Why are PC sales declining ? (Skybuck thoughts on it too)

On 19/04/2013 03:56, mike wrote:
On 4/18/2013 6:02 PM, George Herold wrote:


Yes, Win 7.

3.) How much memory? I figured 8 or 12G.

4GB would be enough but 8GB would be comfortable.
Memory is cheap.
That's my thought... gain is cheap too!

What the heck are you guys doing with all that RAM?

Video editing, large photographic images, computer chess. All of these
benefit from having lots of fast memory available to work in. 8G will
let me do any two of these simultaneously with normal work. I often have
a chess analysis running in the background whilst I am working.

I have win7-32bit running on a P4 with 2GB ram.
I ran it that way with no swap file for months.
I did decide to re-enable the swap file when I discovered
that I couldn't run XP and Linux simultaneously in virtualbox.

If you only ever read emails or do simple things then you can get by
with a lot less. Never tried Win7 on anything less than 4G and these
days I wouldn't even consider installing the 32bit version.

I've got more ram. Just can't see any reason to crawl under
the table to install it.
I don't normally hibernate, but I've had laptops where big
ram made it take longer to return from hibernation than to boot
in the first place.

I've also got a dual-core system with twice the horsepower
and 4GB of ram. I'm sure you can come up with an example,
but
for what I do, I can't feel enough improvement make it worth
switching computers.


--
Regards,
Martin Brown

On 4/19/2013 12:46 AM, Martin Brown wrote:
Never tried Win7 on anything less than 4G and these
days I wouldn't even consider installing the 32bit version.

Kinda hard to put 64-bit on a 32-bit computer.
Your hardware budget must be bigger than mine. :-)

$1 and under garage sale 64-bit dual-core systems are
just becoming available, but the damn things don't have
enough hardware I/O ports or PCI slots to keep everything running.

John Larkin schrieb:

Most people don't need a computer, because they don't compute. A tablet does
email, twitter, facebook, browsing, and games. It's quiet, portable, reliable,
and doesn't have a tangle of cables, monitors, power strips, all that junk under
your desk. The decline is probably long-term. HP, Microsoft, Dell, maybe Oracle
are dinosaurs.

Hello,

some time ago, the dinosaurs were Control Data, Cray, Vax and other
mainframes. Now the time for the next generation of dinosaurs has come.

Bye

On 19/04/2013 00:16, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 22:02:54 +0100, Mike Perkins
wrote:

On 18/04/2013 20:21, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Thu, 18 Apr 2013 18:14:45 +0100, Mike Perkins
wrote:

A decade ago, the rate of improvement in computing speed was
such that you had to buy a new PCs every year to keep up.

That's because every improvement in hardware performance has
been negated by software bloat, software speed, and software
complexity. In effect, overall usability has been stable since
about 2002. Sure, the new software looks more artistic, and
probably has some improvements, but neither art nor obscure
features get my attention.

This perhaps where I will disagree with you. I recall doing a
serious FPGA synthesis 10 years ago where times were halved when I
purchased my next PC.

10 years ago, my typical machine was running on 512MBytes of RAM on
an Athelon 64, early Pentium 4, or G5 CPU. I still have machines in
this class running and they are depressingly slow. However, there's
an oddity which somewhat substantiates my claim. If you load a P4
with 512MB, and install XP SP1, it runs just fine and with quite
usable speed. However, as you install all the numerous updates, the
machine slows down. I've tried running XP SP3 machines on 512MB and
it's really really really slow. 1GB would be a good minimum and
3.5GB would make it more usable. What happened is that the OS
became bloated, grew considerably, and slowed down. With updates,
Microsoft certainly doesn't care about performance on a 12 year old
OS that will soon be obsolete. I also see similar issues with old
OS/X and Linux distributions. The OS and applications were designed
for the CPU and memory footprint of their day. As the hardware
improved, the software writers simply took advantage of the added
horsepower and RAM inevitably resulting in bloat. Can you name any
OS or program that grew smaller over time?

Nope - but that in part due to the increased capability of the software.

To be uncharacteristically honest, it's impossible to generalize
over a 10 year period. Some things became faster, while others
slowed down. Some software was cleaned up, while other remains buggy
and unstable. Progress is not a straight line. Still, it took me
about 5 minutes to boot my 1983 IBM XT from its 10MBytes HD. 30
years later, it still takes about 5 minutes to boot my XP SP3
machine. This is not progress.

I'm more concerned that I can't see conventional computing power getting
much faster!

