[clue-talk] little survey

[dennisjperkins at comcast.net]

When do we get to see a summary? I've watched the answer for "do you get to 
use linux at work" and I'm quite jealous, because my at-work desktop runs 
Windows XP. 

I'll post the summary when people quit responding. 


Which brings me to my question/observation. If you have to use Windows XP, 
which we'll just say is "painful, for a lot of reasons" to avoid steams 
of blasphemous invective, do you find it slower than your linux experience? 

I use it at work. At times it is frustrating. Sometimes it won't let me rename a document because it says it is open when it is not. Sometimes I can't delete files. Viruses. Word sometimes changes fonts and font properties when I copy and paste. Etc. 



The contrast is becoming almost grotesque for me. I have an elderly, 
700 MHz Pentium 3 machine in my 1st floor office, and a 1.3 GHz AMD 
Athlong server in the basement, both running Slackware 12.0. The 700 MHz 
Pentium 3, with 386 Mb of PC133 memory, just FLYS compared with a far newer, 
far faster Compaq "EVO" on my work desktop. I keep at least 10 tabs open 
in Firefox, and I can swith between tabs almost instantly on Slackware. 
IE7 on XP: creating a new tab takes 10+ seconds, switching tabs seems to take 
longer. Opening an xterm on Slackware takes 2 seconds, opening a "cmd" window 
on XP takes 10 seconds. Changing focus on Slackware is instaneous, when 
IE7 or "Outlook" or "Toad" or "Word" get focus, they take 5 to 10 seconds to 
recognize this fact. 

What in the sam scratch is going on here? Why can an old, under-resourced 
Linux box beat a newer Windows box, and not just by a fraction, but by 
an order of magnitude for most things? The so-called "Process Monitor" 
doesn't show CPU bound or paging bound characteristics, but I have no faith 
in that, as the "Anti" Virus companies have seemingly adopted rootkit 
techniques to keep us from seeing how much CPU/disk/memory they eat. 


At a guess, the developers have the latest and greatest fast machines and they assume that everyone will have the same when the software is released, so why bother with speed and size optimization. On a less charitable note, they are just sloppy. On an even less charitable note, it is deliberate to make users want to upgrade computers. 

You don't even need to upgrade Windows to get the benefits of decreased performance. My daughter's computer had gotten very sluggish. If it was due to a virus, we couldn't identify it. If it was due to something else, we couldn't identify it. I had a fast dual-core box with Linux. I replaced it with Windows (she needs it for school and a couple of programs) and gave it to her. I built myself a new, even faster Linux box. We're both happy now... we each have a shiny new toy. 
_______________________________________________ 
clue-talk mailing list 
clue-talk at cluedenver.org 
http://www.cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-talk 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://cluedenver.org/pipermail/clue-talk/attachments/20090604/fc749646/attachment.html