Post by Alex DybenkoPost by GBAPCs are alot more powerful now that way back in the ~1990 era
when Access was beginning....today's laptop is as powerful as the
servers of those days...
But software also get changed, as I remember Pentium 300MHz/256Mb
PC with Access 97 (or 2.0?) on window nt4 in general had better
response then my current laptop with 2.5 GHz and 4 gig of ram
We lose a lot of the benefit of your modern hardware to the
anti-virus tax.
I find the lack of efficiency of the AV monitoring software to be
quite annoying, as well as the fact that the AV makers still use
signature-based scanning and very little in the way of heuristics
that should be able to identify virus-like behavior. I feel like the
whole thing is a massive scam, that is that the AV makers
purposefully make their software not as effective as it could be
just so the fear of infection remains real enough so that people
continue to buy their offerings.
Of course, mostly these days it's not strictly speaking "viruses"
that are the danger, but other exploits that take over various parts
of your computer's functionality, Trojans, worms, etc. Internet
Explorer is the worst vector for this (it's better, but since it
still supports ActiveX, it's still a terrible vulnerability), and I
get all my clients on FireFox whenever I have the sway to make that
happen.
There are also an awful lot of applications that seem to be designed
on the assumption that they are the only thing running on your
computer, loading up a bunch of mostly completely unnecessary
processes (such as quick-launch utilities) and system services that
aren't really needed when the app is not running. These things need
not significantly impact computer performance, but so many of them
seem to be so badly designed that they eat up significant and
noticeable CPU cycles.
Then there are all the application updaters that insist on running
(I'm looking at you, Adobe and JRE!), even though there is no
utility to the end user to constantly update the apps -- I see these
more as marketing than anything else, a Hey! Look! You have Adobe
Reader installed! There seems to be a failure on the part of the
people creating these apps to understand that an end user sees their
apps as utilities, like plumbing, something that should be invisible
behind the walls and just work.
Thus endeth the rant...
--
David W. Fenton http://www.dfenton.com/
usenet at dfenton dot com http://www.dfenton.com/DFA/