I also have Windows XP running on a 5 year dual-core PC and the
boot times and general pleasure of use is nowhere near as good as
this year-old quad-core running Windows 7.

Try running XP SP3 in a virtual machine on a computer with lots of
RAM. The OS ends up residing mostly in RAM, rather than bashing the
hard disk. It's quite a performance boost (after the initial load).

I think the old PC has 2GB of RAM.

I would agree regarding "investment". I was making the point that
PC "inflation" has nearly halted such that a good PC bought 2 years
ago, is still a pretty good PC today. Unlike a PC bought 10 years
ago.

I'm still using PIII machines for weather stations and data loggers.
The main attraction is low power consumption. I could do better
with a modern SBC, but I already had the working machines.

One thing that puts me off using a PC 24/7 is the power consumption and
the associated cost. Have you looked into this? And compared with an
ARM SBC running Linux?

For myself, I buy the old and used machines from my customers when
they get new machines. I'm perfectly happy to use an older machine.
I used to put yellow post-it notes on the machine indicating how
much capital expense I deferred by NOT buying a new machine.

I would also agree that I may consider changing my RAID disk for a
SSD. In the past I might have used the upgrade as an excuse to buy
a new PC, but now I would be more tempted to just change the
insides of my box.

I've had severe difficulties and surprises with RAID. I can see it
for performance (striping), but not for reliability. If the drives
are identical, they tend to blow up all at the same time.

So far I've been lucky! I used a striped drive and another drive it's
quick to backup to.

SSD has the potential of giving me an ulcer. I monitor the error
rate and bad sector allocations for my customers. So far, so good.
However, they're now buying SSD's from strange sounding company
names that I can neither locate or pronounce. I smell trouble as the
NAND memory starts to fail. Same with LED backlighting displays,
which will eventually produce a backlighting color balance problem as
one of the 3 color led's drops in output.

I thought they had algorithms to rotate any memory changes throughout
the disk? They have now been out a while and still haven't heard any
horror stories. I'm in the habit of maintaining a couple of backups to
minimise any disruption.

Long term investments aren't really possible with todays component
selection, which is often intended to target product life to a
specific number of years. If the operating conditions are well
defined, it is possible to predict the lifetime of many components.
Electrolytic capacitors are a good example. The result are products
that have components where everything blows up after about 5 years.
They can sometimes be fixed, but who wants to replace ALL the
electrolytics in their new computah?

Incidentally, most of my working machines run XP. My various
weather stations run Windoze 2000 and Linux. My customers run
Windoze 7 and 8, but I don't have any of those to fight with.

I'm guessing but I would have thought the PC processing power you
require is perhaps not the same as current gaming or video
decompression etc might require.

The weather station spews data at 2400 baud. I could process that
with a PIC controller. There's nothing even close to real time, and
everything is done in small batches. For output, it creates web
pages, pretty JPG's, and ftp's them to a public web server. The
only CPU killer is the web camera, which we decided really didn't
justify an upgrade. Incidentally, I lied. I have one running XP SP3
because the packet radio drivers and software wanted Dot Nyet 3(?),
which doesn't officially run on Windoze 2000.
http://bd-wx.k6hju.com/BonnyDoon.htm
http://802.11junk.com/jeffl/pics/wx/index.html These are old
photos. It's a much bigger mess today.

I am impressed, my only concern would be overall power consumption and
its cost. A hard disk takes more power than a system built around a
micro. Some of the NXP ARM processors are very affordable and can run
Linux.

I would also say if it's not broke, don't mend it!!

If it ain't broke, you're not trying.
http://www.motifake.com/facebookview.php?id=142183


--
Mike Perkins
Video Solutions Ltd
www.videosolutions.ltd.uk

On 4/18/2013 10:09 PM, Skybuck Flying wrote:
Question is: why are PC sales declining ?:
What are your thoughts on the decline ?

I would say people are just happy with the games on mobile devices! They
want mobility rather than a sitting duck, though the duck is a lot more
powerful.

--
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On Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:25:00 +0100, Mike Perkins
wrote:

Can you name any
OS or program that grew smaller over time?

Nope - but that in part due to the increased capability of the software.

