When I grew up computers were slow and you had to spend a lot of time waiting for programs and games to load, and the startup time for a computer could be minutes. Since then a long time has passed, and with all the progress in technology and science you would think that todays computers would be fast as lightning.
But still I find myself waiting a lot. Especially on a PC, where programs can take ages to start, and keeps crashing now and then. It’s like it doesn’t matter how strong and fast computers gets, the programs are always a step ahead and too big for the computers to handle.
In: Technology
1. Most people’s computers suck as they are effectively unmanaged. Even supposed experts I have worked with have home machines which are horrendously bogged down with junk that doesn’t need to be running. This is the ENTIRE cause of the fallacy that “computers get slower as they get older”. No, they don’t. You just let it gum up with crap and don’t know the difference between a program that’s just installed, and one that’s running ALL THE TIME for no reason.
2. Computers are doing a lot more nowadays, but that doesn’t account for much at all. Lots of what they are doing is unnecessary or done in a lazy way. When you turn some things off, the performance improves enormously.
3. You have obviously never seen a new PC, with sufficient RAM, NVMe drives, and nothing bogging it down. They FLY LIKE THE DAMN WIND.
4. Processor speed has plateaued. This is a physical limitation. At speeds at/beyond 5GHz, the time it takes for an electrical signal to cross even the smallest piece of silicon means that the following signal is starting at one end of the chip before the previous signal has finished. This causes problems with our design of processors. You can design a processor that would take account of this, but it would be incredibly complex to do so and not gain very much. 5GHz is a kind of natural limit for a room-temperature, household silicon device running on a clock-synchronous CPU. You aren’t going to get beyond that without a radical redesign of modern computer architecture. Given that in a matter of a few decades we went from 1MHz to 5GHz, it’s been amazingly fast progress, and we won’t see that like again without a major technological revolution.
5. Most of the waiting you see is nothing to do with the speed of the computer, but the design of the OS. Often it’s waiting on unrelated shite like DNS lookup on your Internet connection, thus making you think the computer is slow when really it’s been told to wait for a tiny, tiny answer from the Internet. It’s poor design. I can often Alt-Tab between a AAA game and a browser trying to draw a website, and the game doesn’t stutter, but the browser can feel like it’s dying. It’s because the browser is waiting on things other than local computer resources. It’s like saying “That highway is really slow” because you’re only looking at the electric wheelchair that’s going down the emergency lane and the rest of the road is empty.
6. As an IT guy: Some of the slowness you experience is purely imaginary. The computer is ready to go in all respects, but it just “feels” slow. Other programs function super-fast, the CPU is barely at a couple of % CPU, as are the RAM, the disk storage, the networking, etc. but it just “feels” slow. As an example, turn off animation settings on your Android phone. It’s just the same phone, but it feels FAR more snappy and responsive. Apple learned this with their menu bar, it’s all pre-cached bitmaps so it LOOKS like it’s really snappy and responsive, even if the computer is being dog-slow because it’s at 100% CPU. It’s a clever trick, that fools you into thinking that it’s a faster machine. It’s not.
7. No program should crash. It means you have a problem – either your hardware is faulty and unreliable, your software drivers are poorly written, or you are simply asking too much of the hardware (e.g. you’re using up ALL your RAM). Programs shouldn’t crash. Full stop. End of sentence.
Run Resource Monitor (bring up Task Manager and it has a link in there to Resource Monitor) on your machine and see where the bottleneck lies. If anything is churning towards 100% when you’re just casually using the machine, you have a bottleneck. You’ll notice if you have an NVMe storage that it’s very difficult to max out the storage speed… but if you have a clunky old hard disk (they are obsolete now, upgrade them to SSD/NVMe and throw them away!) in a poorly managed machine it’ll be churning on the disk any time you do anything.
Pretty much – computers are fast. Yes, they’ve hit one technical wall, but there’s no reason your computer shouldn’t be flying along and able to do anything that you throw at it (and trust me, as an IT manager, a developer, a gamer and someone who lives on their computer 24/7, I can tell you that I throw 10 times more at my machine than any ordinary person, even one that considers themselves a power user).
Anything else is because you’re not looking at the right thing, or you have dodgy or obsolete hardware.
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