(no subject)

[pantryslut]

I am not happy with the lag on this computer lately. It's making my typing look seriously random. Alas, Greta, the big box next door*, is actually worse.

Remember kids, software bloat is your enemy.


* Greta is the Black Books computer that sits right next to my iMac on the desk here. Desktop space? What desktop space?

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Blargh. What software, and what sort of computer?

(Also, the "lately" seems to suggest to me that something's recently changed, and leads me to wondering how to unchange it.)

This is one of my significant computer pet peeves; I use a rather old and slow computer by choice, and it makes it quite clear when a piece of software is badly written or not. Mozilla before version 1.3 or so was one of the worst -- it was almost impossible to write anything in its textboxes -- and it's still not great even in the recent versions.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Web browsers are definitely one of the culprits; I alternate between Mozilla and Internet Explorer (the latter of which I have to use for work), and I am happy with neither.

Mozilla and MS Word conflict horribly here on the iMac. (It's probably time to join the 21st century and upgrade to a real computer anyway, or at least a real OS. I've been stalling because of that thing about doing major changes to a work machine -- "I'll wait until deadlines are over" is not really helpful when deadline season is every two weeks.)

Mozilla is also clearly the problem on Greta's end. And when it's not, it's Word -- although at least the two don't conflict so catastrophically over there.

But what has changed recently? The only thing I know of is that I upgraded my LJ client, to the newest version of Phoenix. And it does seem slower than the old version, alas. Thus my comment about software bloat.

[manomano.livejournal.com]

WinTel systems are cheap these days, come over to the dark side.

The Force is strong in this one

[imnotandrei.livejournal.com]

No, Darth Mano. She will not be yours.

And what is the old saying? You get what you pay for?

Re: The Force is strong in this one

[manomano.livejournal.com]

I get a toaster oven if I convert 10 Mac users. Of course, the toaster oven will have to be unplugged, shaken, and then plugged back in again every time I want to make toast, but I'll be able to play games on it.

[brooksmoses]

Hmm. Ever tried Opera? They're unfortunately rather behind on versions for Mac, but only so far as still having the same version that I'm currently using on my Windows machine, and it's much, much faster than Mozilla. I'm quite happy with it in general.

One thing that I've found very useful for this sort of thing is the performance monitor contained in the Windows Task Manager -- it puts a little icon next to the clock in the lower right corner of the screen, which runs a rather simple bar chart indicating the CPU load. Thus, I can tell if something is taking up all my CPU cycles and, if so, track it down and make it stop. If there's something similar available for Macs (and I would imagine there is), you might find it similarly useful -- perhaps it's not Mozilla so much as Phoenix taking up lots of CPU cycles in the background. Or perhaps not.