How much of the added capabilities do you actually use? When I
upgrade to a newer version, it's rarely to obtain some much needed
feature, but rather in an apparently futile hope that the latest
version will have fewer bugs and crash less often. After about 30
years of personal computing, one would think that I should have
learned the bigger isn't better, but that hasn't happened.
Occasionally, some vendor accidentally produces a relatively bug free
release, that is also fairly useful. XP would be a good example.
That's really bad because if there are no bugs, users would just stay
with the current release forever, not be inspired to upgrade. So, the
next release is full of bugs (and features), so that the upgrade cycle
can be restarted. Sometimes, I suspect that they even introduce bugs
intentionally in order to sell upgrades. Of course, if you complain
about bugs, the standard answer is to wait for the next release which
"should have that fixed". Right.

I am tech support, and I know it all.
I anxiously wait for your latest call.
You've only to play, the game of voice mail,
I'll be there shortly, I'm working my tail.
Now tell me your problem, and what did you do?
This cannot have happened. I haven't a clue.
I may have the answer, though it's slightly late,
Just buy the next version, release, or update.
Next, tell me your problem, no matter how small,
I am tech support, and I know it all...

I'm more concerned that I can't see conventional computing power getting
much faster!

I have customers that bought i7 based machines on the assumption that
it would be faster only to discover that only a limited number of
applications can take advantage of 4 cores and a total of 8
(hyperthreaded) processors. I can bring up the task manager, with the
pretty graphs, and demonstrate that most of the cores are doing
nothing. For more mundane applications, there's very little that
multiple cores can do for something like a word processor. For games,
graphics, big arrays, video editing, and CAD, I can see the benefits,
but not for a simple word processor. It's much like a high powered
automobile, capable of doing 200 mph, but stuck in traffic at 10 mph
waiting for other drivers (jobs) to finish so it can lurch forward
quickly and then wait again. Capability does not equal performance.

Much of the CPU time is also spent waiting for I/O. The hard disk is
the current bottleneck. One answer, which is going to be very common
are hybrid drives. That's a multi-gigabloat drive with a
multi-gigabloat flash cache. Kinda like an SSD glued to rotating
memory. For computing that tends to stay in a cache, it's great.
Booting the OS uses the same files every time, so that's a big win.
However, streaming data, that gets read exactly once, can actually be
slower on a hybrid drive than on a conventional drive. However, it's
the latest fashion in computing, and I'll have to endure these until
the prices on SSD drives drops sufficiently to kill them off.

Your quest for more computing power is somewhat futile. Again, if
you're stuck in traffic, a bigger engine is not going to get you there
any faster. Often, you're going at the speed of the slowest vehicle,
or in computing, at the speed of the slowest bus or peripheral. This
month, it's the hard disk that's the bottleneck. For gaming, it's the
video processor. For virtualization and big array crunching, it's the
RAM that slows things down. Put a jet engine in a Volkswagen, and you
still have a Volkswagen.

Try running XP SP3 in a virtual machine on a computer with lots of
RAM. The OS ends up residing mostly in RAM, rather than bashing the
hard disk. It's quite a performance boost (after the initial load).

I think the old PC has 2GB of RAM.

You'll need more to run a VM. The ability to address more than
3.5GBytes of RAM is where 64 bit operating systems shine. Windoze XP
is 32 bits, so you're RAM limited. There was a 64 bit version of XP,
but it seems to have problems. Windoze 7, 8, and Linux on 64 bit
CPU's with 8GB or more RAM works well for XP in a VM.

One thing that puts me off using a PC 24/7 is the power consumption and
the associated cost. Have you looked into this? And compared with an
ARM SBC running Linux?

I have not investigated the power consumption issue. I simply use
what is available and cheap. I'm sure that a lower power SBC and SSD
would draw less power. If I were manufacturing weather stations, it
would be a very different story. I'm currently looking into running a
weather station on a $100 Android tablet, which would certainly be an
improvement in power consumption. It can be done, but it's not
reliable. The LiIon battery does not like to sit forever at 100%
charge and rapidly decays. Android is also not designed for maximum
uptime and tends to reboot, hang, or kill processes over time. Even a
daily midnight reboot doesn't seem to help. However, I'm still hoping
that single application tablet based "servers" will eventually become
a useful idea.

I thought they had algorithms to rotate any memory changes throughout
the disk?

Most SSD's have such an algorithm and more. What it does is detect
errors, and reassign alternate blocks in its place. When access time
to any block on the drive is the same, such a system makes good sense.
Some operating systems also have mechanisms to equalize the wear (wear
leveling) on the cells over the entire drive. I killed off several CF
(compact flash) camera cards, that lacked this feature, so I know it's
a real problem:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_file_system
Still, I worry. When I see the bad sector count climb, I simply
assume that it will continue and eventually kill the drive. This
hasn't happened, but with my customers slipshod (image) backup
frequency, it's a real concern. After a few years of no failures, I
may stop worrying.

