My Computer's Faster Than Your Computer

[Idontcare]

I guess we just have different usage habits. I usually do a depth first search while it sounds like you do a breadth first search.

See, I'll read the page until I find a concept that I don't understand, click on that link, read up, and then hit the back button. My surfing habits dictate the heavy usage of back-buttoning, but have a lower memory usage. I helps that I personally have a pretty decent memory so I remember most stuff that I read pretty much anywhere at any time.

It's just a matter of how each of us handles the branching aspects of the connectivity of information.

I like to leave no rock unturned (or as few as possible), and I study the undersides of the rocks in series but I discover the rocks themselves in parallel. So my choices are (a) turn over the rock but set it aside to come back to later for further study, or (b) ignore the rock and carry on with carrying on.

Branched learning is natural to the human condition, that's why our education system is setup such that our school courses cover many different topics in parallel. We don't do math 9-3 M-F for 4 yrs, then switch to grammar for another 4, then history, etc.

There's no right or wrong way, I just use tabbed browsers to maximize/optimize the manner in which I seem to absorb information in branchy subjects.

 

[faxon]

Btw, for those quoting the performance X speed up of SSDs vs mechanical drives, a typical sandforce drive is as much as 240x faster in random reads, and similarly in writes, with most HDDs averaging .5MB/s random write vs sandforce' aprox 120MB/s+. This is insane, but even with an indilinx drive hitting 20MB/s the speedup is still enormous and immediately obvious.

Ed: also of note, don't forget it takes a 7200rpm HDD about 12-13ms to even start reading or writing data. With some basic multiplication you can extrapolate how much data the SSD can transfer before the HDD even starts, and that's an enormous difference since most drive access is many times smaller than the data transferred by the SSD while waiting on the HDD in my seek comparison

 

[taltamir]

I have the same "hundreds of tabs" habit as the author... I have seen 5GB of RAM used by browsers alone (~300 tabs each on firefox and chrome, at the same time)...
I cut back on my tabs though since I moved to my i7, since DDR3 is so expensive and I only have 4GB of it.

which seems to be the issue he is not addressing. He thinks its all the money he spent on a faster CPU and SSD, but he doesn't even mention his ram amount. He probably went from 2GB to 4GB of ram, a huge improvement for the multi-tabber. If he uses so many tabs he should have gove with 8GB.

 

[Idontcare]

I have the same "hundreds of tabs" habit as the author... I have seen 5GB of RAM used by browsers alone (~300 tabs each on firefox and chrome, at the same time)...
I cut back on my tabs though since I moved to my i7, since DDR3 is so expensive and I only have 4GB of it.

which seems to be the issue he is not addressing. He thinks its all the money he spent on a faster CPU and SSD, but he doesn't even mention his ram amount. He probably went from 2GB to 4GB of ram, a huge improvement for the multi-tabber. If he uses so many tabs he should have gove with 8GB.

He's saving that for his next article

 

[RussianSensation]

But even with 50 or so tabs, my C2D 2.0ghz laptop becomes a crawl despite having 4GBs of Ram (nowhere near being maxed out). I realize that RAM is important, but I pleasantly surprised that an SSD would make the most difference. Looks like I need an upgrade!

 

[ShawnD1]

Seems like most problems related to computers are caused by people who suck at using computers. The guy in the article says his lag is caused by having dozens of tabs open. Well why do you have dozens of tabs open? The whole point of having bookmarks is so you don't need to keep dozens of tabs open. My dad is a good example of how a computer works - the left side of his screen has a list of dozens of bookmarks. He only keeps maybe 2 tabs open, but the bookmark list is always open. To go to one of those other locations, click the bookmark. This is not hard. Of course you're going to need a $300 processor just to use a web browser if you have 30 tabs open and all of them are trying to run flash animations at the same time.

SSDs still have quite a way to go before I drop the cash for one. The idea of the drive degrading over time is the major turnoff for me. When I read about people essentially bricking their drives after 30 days of moderate to heavy it really discourages me.

