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On Wed, 30 Sep 2020 at 19:10, comrade meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx> wrote: > >Yeah, you've diagnosed your own problem right there. Managed better, a >4Gb budget laptop could do that no problem although cutting down on >bit would help no end. > >[...] You see I don't know if you're aware of this but you've crossed into >that difficult middle stage where you're a "Power User". Skilled and >confident enough to easily get yourself into trouble but apparently not >yet advanced enough to immediately understand or fix what you're doing >'wrong'. > >Before I make another enemy for life I really want to reiterate I'm not >having a go at you John - I just have a bad personality so blame any >perceived slight or disdain fully on my terrible communication skills :] I perceive no slight but I do think you're ignoring a few alternatives, chiefly in regard to the value I place on my time. If I were, for example, employed to run IT for a fifty-PC and 100-laptop network then an important part of my job would be to get trained, Microsoft-certified to select the right hardware, configure and maintain it, teach the staff and students how to get the best from the software and so on. Oddly enough I spent a few years in the 90s doing exactly that, reliably balancing Win32 on Workgroups 3.11 alongside Novell Netware, NT 3.5, interfacing the rather new and optional TCP/IP stack to live on the same wires with NetBIOS with IPX/SPX, and I quite enjoyed doing a good job of it. There was a satisfaction in creating a stable environment like that. But that's not what I'm doing with PCs and laptops today. Today I'm being an analyst programmer because it's something I can do from home and I enjoy working from home. Apart from a couple of six-month stints as an operations shift leader to get firms through self-inflicted emergencies, the job is mostly what I've done since the mid-seventies. My advice on that, incidentally, is that if anyone needs you to run night-shift mainframe operations and you have to regularly patch defective live programs at five in the morning when nobody else can, overcharge them or they'll just get used to the idea. I'll get to the point in a moment, I just wanted to note that starting out as an assembler programmer, when your mainframe only has 50kB and you're sharing the mix with a production environment, does give a lifetime's awareness of how and when to be profligate with memory. It goes from very very rarely to maybe when it's cost effective. So by the nineties, even when other departments were running their online sessions on 4MB desktops, I stretched the budget a bit and installed 16MB because it let the machines generate way times the value in improved productivity from shockingly expensive users. I am, today, in that context, a shockingly expensive user. I am not a power user, I am a user and I cost a fortune to run. If I can blow an extra couple of hundred quid a year and get a sense of flow all day every day when I'm using a keyboard then by damn I'm going to splurge on what I buy. And when it comes to encouraging my nine-year-old to rebuild the inside of his desktop, and he chooses a Ryzen 9 and 64GB of very slick memory, I guarantee I don't bat an eyelid because I know the excess will pay for itself many times over. I may only have a quarter of his CPU and memory but that's quite sufficient for merely programming and proposing and documenting with 70 tabs open. A lot of the tabs are manuals and they're more easily searched than paper copies, and keeping them permanently open in preordained locations saves me time and motion. I watched myself these last few days and I now know what else I'm doing with the browser. I didn't until I watched myself. I'm using the tabs as a to-do system, and some of them stay open all week. I can't do that with 4GB regardless of how I trim and scrape at the final 30% operating system efficiency gains, I'd be nowhere near. Besides which, when I delve deep it's into the parts of the system which generate my income. I am not prepared to use my expertise keeping my machine well oiled, because the focus of my attention is worth more to me than spreading it across a wider object space. I use a totally vanilla clean copy of this year's Mint Linux on my laptop, and any spare moments I find go into staying up to date on what they give me. I am not a hobbyist and I have never approached using a computer as a pastime. We began by discussing Neil's spousal seven year old laptop. It's possible that the extra money needed to push its replacement from 4GB to 16GB could be better spent elsewhere, but that doesn't seem to place much value on her time. I thought she'd benefit, even if only marginally and occasionally, from the extra capacity and the potential extra spend, which is why I posted in this thread. I still think it's worth considering. > > -- > The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG > https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list > FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dcglug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq