Recommended requirements to surf the web and for videos?

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Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
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I don't know, but shouldn't a Sata connection be a little faster? Or is this one of those "real world" vs advsertised things?
It's a hard drive. It's talking to the controller at 300MBps, but it can't reach that. For single drives, we've always been able to keep the interface well ahead of the drives, until fairly recent SSDs. New HDDs can do >150MBps sequential, and >2MBps random.
 
Aug 11, 2008
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Read the chatter, and visit the link. This was gone over, already. It's a CPU bottleneck. Frankly, without Flashblock and Adblock, my >3GHz Haswell does not have, "plenty of power," for the OP's link, and it's a CPU hog for multiple seconds, even with them.

I do have adblock plus, but not flashblock installed. I even have adblock installed on the tablet. Maybe I should try flashblock on the tablet. My desktop, I dont think needs it. Most of the time pages load really fast, and it is only a SB i5.
 

ironk

Senior member
Jun 18, 2001
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I think its most likely a cpu problem for me then. At least many of the other websites load, except for things like ign.com and the sports websites (nfl.com, etc) which are slow but still work eventually. Hopefully not everyone makes a long flash like website that mercury has, because to me the recommended requirements should be a Quad core cpu with 4-8gb memory and a decent video card to just be able to surf the web and watch videos at a decent speed. I don't know how some people are able to get the sites to work on a Atom processor or similar, which is a mystery to me.
 

Ketchup

Elite Member
Sep 1, 2002
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I have flash set on 'ask to activate' on one of the vm's on my laptop. Helps a good bit for the one core and smaller amount of memory it has allotted.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
17,484
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I do have adblock plus, but not flashblock installed. I even have adblock installed on the tablet. Maybe I should try flashblock on the tablet. My desktop, I dont think needs it. Most of the time pages load really fast, and it is only a SB i5.
On my main rig, Flashblock is less for performance than it is having a guaranteed play button under my control. But, it helps on lesser hardware quite a bit just in performance, much like adblock. In any case, the link the OP gave is not most sites, but also isn't the worst news site I've ever seen. I can handle most sites on my phone, as long as they aren't too ridden with 3rd-party ads, faking a desktop UA (often better than using the mobile versons), and my internet connection is usually the bottleneck for my PCs (~50-100ms per file, even with pipelining, adds up when there are tons of files to get). It's places like the OP's link, Blogspot blogs, and other giant hubs of Javascript, masquerading as individual websites, that can hog CPU time on anything, but become quite sluggish on old/slow PCs.

I don't know how some people are able to get the sites to work on a Atom processor or similar, which is a mystery to me.
Inefficiency. Many people hunt and peck on the keyboard*, and have to 'retarget' every time they move the mouse. When every action takes a minimum of 3 seconds, the difference isn't as much as to those of us that are moving in expectation of certain software and hardware responses.

* to be fair, if you have a so-called "ergonomic" keyboard, and I have to use it, I'll go from 40+ WPM to 3-5.
 

ironk

Senior member
Jun 18, 2001
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Yeah, it is sad the coding being done on some websites...I could probably run many video games on this computer but surfing the web is more difficult for the cpu.

Its about time and frustration also. If a webpage and load 10-20 secs faster and work smoothly, then its worth the money to upgrade imo. The problem is knowing what will work best: APU or Cpu+GPu, how many cores, ram, etc. Its something you don't want to spend too much on, but then it maybe necessary. I think things like flashblock and such can be used, but they do have their own problems as certain webpages require them and will appear "gimped" otherwise.

So, getting back to the original question about recommended requirements: If you were to build something for the web and videos today, what would you use in that machine?
 
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