!?!?!
I'm using a 30gb "value" drive as a swap file. It's been about 2 months of constant swapping in a computer that acts as a server and runs 24/7 and the thing still works fine. I don't know what those other guys are doing to brick the drive. The expected life on them exceeds 10 years of constant usage.

Ed: also of note, don't forget it takes a 7200rpm HDD about 12-13ms to even start reading or writing data. With some basic multiplication you can extrapolate how much data the SSD can transfer before the HDD even starts, and that's an enormous difference since most drive access is many times smaller than the data transferred by the SSD while waiting on the HDD in my seek comparison

It's always difficult explaining this to people, but this here is exactly why separate drives for separate things always beats RAID0 in desktop performance. If you had 4 regular spinny drives in RAID0 and Windows is trying to write to virtual memory, it will lag all 4 hard drives. If you keep them separate, virtual memory only lags 1 of the hard drives and the other 3 are still operating at full speed. If you can't afford an SSD, the biggest performance increase you can get is a cheap second hard drive. Even an old drive from 5 years ago will make a huge difference because it removes the burden of virtual memory; program files shouldn't be in a constant battle against virtual memory.

 

[ehume]

That guy thinks he got all of his speed boost from his SSD. But the experience would not have been life changing had he not moved up from two cores to four cores. The combination of going to something that can handle all of his work in parallel combined with the qualitatively improved access times of an ssd is what gave him his transforming experience.

Those of you who've experienced the boost of going to a quad, then to an ssd in separate steps - think back. Both significant improvements that really made a difference. The combination had to be mind blowing.

 

[ShawnD1]

Those of you who've experienced the boost of going to a quad, then to an ssd in separate steps - think back. Both significant improvements that really made a difference. The combination had to be mind blowing.

Depends what you're doing and how you're doing it. For example, article guy said something about skype cutting out and getting choppy. That can be fixed without buying a new processor OR changing retarded behaviors with a million tabs open.

One thing I often do is have 1 process going that is more important than all of the other stuff I have going, such as AutoCAD at work (for article guy it would be Skype). What I'll do in task manager is set that process to use all but 1 of the physical cores. On a dual core it would use 1 core, on a quad it would use 3, etc. After setting processor affinity, set the priority to realtime. Now that 1 task will never be lagged by any other task. The reason for disabling one of the processors is so the computer doesn't accidentally lock up, which tends to happen if a process is able to use all of your CPU and it has full priority to do so.

Another thing to stop lag is to set non-realtime tasks to lowest priority. This would be things like creating zip files, video encoding, or trying to print a 100mb PDF file. The low priority task might slow down by something small like 5% or 10%, but it radically changes the performance of the system. Doing the opposite and setting a hungry task to high priority will do the opposite, and the system will freeze.

 

[iCyborg]

Seems like most problems related to computers are caused by people who suck at using computers. The guy in the article says his lag is caused by having dozens of tabs open. Well why do you have dozens of tabs open? The whole point of having bookmarks is so you don't need to keep dozens of tabs open.

I think Idontcare explained how this happens. I'm the same and I typically have 30-60 tabs open at any given point. Most of them I want to read only once or I need them only temporarily. An alternative to that would be to open a tab, bookmark it, close the tab, then later when I come back to it: open that bookmark in a new tab, read it, delete tab, delete bookmark. It's not worth the hassle, I only bookmark things that I plan to visit more than once.

 

[AznAnarchy99]

I hear all these amazing things about SSDs but I dont know about everyone else, but I find it extremely hard to shell out $400 bucks for a little over 100gb. Thats about a third of a system and would be more than my motherboard, ram, and cpu, combined.

 

[ShawnD1]

I hear all these amazing things about SSDs but I dont know about everyone else, but I find it extremely hard to shell out $400 bucks for a little over 100gb. Thats about a third of a system and would be more than my motherboard, ram, and cpu, combined.

64gb SSD = $105
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820249003

Just now I went to my C drive, did a select all, right click, properties. Total size of every file on my C drive is 36.2GB; size on disk is 36.5GB. I'm using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and all of my software with the exception of games is installed on the C drive. 64GB SSD is all you need.

That said, none of my computers are using SSD as the primary drive. I don't like how cramped they get since the Windows folder by itself is 20GB and my SSD is only 30GB.

