Re: What's the Big Deal with Firefox?

Andrew DeFaria wrote:
> Ron Hunter wrote:
> 
>> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
>>
>>> Ed Mullen wrote:
>>>
>>>> Andrew DeFaria wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Ed Mullen wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> In a world of 1+ Gig processors, 512 Mb of RAM and standard 120 Gb 
>>>>>> drives, the disk and memory footprint differences are not 
>>>>>> functionally significant.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Nonsense! Or at least it's been my experience that people who think 
>>>>> in such a way are of two varieties: Either they don't use their 
>>>>> computer for much or they are constantly complaining how slow their 
>>>>> computers are and/or rebooting.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Huh?
>>>
>>>
>>> OK, I give up. There's a 3rd category I guess - those who don't 
>>> understand it! ;-)
>>
>>
>> Or perhaps, those who don't sweat the small stuff.  I suspect that is 
>> us old guys who are so conscious of ram and cpu/disk space usage, from 
>> the old kilobyte/megahertz days.
> 
> 
> Nah it's not necessarily not sweating the small stuff. It's seeing and 
> sensing a real problem and fixing it. You don't know how many times a 
> friend of mine will be contemplating getting a new PC because his isn't 
> working quite as quick as it used to, or they will stop using something 
> just because "it's broke" or "my computer's too old to do that anymore" 
> - ridiculous reasons if you ask me. Usually after just a cursory 
> examination of the computer I'll find tons of stuff in the start up 
> folder/registry, drivers, services, etc, etc. - tons of unnecessary and 
> unused stuff strewn upon the unsuspecting and unconcerned user (hey I 
> have tons of space, speedy CPU, large disk drive) bringing an otherwise 
> speedy and useful machine to it's knees!
> 
> It's exactly that attitude (Hey I got a quick machine) that the folks at 
> Intel and MS are banking on. Intel was actually looking for uses for 
> their CPUs to waste processing time 'cause the average CPU is way faster 
> than the needs of the typical user.

Yeah, but some of use that to convince the wife that we really DO need a 
newer faster machine.  You trying to undermine the basic premise of the 
world's marketing system?  Grin.

Periodically, my wife complains her machine is gettintg slow, and I go 
in and get rid of a bunch of deadwood, and defrag, and all is well 
again.  I have convinced her that she really doesn't need to save 15,000 
emails, let alone the 'sent' ones.  But I have to remind her to compact 
the folders after deleting ancient email.  Still, I don't worry too much 
if a program downloads at 10 meg or 15 meg.  With about 420 gigabytes of 
disk space online, and a combined 1.5 gigabytes of ram in the three 
computers, I haven't seen much use of the swapfile in a while.