![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wiping & reloading
Oct. 28th, 2010 06:47 pmIn lieu of real content, a recycled mailing-list post...
I advise wiping & reinstalling all computers periodically. Ideally, every 6mth, but at least once every 2-3y. With my consultancy hat on, I constantly see individuals & companies throwing out "old" computers that are now "too slow". Actually, if they were wiped & reloaded, the machines would be just fine - it's the accumulated cruft that slows them down.
Since the Core2 Duo and "Sledgehammer" Athlon64/Opteron chips came out, CPUs really have not got all that much faster - they just have more cores now, and very little software really benefits from more cores. Parallelism is /hard/ and most code is single-threaded. Having 2 cores gives you a slightly more responsive system; more, for most people, is a waste of electricity & silicon.
People often misunderstand & misquote Moore's Law. It doesn't say chips double in speed every 18mth. It says the number of transistors for a given unit of money (& space on the chip) doubles every 18mth.
However, the technology does not exist to spend more transistors on making processors run code faster, so instead, now, CPU makers just make the chips able to run /more/ code in unit time, by adding more cores. This doesn't mean 1 program runs in half the time; it means you can run 2 (or 3 or 4 or now even 6 for big server chips) programs in the same time as 1. This is actually no help at all for most purposes.
What this means is that computers stopped getting much faster a few years ago. Actually, a well-specced 2006 PC, properly set up, is within 15-20% as quick as a 2010 one, given the same amount of RAM and so on.
But the 2006 one is full of accumulated cruft. Wipe it & reload with its original software, it will probably be quite a bit faster than a modern machine laden down with Win7 & Office '10 (or if you prefer, compare Ubuntu 6.06 & OpenOffice 2 with Ubuntu 10.04 & OpenOffice 3.2).
Wiping & reloading is a pain in the *cough* neck, but the pain is rewarded. It is, as the kiddies say, like, totally worth it.
I advise wiping & reinstalling all computers periodically. Ideally, every 6mth, but at least once every 2-3y. With my consultancy hat on, I constantly see individuals & companies throwing out "old" computers that are now "too slow". Actually, if they were wiped & reloaded, the machines would be just fine - it's the accumulated cruft that slows them down.
Since the Core2 Duo and "Sledgehammer" Athlon64/Opteron chips came out, CPUs really have not got all that much faster - they just have more cores now, and very little software really benefits from more cores. Parallelism is /hard/ and most code is single-threaded. Having 2 cores gives you a slightly more responsive system; more, for most people, is a waste of electricity & silicon.
People often misunderstand & misquote Moore's Law. It doesn't say chips double in speed every 18mth. It says the number of transistors for a given unit of money (& space on the chip) doubles every 18mth.
However, the technology does not exist to spend more transistors on making processors run code faster, so instead, now, CPU makers just make the chips able to run /more/ code in unit time, by adding more cores. This doesn't mean 1 program runs in half the time; it means you can run 2 (or 3 or 4 or now even 6 for big server chips) programs in the same time as 1. This is actually no help at all for most purposes.
What this means is that computers stopped getting much faster a few years ago. Actually, a well-specced 2006 PC, properly set up, is within 15-20% as quick as a 2010 one, given the same amount of RAM and so on.
But the 2006 one is full of accumulated cruft. Wipe it & reload with its original software, it will probably be quite a bit faster than a modern machine laden down with Win7 & Office '10 (or if you prefer, compare Ubuntu 6.06 & OpenOffice 2 with Ubuntu 10.04 & OpenOffice 3.2).
Wiping & reloading is a pain in the *cough* neck, but the pain is rewarded. It is, as the kiddies say, like, totally worth it.
