Machinations

I have a simple machine at home. Hmm...that was very modest and polite. Actually its completely outdated. And the kind of processing i try to squeeze out of it always becomes a challenge, and it struggles and wobbles and i stretch it, till it can. After that it freezes. Normal behaviour. Like every other machine on this planet.

But its not it's fault. I mean the processor is a humble VIA C3 800 Mhz, its used in multi-purpose phones these days... And what i do is synologous to driving a Maruti 800 at 80-90 kmph, non-stop K to K.(thats kashmir to kanyakumari). I overwhelm the poor machine with tasks even a mighty AMD 64 would find daunting.

I have this big library of images, its particularly useful for the off-the-shelf work i do like making posters & brochures. Firstly it took the breath out of Picasa2 to index the library, some 2 hours. Then i tried doing batch tasks, like resizing & color adjusting. There are lot of tools you can deploy for that, Picasa2, Irfan View, and offcourse Gimp as well as Photoshop. Irfan view is the fastest while Picasa2 is the coolest, too good GUI. Photoshop & Gimp are better used for better bigger tasks that cant be done in these simple tools.

Newer versions of Photoshop, 6.0 onwards are very heavy. My machine takes 2 min to load them.I use 5.5. Gimp is a different story altogether. It seems to be running slow because of GTK-windows, the Windows port appears heavy & just doesnt feel right.

I tried overclocking my CPU, thats pretty safe if your CPU doesnt generate lot of heat. Mine doesnt, this VIA C3 can run even on a passive heat sink i.e. without a fan. Dont try this if you have high end P4s, it might just fry out. Overclocking has to be done with care, incremetally increasing your clock speed. I increased it from 133 to 150. After that it doesnt boot. So now my 800Mhz runs at 902Mhz. Wow. People have overclocked Celeron in greater ratios.

With all this going on i had a tremedous urge to get a new machine, offcourse not a desk based one. But i gave it up again for the same reasons, not the right time...and the not the right kind of money.

Category [ _Tech_ ]