Bogging Down Fast Computers

Alex Scoble asks:

"Here's a question for all of the Computer Engineers out there. Why do PCs become slow almost to the point of unusable when the PC's drive buses are in heavy use?

What am I talking about? Copy a CD to a CD or perform a disk intensive process like copying a lot of data from one PC to another and see what happens to your nice 3.2Ghz P4 with 512MB of DDR RAM. It slows to a crawl! At least it does in Windows...."

Read the rest of Alex Scoble's post here.

He mentions that servers handle disk I/O much more effectively, and wonders why desktop computers can't too.

Great point.  Right now I have two computers under my desk connected via an Iogear KVM switch so that when I tie one up with a long-running task, I can bounce to the other.  With the KVM, shared drives through Windows, and a shared clipboard (using a freeware program called Spike), it's *almost* like getting the benefits Alex would like to see built into every computer -- though at twice as expensive and a lot bulkier.

And this is an area where improvements could mean really noticeable benefits to users (as opposed to the MHz races that made good marketing copy but often didn't deliver anything in real-world use).

- Jim

Thanksgiving Photo Essay

Ran across this Thanksgiving photo essay at www.donaldsensing.com. 

Thank you for the touching reminder of what we're really supposed to be dwelling on at Thanksgiving (and it's not football, not turkey, not preparing to shop on Black Friday).

We have so much to be thankful for this year, and, as we gather with family this holiday, I hope we'll keep in mind all the good things we've received and look for ways to share our good fortune with others.

Best wishes to you and yours for a safe, happy Thanksgiving holiday!