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Kahn -> (5/30/2002 11:27:28 AM)
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Zorach is on the right track, though I might dissagree with his assesment of Maxtor. Any of their IDE drives made in the last three to five years are fine, just don't buy any of their SCSI drives.
And yes, disks DO spin continuously unless in the computer is in hibernation mode (you will note there is even a setting under Windows 98/2000/XP that even lets you set the timeout for this). You can just imagine the ware and tear that your car would take if you stopped for every stop light and traffic sign, the floored it after every stop to a crusing speed of 80 mph, just to slam on the breaks at the next stop! Why should you expect a disk drive to be any different; stop, then accellerate to 7200 rps (revolutions per second!) within the space of 2 seconds or less, then stop again... OUCH!
Rather, the unfortunate state you are refering to is the "bloatware phenomonon" which is simply put "as computing power and memory increases, so does the software memory allocation". Just the basic size of Windows 2000 OS alone in memory is between 62 and 70 megs with no other program running. That just blew through 1/3rd of your memory right there. Add say, a firewall, anti-virus software, intellimouse driver, and IE Explorer (which is all that I have up now as I write this) and I'm up to 165 megs, that's 3/5ths of my memory gone. When you figure that a game (in the worst case) is going to stream over 1.3 million pixels (32 bits each) at a frame rate of 60 to 70 times a second AND keep tract of how many shots, what items you still have, recalculate all the verticies in each frame so you don't walk through a wall, etc. you can see that your memory is going to be used up mighty quick. That is why windows gets around these limitations by using what is called a "swap file" (this is sometimes refered to as "virtural memory", and again this can also be set under the any of the Windows OS's) A swap file resides on your hard disk and is ment to augment your systems memory by storing data that is not as volitile as as that kept in system memory. A good example of this is to take a very large document in MS Word (say one with lots of graphics), or a large image in Photoshop. Only the parts that are being actively edited need to be in directly accessable memory, the rest can be stored on the hard drive until needed (like when you hit the save button).
When you get right down to it, we ask our machines to crunch numbers at a fantastic rate. Given the enormous burden in overhead that Windows and DirectX add to this number crunching, combined with the fact (and no offence to those programmers out there, since most of you weren't even born yet when the 8080 or Z80 chips were king, and you had to program to conserve clock cycles in order to make a kick ash program) most programmers just are not taught much about what routines use more time and memory that other routines that accomplish the same thing, so building a compact program is not of primary concern nowadays.
Heck, with two hard drive failures in 12 years! You have a much better average than any IT organization on the face of the planet!
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