Bloat

[fuzzy70]

Time came today when I finally decided to reformat my drive & re-install win7 as over the past year with adding & removing programs etc things where getting a bit messy & sluggish. Another reason was to remove some bloat as well & look for alternatives. For example I have now ditched iTunes due to it taking up way to much memory while running (300mb+ ram on some occasions) & now have MediaMonkey, a move I should have made ages ago if I was aware of it as memory usage has now dropped to 50-60mb & has far more features than iTunes as well as superior tag handling/editing (way smaller download as well).

Another one to go was Adobe reader as I went on the download site to be greeted by a 64mb download just to view pdfs, I admit reader must do other things as well but they are something I have never used & as such it doesn't warrant a download to me. Also when did Adobe get so poor that they need extra revenue by asking you if you want McAfee security suite & there was something else on the flash download which I just skipped.

While the downloads of the above packages are on the rather large side for what the provide & I think I found out why. What happened to the days when you selected exactly what you wanted to install including what language. Seems now that you don't get the option & they install every language that exists, while some of you are multi-lingual can you speak 30+ languages?, I doubt it lol.

All the extra stuff they throw in as a pain & just causes hassle. If you have a SSD drive then space is a luxury that you try to keep under control & even if you have a old school HD all the extra bloat serves nothing more than to increase defrag times (which is a thing you want to do the least on SSD's) disk checks etc etc.

BTW if you are a Mac user do not think you are immune to disk fragmentation, while apple does it's best to automatically keep your disks frag free it's far from perfect, just download iDefrag & look at your drive.

Developing software tends to create more fragmentation than most other pc activities due to compiling/linking/intermediate files etc, web browsing is another with streams of small files slowing filling the cache.

Right that's my rant over  , Just needed to get it out of my system & air it 

[Moru]

What if there was a way of controlling where the temp compiled files end up with GLBasic? Put them on a ramdisc instead of the SSD. Less writing to the SSD is good and ramdisk is even faster than an SSD. Not to mention us stuck with normal harddrives but loads of cheap RAM.

[fuzzy70]

I do tend to keep all my temp files on a separate partition, Internet files, windows temp files etc etc. I have not got round to putting GLB back on yet but as far as I recall it does use the windows temp directory pointed to from the env variable TMP & TEMP. I also keep all my dev stuff on a different partition as well so all in one place for easy access & backup.

Last time I remember using a ramdisk was on my Amiga, never really thought about it on a PC 

[Moru]

Ramdisc is great for performance, can't get it any faster. The bad part is that you loose all info on it if the power goes. This is why it's perfect for temp compile files and web-browser cache for example.

[erico]

yep, the amount of shovelware or extra useless stuff going around is ridiculous. It pisses me of to the extreme.
I-tunes only if I ever get to the i-things to develop, and that only.

To buggie I use foobar.

Not so long ago, lightwave used to fit a couple disketes

[Moru]

The worst bloat is webbrowsers. If you try to open more than 15 tabs or so, your memory usage will start to climb exponentially. If you have less than 3 GB memory and start a few programs, Opera will take several minutes to shut down because most of the memory needs to go out on the swap and takes ages to clear again. Watch the VM Size column, it's scary on some programs but especially browsers...

[fuzzy70]

Not so long ago, lightwave used to fit a couple disketes

I remember that lol, have been a lightwave user since my Amiga days along with Cinema4d. Although 3D progs do tend to bundle a lot of content like projects, objects etc so while bloat technically I class it as useful bloat which can be relocated without problems.

I will have to look into ramdisks as like I said earlier I have never really given them a thought on a PC

Lee

[erico]

I enjoy this:
http://tinyapps.org/

some are not as useful as the big brothers, but there is something for everyone.