8.07.2007

Why You Hate Your Computer

You hate your computer because it isn't any faster than it was seven years ago. Think about it: around 2000, the average reasonably-fast PC for home use was something like:

  • PII or PIII Processor, maybe 400 - 800MHz
  • 128MB of RAM
  • 10GB Hard drive
  • Video card or onboard video w/ 8 or 16MB of RAM

Present-day computers, the kind you'd buy from Dell or HP for 800-1000 bucks, are now something like:

  • Intel or AMD Processor, 2.4 - 3Ghz
  • 1 - 2GB of RAM
  • 200GB Hard Drive
  • Video card w/ 256 - 512MB of RAM

By my math (always a terrible risk, granted), that means:

  • 5 - 6x faster processors
  • 10 - 15x more RAM
  • 20x more hard drive space
  • at least 16x more memory on the video card

But is your computer actually 5+ times faster? Chances are good it's slightly faster at everything you actually use it for: e-mail, internet, documents, games. There are prettier visual effects and so on, but booting your computer, logging in, and opening the programs you actually use takes about the same amount of time.

IMHO, this is pretty stupid. There was recently a big hoo-ha in the linux kernel development community in which one of the kernel hackers quit (very publicly) because he believed the core kernel team didn't care about the desktop computing experience. I'm less concerned about the specifics of that exchange than I am about the larger point: faster hardware has not translated into (much of) a faster, more seamless computing experience.*

It'll be interesting to see if this trend ever changes. For various reasons, I'm pretty skeptical. It seems clear that most people are willing to buy in to shinier visual effects over substantive improvement (by all accounts, including my own tests at work, Windows Vista is the single ugliest, stupidest example of this phenomenon EVER.)

It looks like the finances are going to line up such that I get to build a new computer from parts in the next month or so, which will be an interesting proof of concept: can a computer running a really bitchin' stripped-down installation of Debian linux actually perform ridiculously fast, or do basically all operating systems just keep heaping on the bloat as hardware gets fast enough to handle it?

(Side note: Apple laptops are still awesome.)

*Although it has allowed stuff like video editing at home, which wasn't possible before.

5 comments:

clumsygirl said...

I think back to my 1998 computer (an beige-box apple G3, before the imac fancy colors were introduced). I was doing design homework, and man... it was so slow and clumsy. I could only open one application at a time. I couldn't work on any Photoshop project that was larger than 7x6 (w/ 300 dpi & color) without deconstructing the image into pieces, or the whole thing would crash. And... I was on the school's free dial-up. I was always checking the remaining memory and virtual memory of my computer, allocating more power to one or another application, cutting up projects into pieces or layers and generally being frustrated.

Now, I have dsl. I have a wee little laptop. I can not only open Photoshop, Illustrator and NeoOffice simultaneously, but I can also run Safari (or Firefox), Itunes and Fetch all at the same time as well. Nothing crashes. It's miraculous.

I love my computer now. I don't require faster. I require more usability.

kungfuramone said...

Of course, the graphic artist must chime in to remind me that I'm full of it! Bah!

:]

Rachel said...

Music is better now too. The computer I had in 2000 was an AMD equivalent of a 486. I couldn't play any music (it came out sounding like the exorcist, slowed down really, really badly), and when I tried to surf the net, certain ads would cause explorer to lock up.

That said, Norton still completely f's up my system - which is supposed to be fast - to where I can't even play my music, which is about the only non email/internet/word processing thing on my computer I actually care about. And I'm all for faster booting up, but for booting up, nothing beat our old Atari ST. Course, it didn't have a hard drive, but it was fast! And it could play three tones at once, which so beat the socks on the IBMs which could only play one tone at a time before SoundBlaster. Oh yeah.

Becky said...

i know nothing of computers really, but i am pretty sure that my new macbook is a hell of a lot faster than the concrete blocks we learned to play oregon trail on...

Chrissy said...

That is EXACTLY why I hate my computer!