How much do I despise this Compaq Presario M2000 loaner that Fry’s stuck me with? A lot. Any manufacturer that thinks 256MB is sufficient to run even a fairly light load on WinXP Home is trading the immediate bottom line against longterm customer business. Fry’s has probably given up on any future sales to me anyway but HP can now do the same (as if they cared anyway).
What am I running that’s causing such long switch times? Not much on the surface though dig deeper and the demands, unavoidable as may be, grow. Right now (in addition to XPh and in general) I run:
- Firefox (latest rev, 1.0.5)
- Outlook 2003 (yes, I know it’s time to reconsider Thunderbird)
- SharpReader (still stuck at 0.9.5.1 and no product or personal blog entries from Luke in a while) although admittedly this is known to suck up more than its share of RAM
That’s it. You wouldn’t expect to wait 15-20 seconds when switching between apps. Wait, then we need to acount for all the necessities and extras:
- Norton Antivirus/Firewall, because way too many assclowns are constantly looking to pervert, corrupt or takeover unprotected machines, which is actually a bunch of seperate programs (CCAPP, CCEVTMGR, CCPROXY, CCSETMGR, navapsvc, savscan, SymWSC,
- Windows Messenger, not signed in but required by Norton for an unexplained reason
- NDAS Manager, which provides the seamless connection to my Ximeta NAS drive
- iTunesHelper and iPodService, some utilites Apple requires for iTunes whether iTunes is running or not
- ATI utilities and helpers for the video card
- hpqwmi and hpwuSchd2, presumably machine-specific tools from HP
- lsass is a Windows service and a frequent virus target
- jusched is the Java Update Scheduler because it’s important to be checking all the time for the absolute latest version of Java (but not necessary and I’m taking it out)
And so on. A lot of crap, much of it offering little direct value. The complications of an open system, I suppose, and the high return to rogue elements for trivial effort.
BillSaysThis 