SomeGuyDude
November 11th, 2007, 10:35 AM
Bored in the wee hours of the morning, I decided to see what happens if I throw just about anything I could want to do at once at my computer. I'm no power user, so I just picked as many programs as I could feasibly imagine myself using at the same time. I settled on...
- Pidgin
- banshee
- VLC with a DVD playing
- GIMP with a picture open
- Swiftweasel with 11 open tabs including a Homestar Runner toon playing and a slew of extensions
- Google Earth
- OpenOffice Word
- The Cairo Clock just for the hell of it
- My Compiz/Emerald/AWN combo
Now obviously I could have just gone into my Applications list and opened up everything, but this is about the maximum I could imagine myself having happen at one time. I check out my system resources, and...
CPU1: 23.0%
CPU2: 12.1%
User Memory: 852.2MB out of 2.0GB 42.2%
Used Swap: 33.9MB out of 4.6GB 0.7%
If I wanted to check out a website while editing a photo in Photoshop as a movie played in the background, Vista would smack me in the face and ask what the hell's wrong with me. It used around 900MB of RAM just sitting there without any applications open.
Has anyone ever managed to "tap out" their system in a way that a user might actually stumble across (meaning without simply opening up literally every document and application you have)? I mean, people always talk about how you can't bog this thing down, but I had no idea I wouldn't even be able to use HALF of my RAM, and I'm thinking that my swap is waaaaaayyy too big.
- Pidgin
- banshee
- VLC with a DVD playing
- GIMP with a picture open
- Swiftweasel with 11 open tabs including a Homestar Runner toon playing and a slew of extensions
- Google Earth
- OpenOffice Word
- The Cairo Clock just for the hell of it
- My Compiz/Emerald/AWN combo
Now obviously I could have just gone into my Applications list and opened up everything, but this is about the maximum I could imagine myself having happen at one time. I check out my system resources, and...
CPU1: 23.0%
CPU2: 12.1%
User Memory: 852.2MB out of 2.0GB 42.2%
Used Swap: 33.9MB out of 4.6GB 0.7%
If I wanted to check out a website while editing a photo in Photoshop as a movie played in the background, Vista would smack me in the face and ask what the hell's wrong with me. It used around 900MB of RAM just sitting there without any applications open.
Has anyone ever managed to "tap out" their system in a way that a user might actually stumble across (meaning without simply opening up literally every document and application you have)? I mean, people always talk about how you can't bog this thing down, but I had no idea I wouldn't even be able to use HALF of my RAM, and I'm thinking that my swap is waaaaaayyy too big.