They have now been out a while and still haven't heard any
horror stories.

Google for "SSD horror stories". The first few hits are worth
reading.

I'm in the habit of maintaining a couple of backups to
minimise any disruption.

I do image backups which backs up literally everything. It's faster
and better than any other method I've tried. However, the image
backup software seems universally crude and strange. The least
disgusting of the lot seems to be Acronis True Image, which is my
current favorite. Run it from a boot CDROM, not while the operating
is running, and it will work better and much faster. (Typically 1 - 2
GB/min to USB 2 or 4 GB/min to USB 3).

I am impressed, my only concern would be overall power consumption and
its cost.

The computers in the photo were salvaged at the recyclers and cost me
about $30/ea. Pentium III, 3.5" HD, about 2GB RAM, running Windoze
2000. Nothing really special except that they're totally reliable.
Well, I have been killing off cooling fans, but that doesn't really
count. About 55 watts average consumption measure on a kill-a-watt
meter. At $0.20/kw-hr, that's 481 kw-hrs/year or $96/year. Not
great, but also not worth spending several years electricity budget to
reduce the cost. Replacing the 3.5" HD with a flash drive will save
about 10 watts, which I think will be the biggest improvement.

A hard disk takes more power than a system built around a
micro. Some of the NXP ARM processors are very affordable and can run
Linux.

True. The software we're using:
http://www.weather-display.com
also runs on Linux. However, we have other services running on these
machines, such as a ham radio packet email gateway. Much as I would
like to run Linux, the packet stuff is Windoze only at this time.



--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

Skybuck Flying wrote:

4. Sick of overheat and associated problems ? (maybe... I am surely sick of
it )

"When the water is cooling, the universe will expand".

"the universe will expand, when the water is cooling"


--
--
What's on Shortwave guide: choose an hour, go!
http://shortwave.tk
700+ Radio Stations on SW http://swstations.tk
300+ languages on SW http://radiolanguages.tk

On Fri, 19 Apr 2013 14:07:10 +0200, Uwe Hercksen
wrote:



John Larkin schrieb:

Most people don't need a computer, because they don't compute. A tablet does
email, twitter, facebook, browsing, and games. It's quiet, portable, reliable,
and doesn't have a tangle of cables, monitors, power strips, all that junk under
your desk. The decline is probably long-term. HP, Microsoft, Dell, maybe Oracle
are dinosaurs.

Hello,

some time ago, the dinosaurs were Control Data, Cray, Vax and other
mainframes. Now the time for the next generation of dinosaurs has come.

Bye


In the '80s Goodwill Industries was getting bids by steel scrap haulers
on donated mainframe racks... hoards of 'em. Literally tons of big
computer grade caps and fans and other stuff could have been salvaged.

That was way back then.

On 2013-04-19, mike wrote:
On 4/18/2013 6:02 PM, George Herold wrote:


Yes, Win 7.

3.) How much memory? I figured 8 or 12G.

4GB would be enough but 8GB would be comfortable.
Memory is cheap.
That's my thought... gain is cheap too!

What the heck are you guys doing with all that RAM?

disk cache!


--
⚂⚃ 100% natural

--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: ---

On 20 Apr 2013 03:35:24 GMT, Jasen Betts wrote:

On 2013-04-19, mike wrote:
On 4/18/2013 6:02 PM, George Herold wrote:


Yes, Win 7.

3.) How much memory? I figured 8 or 12G.

4GB would be enough but 8GB would be comfortable.
Memory is cheap.
That's my thought... gain is cheap too!

What the heck are you guys doing with all that RAM?

disk cache!


Muy estupido.

cache? not.

I used "speeddisk" back when software based caching actually had
benefit (286/386 days). It does not with today's drives and I/O buses.

I used a whole, considered huge at the time 16MB hardware based caching
hard drive controller back when *that* had benefit.

It no longer does or there would be cards still being made.

Even big cloud racks full of hard drives use the hard drives themselves
to get max throughput and there is no caching.

My cheap ACER laptop with a Seagate SATA 6GB/s 750GB HD+ 8GB SSD boots
in 15 seconds flat to Win7.

Oh and what THIRD PARTY application are you using to 'create' a
'RAM_Disk' with?