One thing you can do is use NTFS compression on your SSD. I did that before and it works really well. It seems to save about 10-20% disk space, and the drive still has excellent multitasking, which is the whole point of SSD. Obviously compression does make it slower than if it were not compressed, but compressed SSD is still faster than non-compressed spinny drive.

 

[crucibelle]

Seems like most problems related to computers are caused by people who suck at using computers. The guy in the article says his lag is caused by having dozens of tabs open. Well why do you have dozens of tabs open? The whole point of having bookmarks is so you don't need to keep dozens of tabs open.

Excuse me? Just because YOU don't browse in that manner does not mean people who do "suck at using computers". I like to keep many tabs open, and I know how to use a computer just fine, thank you very much.

 

[Arkaign]

I can't figure out why someone would need dozens upon dozens of tabs open simultanously :/

If you have appropriately fast internet most will open almost instantly anyway, and if you no longer need the tab open (have gathered info / nothing new to see), you close it, right? It seems like just scrolling/swapping through dozens (hundreds?) of tabs would be more tedious than actually clicking through your bookmarks to snap the page you desire open.

 

[ShawnD1]

I can't figure out why someone would need dozens upon dozens of tabs open simultanously :/

If you have appropriately fast internet most will open almost instantly anyway, and if you no longer need the tab open (have gathered info / nothing new to see), you close it, right? It seems like just scrolling/swapping through dozens (hundreds?) of tabs would be more tedious than actually clicking through your bookmarks to snap the page you desire open.

Totally this. Scrolling through dozens of tabs is incredibly tedious. As more tabs are added, it shrinks the size of each tab. Normally a tab says something like "off topic - anandt" which is enough to know what that is. It's anandtech off topic.With a dozen tabs, it will just say "o...." which could damn near anything. Offensive hockey strategies? Offer of the day for free ipods? What is o...?
The bookmarks navigation is much better. The bookmarks are set up as cascading folders and it shows the entire label of the page. I don't need to guess what a page is.

Here is how Google Chrome handles tabs

As you can see, it's completely unreadable. How does that make your browsing experience easier? If you can't remember exactly what the tabs are, you need to click on each one to find the one you are looking for. Just use the damn book marks. This is what I mean when I say people want their computer to run like dog shit. These people probably also put 500 pounds of bricks in their car just so they can bitch about how slow it accelerates and how terrible the mileage is.

 

[taltamir]

Excuse me? Just because YOU don't browse in that manner does not mean people who do "suck at using computers". I like to keep many tabs open, and I know how to use a computer just fine, thank you very much.

exactly! I also take offense at him calling it retarded. And I am quite competent when it comes to computers.

Usually when I get a million open tabs its when browsing wikis.
wikipedia or TVTropes.org are the most common ones.

what happens is that I open a tab, and then I open a bunch of links in background tabs, but I want to finish that page first. then i finish it I close it and go to the next page, as I read it I open a bunch of links in new pages... and so on and so on.
You can easily get to hundreds of tabs that way, and bookmarking them is completely impractical.

 

[cbn]

Try digesting the contents of this link for example without being tempted to click any of its embedded links mid-thought to help "fill out" your comprehension of the primary material.

Those are situations where having at least dual monitors is nice.

However, I find the biggest hit my computer takes is opening Firefox bookmarks that have greater than 60 tabs. (It bogs all at once, but after waiting for the computer to catch up it is much less tedious that opening each link individually...and I am able to scan through all 60+ links much faster this way.)

 

[AznAnarchy99]

64gb SSD = $105
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820249003

Just now I went to my C drive, did a select all, right click, properties. Total size of every file on my C drive is 36.2GB; size on disk is 36.5GB. I'm using Windows 7 Pro 64-bit and all of my software with the exception of games is installed on the C drive. 64GB SSD is all you need.

That said, none of my computers are using SSD as the primary drive. I don't like how cramped they get since the Windows folder by itself is 20GB and my SSD is only 30GB.

