Saturday, July 14, 2007
(11:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Back in Time
Yesterday, in my continued quest to grapple with the inordinate slowness of my computer, I switched from iTunes back to Winamp. They now have a plugin for Winamp that allows it to play music through an AirPort, and the install file alone is only one-tenth the size of iTunes'. Under the install options, I selected to have no "visualizations" and no support for video -- when given a choice between so-called "modern" skins and the "classic" look, I went for "classic," which was now mainly intended for people with slow computers or inordinate nostalgia.All of a sudden, I could switch between application without having time to get up and top off my coffee, and I could type -- get this -- in real time. But I asked myself -- could I get things moving faster? I switched back to the "Windows classic" scheme and found, much to my surprise, that it responded basically instantly when I clicked on the Start Menu, without having to wait for it to render the fancy rounded corners, etc. What had I been doing all these years? I could have gotten my MBA in the time that I've wasted waiting for Windows to "swap" bloated features that I have no use for.
Now I'm starting to feel some nostalgia for those long hours frittered away editing my config.sys and autoexec.bat files to get over 500K of conventional memory. Does anyone have tips for me to further improve performance? I should note that the one thing I'm not willing to give up is (the admittedly bloated) Microsoft Word, because I'm in the middle of a fairly significant writing process and want to stick with what I know.
