Resource Intensive Apps
Posted by Jonathan Ng | Filed under Technical
I tried using some new applications (new versions) this week. Foobar 2000 version 0.9 and Opera 9 final. Sad to say, my experience with both of them are, far from best. On one hand, I’ve got Foobar, which uses a hell lot of processing power (40-70%), just to play some mp3s. I would say that the problem probably lies in some of the components that I use with Foobar. Funny thing is, I never had such problems with the previous version.
On the other hand, I’ve got Opera 9. As mentioned earlier, it suffers from severe memory leaks when running on my computer. It happens everytime I use Opera. It’s memory usage simply keeps going up. Sigh.. I only manged to find Opera technology preview 2, but none of the betas. Anyone still have the installation file for Opera beta 2??
This kinda situation just makes me wonder how much memory my next computer should have. My next computer will probably be a laptop that I’ll be taking to UK for my 3 month “summer semester” there. It’s like, 1.5 years away so that’s exactly how long my Athlon XP 2200+, 512 MB RAM computer will have to “tahan”… Perhaps I’ll customize that laptop with a good 2 GB of RAM for good measures. After all, laptop components aren’t easily upgradable..
Since I doubt that I can afford a Mac (let’s not forget that “free” software aren’t as available for Macs as they are for Windows), I’d probably be running Vista. The .Net framework has put much emphasis on managed apps, in other words, apps that run like Java: running apps within a virtual machine. That’ll certainly consume like tons of memory.. sigh.. bad news for me, good news for Kingston and co.
Tags: software
4 Responses to “Resource Intensive Apps”
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boringest Says:
June 26th, 2006 at 4:02 pmtry http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/ for the latest weeklies, i find 9.01 not too bad.
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Jinny Says:
June 26th, 2006 at 5:15 pmActually, I found more free or very cheap software for the Mac than Windows :)
Plus, the OS architecture of the Mac handles these heavy memory swap/paging and heavy processings better than Windows does. I can be running a process to reindex my entire hard disk for Spotlight, which takes up almost 70% CPU, yet I never noticed any difference until I brought up the Process Monitor.
Plus, Macbooks retail at RM4399, about a price of a decent Windows notebook (and no, I’m not an Apple staff btw :) Just sharing some information)
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Jonathan Ng Says:
June 26th, 2006 at 5:30 pmboringest:
yeah… am using the 9.01 nightly now (build 8505).. damn, the memory usage is the lowest I’ve ever seen for Opera/Firefox/IE7.. Opera 9 rocks!Jinny:
oo.. thanks for the info.. i too noticed that the Macbooks are less than RM 1k more expensive than a simlar Dell laptops. then again, the Macs come with iLife. I think that the rumoured native virtualization support in Leopard will certainly settle the software issue on Macs.. -
Jinny Says:
June 27th, 2006 at 11:42 amYup, Macs come with iLife, and a lot more applications bundled with it, so there’s really very little apps you’d want to download to install in your brand new Mac.
I’m not sure about the virtualization, it’s just a rumour for now, but that’s for running native Windows apps in Macs. As it is, there’s a lot of equivalents of Windows software on the Mac. I do programming and software design & engineering and use my Mac for it, instead of Windows, in fact.
Then again I won’t put down Windows completely, there are things Windows is good for and I acknowledge it, and there are stuff which Unix/Linux is better suited for, and some which Macs are good for, and that is why I have a Mac, and a desktop dualbooting Windows and Linux. It depends on the user’s usage. But if all you need a notebook for is for simple computing, get a Macbook - it’s simpler and saves you a lot of hassle (spyware, virus issues are still uncommon on Macs) :)