One thing you can do is use NTFS compression on your SSD. I did that before and it works really well. It seems to save about 10-20% disk space, and the drive still has excellent multitasking, which is the whole point of SSD. Obviously compression does make it slower than if it were not compressed, but compressed SSD is still faster than non-compressed spinny drive.

Im looking at the Intel/Corsair/OCZ range which if I got an SSD thats what I'd rather get.

Steam 75gb + WoW 25gb + SC2 8.5gb which is about 110gb right there. That doesnt include some of the random games I have which I didnt buy through Steam. Add on Windows install which mean I would at least need 160gb. My C drive is currently at 400gb/640gb.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

I guess we just have different usage habits. I usually do a depth first search while it sounds like you do a breadth first search.

See, I'll read the page until I find a concept that I don't understand, click on that link, read up, and then hit the back button. My surfing habits dictate the heavy usage of back-buttoning, but have a lower memory usage. I helps that I personally have a pretty decent memory so I remember most stuff that I read pretty much anywhere at any time.

I haven't got one either... but I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't want to go back to a mechanical HDD afterwards...

Compare -

Images courtesy of Storagereview, full articles -
http://www.storagereview.com/crucial_realssd_c300_review_256gb
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_barracuda_lp_2tb_review

 

[tommo123]

Seems like most problems related to computers are caused by people who suck at using computers. The guy in the article says his lag is caused by having dozens of tabs open. Well why do you have dozens of tabs open? The whole point of having bookmarks is so you don't need to keep dozens of tabs open. My dad is a good example of how a computer works - the left side of his screen has a list of dozens of bookmarks. He only keeps maybe 2 tabs open, but the bookmark list is always open. To go to one of those other locations, click the bookmark. This is not hard. Of course you're going to need a $300 processor just to use a web browser if you have 30 tabs open and all of them are trying to run flash animations at the same time.

why would i need dozens of tabs open? cos i want to and choose to. that's reason enough. my PC can handle it just fine (opera btw, not chrome. opera handles it far better IMO). i dont want to have to go from bookmark, to bookmark, to bookmark about 70-80 times over - that would be insanely tedious. i know where the tabs are as the layout has been the same (plus or minus the odd couple) for about 3 years now.

also, what the hell sites do you go to where they're all filled with flash? youtube is the only one i go to that has loads.

as to needing a $300 processor to do this, are you kidding? my netbook has about 40 tabs open in opera on it (1.6ghz atom, 2 gigs ram) and it handles it fine also.

if you want to have only 2 tabs or so open at any one time, fair enough. you might have a win95 PC with 8MB ram on it, the rest of us have moved on.

 

[Idontcare]

I can't figure out why someone would need dozens upon dozens of tabs open simultanously :/

If you have appropriately fast internet most will open almost instantly anyway, and if you no longer need the tab open (have gathered info / nothing new to see), you close it, right? It seems like just scrolling/swapping through dozens (hundreds?) of tabs would be more tedious than actually clicking through your bookmarks to snap the page you desire open.

It's an iterative process.

Start with tab one, while reading the contents of tab "1" you open the hypderlinks within that tab as new tabs in the background...you don't know what the contents of those tabs entail at this time because you don't want to lose your train of thought while contemplating the contents of tab "1".

When you are finished with tab "1" you make the decision whether to retire the tab (ctrl-w) or bookmark it for later usage.

Then you ctrl-tab to the next successive tab, repeating the process from above.

Spawning new tabs as you go, electing to retire or save the bookmarks only after having read the contents of a given tab.

Totally this. Scrolling through dozens of tabs is incredibly tedious. As more tabs are added, it shrinks the size of each tab. Normally a tab says something like "off topic - anandt" which is enough to know what that is. It's anandtech off topic.With a dozen tabs, it will just say "o...." which could damn near anything. Offensive hockey strategies? Offer of the day for free ipods? What is o...?
The bookmarks navigation is much better. The bookmarks are set up as cascading folders and it shows the entire label of the page. I don't need to guess what a page is.

