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

[John Levin]

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 web pages are you talking about? I find that myspace (bleh) and 
the Guardian homepage always take ages to render, the first because of 
all the flash and music and whathaveyou, the second, I think because of 
the images (don't know why this should be, I suspect because of some 
javascript being used to call them up).

But most sites without gunk - even if they have a lot of javascript - 
load fine, and I often have upwards of 30 tabs open on my old Dell laptop.

But flashblock / adblock, as others have pointed out, will help a great 
deal.

John

-- 
John Levin
http://www.technolalia.org/blog/
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