Author Topic: A placebo upgrade  (Read 2495 times)

zenyatta

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A placebo upgrade
« on: September 08, 2004, 07:40:21 am »
Hi all,

the strangest thing just happened to me so I thought I'd share a story.

I'd been absolutely swamped with work over the past few weeks and, as a result, my Z was relegated to the role of a stress-relief toy. In particular, I developed a habit of playing Patience in any spare moments I had. Over time, I gradually gained a vague impression that the game was running somehow slow. Card animations felt sluggish and the startup time was also less than snappy. I didn't have the time nor was I in the mood to investigate, and so I just concluded that 206MHz is not that much and my recollections of better performance were probably just wishful thinking.

The work stress came to an end this Sunday when I held a big presentation to a group of clients. After it was over, I finally had more time to play around with the Z, and as I fired up my outliner it took _ages_ to start. Saying to myself "whoa, that ain't right!", I opened Konsole and ran "top". Sure enough, there was a stray python process hogging all CPU cycles it could. It must have been there for weeks!

When I killed it, everything just started flying. I put on Patience - the animations were smooooooth. As were the PIM apps and the Settings apps, suddenly. So now I'm enjoying a very fast machine indeed, all thanks to a self-induced bit of pessimization  

z.
SL-5500, 256MB Kingston CF card, 128MB EDGE SD card, Thomson HED-155 headphones
OpenZaurus 3.5.3 / Opie (kernel 64-0)