Here is how Google Chrome handles tabs

As you can see, it's completely unreadable. How does that make your browsing experience easier? If you can't remember exactly what the tabs are, you need to click on each one to find the one you are looking for. Just use the damn book marks. This is what I mean when I say people want their computer to run like dog shit. These people probably also put 500 pounds of bricks in their car just so they can bitch about how slow it accelerates and how terrible the mileage is.

Look, we get it, you are completely ignorant of how and why some of us (including the OP) are using tabbed browsers to enhance our compute experience.

What we don't get is why you are also so steadfastly arrogant about it too. Arrogance combined with ignorace is never a pretty sight, and your post is proof of this.

And what's with the strawman argument now? Not only are we a bunch of dumb idiots who couldn't possibly know what we are doing because we can't read the tab labels but we also load our cars with 500lbs of bricks and bitch about it too?

 

[ShawnD1]

also, what the hell sites do you go to where they're all filled with flash? youtube is the only one i go to that has loads.

The banner at the top of Anandtech is flash. The upload thingy for imageshack is flash. Horribly designed websites like the one for Acura cars use flash for almost everything. When running the flashblock plugin for Chrome or Firefox, lots of websites mysteriously don't work because small parts of the site rely on flash.

as to needing a $300 processor to do this, are you kidding? my netbook has about 40 tabs open in opera on it (1.6ghz atom, 2 gigs ram) and it handles it fine also.

The guy in the article said he bought an i7 930 just to handle web browsing. taltamir said something similar in a thread where he talked about how much faster his 100 tabs load... because loading a web browser is actually a problem on his system. For most people, things like Firefox or IE pop up immediately with no lag time.

if you want to have only 2 tabs or so open at any one time, fair enough. you might have a win95 PC with 8MB ram on it, the rest of us have moved on.

It's a 3.8GHz Phenom X6 with 8GB memory.

And what's with the strawman argument now? Not only are we a bunch of dumb idiots who couldn't possibly know what we are doing because we can't read the tab labels but we also load our cars with 500lbs of bricks and bitch about it too?

The guy in the article is doing things that you know for a fact cause the computer to run extremely slow. His conclusion in the article? It's not how he's using the computer that is totally broken, it's the fact that he should have spend over $1000 just to browse the internet! Something most people are capable of doing with a $250 Walmart computer. It really is similar to someone who would load down a car with a bunch of weight, complain about the performance being terrible, then writing an article on the internet about how the solution to his self-inflicted problem was to buy a car with 400HP. Obviously it's not his behavior that is causing all these problems and terrible performance.

Also, can you explain the picture I posted? That really is what Firefox, Chrome, and Opera look like when there are dozens of tabs open. How can you use the browser when it looks like that?

 

[Idontcare]

The guy in the article is doing things that you know for a fact cause the computer to run extremely slow. His conclusion in the article? It's not how he's using the computer that is totally broken, it's the fact that he should have spend over $1000 just to browse the internet! Something most people are capable of doing with a $250 Walmart computer. It really is similar to someone who would load down a car with a bunch of weight, complain about the performance being terrible, then writing an article on the internet about how the solution to his self-inflicted problem was to buy a car with 400HP. Obviously it's not his behavior that is causing all these problems and terrible performance.

I'm not making any attempt to defend or justify his erroneous "cause-and-effect" logic...I agree with the majority of posters here that the bottleneck in his system was likely ram, followed by cpu, and lastly followed by SSD.

Upgrading all of them in fell swoop was not a bad idea either since all of them do contribute to improving the performance of web-browsing, albeit at perhaps dismal price/performance rates.

Also, can you explain the picture I posted? That really is what Firefox, Chrome, and Opera look like when there are dozens of tabs open. How can you use the browser when it looks like that?

It's an iterative process.

Start with tab one, while reading the contents of tab "1" you open the hyperlinks within that tab as new tabs in the background...you don't know what the contents of those tabs entail at this time because you don't want to lose your train of thought while contemplating the contents of tab "1".

When you are finished with tab "1" you make the decision whether to retire the tab (ctrl-w) or bookmark it for later usage.

Then you ctrl-tab to the next successive tab, repeating the process from above.

Spawning new tabs as you go, electing to retire or save the bookmarks only after having read the contents of a given tab.

