OS Performance Benchmarks Over Time..
[Somewhat off-topic. Anybody have any insight? soup]
via Macway
from: Kathy Mihalisko mihalisk@erols.com
Does anyone know of a study or two demonstrating comparable performance
of Pentiums and PowerPCs in 6- TO 12-MONTH-OLD COMPUTERS, with equivalent
MBs on disk, same apps, RAM, etc.?
In our shop I've noticed a serious degradation of performance with the
PCs within a few months of purchase; either they become insufferably slow
as the hard drives fill up or, as in the case of my Cyrix 200, they
overheat (since this Feb., I've had to actually replace the Cyrix twice
due to "meltdown" -- the tech shop informs me that the 200Mhz Intel brand
also overheats on a regular basis. What will happen when the warranty
expires??) Our Performa 6300, 100 Mhz, full-to-capacity hard drive runs
considerably faster than an almost brand-new Compaq Presario at 166 Mhz.
In fact, the Compaq runs a tad slower than the mothballed Mac II that it
replaced!
Being able to point to some over-time benchmarks would help me prevent
Macs from disappearing completely from our shop. I've won a couple of
converts to the Mac platform but not among the higher-ups.
__________________________
Digital Guy Sez:
This is something you don't really see covered by most computer speed
benchmarks, and is pretty relevant to real world computing. There are
quite a few things that all computers fall prey to after a few months of
use. Hard disk fragmentation can slow down system access considerably,
for example. But what *are* the specific issues of an aging system? All
the speed comparisions are done using freshly formatted hard drives and
clean installs, usually using benchmarks specifically designed to examine
specific aspects of a machines performance. This doesn't even include
the time wasted because of re-installing a corrupted system. ;-) |
