From: Benjamin Koh (benkoh_at_stanford.edu)
Date: Fri Mar 09 2001 - 15:54:47 EST
Sid,
Having used a 486-100/16MB/1gig (later upgraded to 24MB/3gig)
with
Windows 95 for 4 years, I can say that what you experienced is almost
certainly a result of poor system maintenance and optimization. You can
skirt ignorance of system optimization by throwing more money at it and
buying a faster system every time it feels slow, but most people don't
have money trees in their backyard. For them, learning basic things
about maintaining the system (removing unused programs, defragmenting
the hard drive etc.) will go a long way towards preserving system
performance.
My 486-100 took maybe a minute or two to boot to the desktop,
not 10
minutes. I got plenty of productive work (email, wordprocessing, basic
graphics, spreadsheets, databases) done. I even played and finished
Diablo I on it all 3 times, despite the "Pentium" requirement. Hard
drive thrashing? The only thrashing I ever heard was when the hard drive
(a 1.2gig Quantum Bigfoot) died and I replaced it with a 3.2gig IBM
drive. Was the system slow? Only when I tried to play MP3s - and it
managed those in 22khz mono too.
It is a poor carpenter who blames his tools.
Benjamin
sid soni wrote:
>
> After other members of this thread bragged about the joys and benefits of
> using mid 1990's configurations, I decided to do a reality check, just to be
> fair.
>
> So, next time I visited, I sat down at my technophobe mother's IBM
> aptiva....48MB running w95. I forgot to note the chip speed, but I'm sure
> its right on par with whatever they were using..
>
> They were right, it was great.
>
> After windows started, it took about 10 minutes for the hard drive to stop
> thrashing and finish loading various things into the system tray. This was
> great as this allowed me to finish my cup of coffee, and get up and pour
> another cup.
>
> EVERY SINGLE action, opening a window, clicking somewhere, etc...involved
> CONSTANT thrashing of the harddrive. This allowed me to get thru almost
> the entire day's newspaper, 10 seconds at a time.
<snip>
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