Contrary to the perception, I am not "sifting through" 50 tabs looking for something. I cycle through the tabs one at a time, retiring the tab or bookmarking (and then retiring) as I go on.

I read my email the same way. I let outlook download all my emails from the yahoo server. My inbox might have 40 emails in the morning. I don't read them all at once. I read one, decide whether to delete or file in a non-inbox folder and the cycle to the next unread email.

I'm not asking or expecting anyone else to have the same habits as I do, I'm just perplexed why you or anyone else would feel the need to castigate and denigrate me and my websurfing habits (and others like me).

Its got to be one of the silliest things to take issue over.

Its just weird to me to see intolerance over something you obviously don't do yourself so why would you expect yourself to understand the value others derive from doing it?

 

[Cogman]

I'm not making any attempt to defend or justify his erroneous "cause-and-effect" logic...I agree with the majority of posters here that the bottleneck in his system was likely ram, followed by cpu, and lastly followed by SSD.

Upgrading all of them in fell swoop was not a bad idea either since all of them do contribute to improving the performance of web-browsing, albeit at perhaps dismal price/performance rates.

Contrary to the perception, I am not "sifting through" 50 tabs looking for something. I cycle through the tabs one at a time, retiring the tab or bookmarking (and then retiring) as I go on.

I read my email the same way. I let outlook download all my emails from the yahoo server. My inbox might have 40 emails in the morning. I don't read them all at once. I read one, decide whether to delete or file in a non-inbox folder and the cycle to the next unread email.

I'm not asking or expecting anyone else to have the same habits as I do, I'm just perplexed why you or anyone else would feel the need to castigate and denigrate me and my websurfing habits (and others like me).

Its got to be one of the silliest things to take issue over.

Its just weird to me to see intolerance over something you obviously don't do yourself so why would you expect yourself to understand the value others derive from doing it?

Because you aren't using the one TRUE way of internet surfing. All hail the back button, lord of the internet! Master of smaller memory footprints!

 

[bigboxes]

This guy is the equivalent to a hoarder. If you have 200 tabs open you have OCD. There's no way this guy has any idea of what he has open and any idea on how to find it no matter how large his monitor is. I'm sure he's exaggerating, but still.

 

[ShawnD1]

I'm not asking or expecting anyone else to have the same habits as I do, I'm just perplexed why you or anyone else would feel the need to castigate and denigrate me and my websurfing habits (and others like me).

I'm not bothered by you, but it bothers me when people using the browser that way start suggesting other people spend huge amounts of cash to fix self inflicted problems instead of suggesting people change their behavior. In the specific example of the article posted, the guy is arguing that his computer was always slow because of how he was using it, which is true. The easiest and most expensive solution would be to buy a $300 i7 processor instead of a $100 processor, buy a $200 or more SLC SSD instead of a standard $60 high speed conventional drive (a WD Caviar Black is $60 on newegg), suggesting people buy twice as much memory because Chrome and Firefox tend to use a lot of memory when 50 tabs are open, and the list goes on.

My beef with articles like this is that a lot of people don't know anything about computers and will think this article isn't totally stupid. My mom once asked me if she should get a "solid drive" because she heard it will make the computer boot faster. I said no, and I showed her how to configure the computer so it only goes to sleep. Without spending 1 penny, the computer now instantly "boots" because the computer sleeps instead of turns off. Hitting the power button makes it sleep. Leaving the computer idle for 15 minutes makes it sleep. Touching any key on the keyboard makes the computer wake up instantly with everything still loaded. She has the instant boot she wanted, and it was free. Instead of telling uninformed people that they should spend $1000 just to run Firefox, the article should tell people how to get more speed out of the equipment they already have.

Because you aren't using the one TRUE way of internet surfing. All hail the back button, lord of the internet! Master of smaller memory footprints!

Only works with Opera. Firefox and Chrome have unbelievably slow back buttons, and IE's back button straight up doesn't work properly. If you try to make a post on this forum in IE and there's some kind of connection error, hitting the back button will also show a connection error. The back button isn't loading the page from memory; it just remembers the URL you were at before. It doesn't even remember the scrolling position.