"Their spreadsheetss email etc. will run quite well on Pentium-200s"
HAH!
You haven't tried Eudora 4.0, have you? ;)
I just upgraded from 3.0, and 4.0 is significantly slower than 3.0 - slow enough to be pretty darn annoying on my Cyrix P150+.
And, right now, as I type, there is significant delay between my keystrokes - at times, to the point where it seems that it just isn't working at all. Reason? The large number of ticks in INTC and INTCW, which are currently being displayed by RealTick III. I really do need to add that second CPU! (I am too cheap to pay $150 each for2 P200s, when I know they will be <$100 in a couple of months...)
The fact is, as CPUs get more powerful, software gets slower. Good programming is expensive. Sure, I'll bet that almost all commercial software packages could be speeded up several times with some good programming. But nobody is willing to pay for that, so we write sloppy code and pray for the next chip upgrade.
(I am a software engineer, have been for > 20 years, so I have a basis for saying this.) |
