20 premium once people have experienced them.
Instead we are left with abominable mushy membrane keyboards that hurt my hands within minutes.
The ideal combination for me would be clicky keyboard, split layout, and no windows keys (order of importance from highest to lowest).
Footnote: If you find yourself using a bad keyboard at work or school, do something about it before you damage your wrists, even if you have to buy a replacement with your own money. I didn't do this - the wrist pains suddenly started one day and then it was too late.
Haha. I spent an entire Sunday, about 15-16 hours, several weeks ago to transfer 120 diskette sides from my old Commodore 1541 disk drive to my PC (using COM1541 provided with the C64S emulator).
My entire collection of 15-20 year old diskettes worked out to be around 19MB.
About five of the disks didn't read properly, but they were written at a time when my floppy drive was misaligned.
The funniest part is that I can now "grep" the entire collection in a few seconds to find out which diskette has which program.