[Gllug] Do modern webpages kill older laptops/PCs?

[M.Blackmore]

Wow! I'd no idea there were so many plugins - installed so many to play
with my browser will probably grind to a slug's funeral march pace
through sheer overload despite flash and adblock >;)

Off to play for a bit before bedtime.

I'll see how things are working and decide which are eye candy and which
provide some functionality I will actually *use*. Some of them were just
intriguing - WHY did someone feel motivated to do that? What itch was
being scratched? So I had to find out too...

Suspect will probably delete most of them but anything that makes the
web useable again without buying a more modern laptop (which I really
don't need, this does me fine apart from web page crawling rather than
browsing).

Malcolm

On Mon, 2008-05-26 at 20:54 +0100, M.Blackmore wrote:

> 2 years ago I purchased a pair of Inspiron 8200 laptops second hand -
> 768mb ram, 2ghz P4, and a 16mb nvidia card.
> 
> Under Ubuntu 6.06 (transmuted into Mint Linux 'cos they put in all the
> multimedia stuff) these would happily run Evolution with LOTS of stuff
> on an imap server and local files, and Firefox whatever version it was
> then, with often up to 20 windows open (I'm a lazy sod who hates
> bookmarks).
> 
> Now they are unuseable with more than 3 or so web pages open. 
> 
> Web pages seem to be so loaded up with flash this and python or perl
> that and dancing pictures of adroidal sheep etc. nowadays - is it this
> that is killing the laptop? I would have thought 2ghz of processor
> power was quite enough for most things "ordinary" non power users
> need, thanks, and the ram memory isn't saturated ... so that leaves
> the 16mb video card as the bottleneck? Oui or non?
> 
> How can all the dancing twirling stuff in "web 3"(??) be affecting the
> sheer utter mindbending slowness of navigating around Firefox? Is it
> the video card memory? Has Firefox become a slug with version changes?
> 
> Which raises for me the question based on my technical ignorance -
> what IS it that video card memory does that all the singing and
> dancing on webpages can slow down changing to tabbed windows, make
> highlighting links agonisingly slow (can take up to 10 seconds to
> highlight) and so forth?
> 
> I've reinstalled a couple of times from baremetal up (called finger
> trouble when playing with setups and so  forth and getting into awful
> dependency tangles so I just thought easier to start again and not
> mess up next time) and that hasn't made a difference. Not the same
> passwords or anything either. New server and firewall - so I don't
> think I've been botnetted.
> 
> Am I right in my suspicions? I've just had to upgrade my wifes old
> computer to a 2.8 P4 with 96mb vid card from an older 1ghz machine
> with vid card with 20mb memory and the difference is phenomenal...
> hers had also ground to uselessness over the last two years whilst on
> web browsing.
> 
> Be interesting if someone with technical knowledge could help me
> understand what is going on here.
> 
> Many thanks
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