[Gllug] Do modern webpages kill older laptops/PCs?
John Levin
john at technolalia.org
Mon May 26 20:39:01 UTC 2008
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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