Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog

And you don't use Linux because...?

You've noticed that, too?

Because when I run linux (to speak for the esteemed prof), I still have to compile many of my own programs. File-management is a chore...

The day will come when Mozilla : Firefox :: Linux : Something. Linspire, is on the right path to being that something. But that day is not here yet...

Macintosh, duh!

How long has it been since you did a clean install? My laptop has less memory and doesn't thrash at all in that case, but it's also fairly clean right now.

You can improve it by using the advice on:

http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/OptimizeXP.html

Well, both Linux and Windows will let themselves cover most of the available physical memory with whatever you have open. Linux programs tend to be lot smaller, though, so it's less of a hassle for the computer to page things in and out.

simple: because they, combined with the OS and whatever else you are running (virus scanner, antispyware, firewall, etc etc etc), use up more than the physical memory you have, so virtual memory kicks in, meaning parts of various apps get paged out to disk, but maybe you meant "why does this bloated pigware take up so much space?"? that too is simple: because ms feels bigger is better. take a look at the cookie in excel 97 where you can fly around a virtual reality landscape and eventually find a tombstone with a scrolling list of the developers who worked on it, and you get the idea that space efficiency wasn't exactly a goal.

and no, you don't have to compile your own programs to use linux if you are using ordinary office-type apps, and even if you did a lot of pretty complex apps can be built and installed quite easily (no, I didn't say *all* of them can ;-).

Give WordPerfect a try again. You can export documents in Word, plus it has a smaller footprint. It is still the most elegant word processing product out there.

640MB is an unusual config. The usual increments are 512MB then 1024MB. 640MB can be obtained with a 512MB card and a 128MB card, but it sounds as though your machine is only using 128MB.

If you are running XP, start Taskmanager (right click on taskbar and select from list), go to the Performance tab and look to see how much physical memory it says you've got.

I am using XP with 256MB memory and have no trouble running Excel and Word together. There must be something really strange about how your machine is set up.

At all events, having figured out what is wrong with your machine, fixing it needs someone who can check Registry settings and open up the insides. These are not jobs for the faint-hearted.

First, Mac -- way to go. Office for Mac is even better than its Windows counterpart. Second, I echo the WordPerfect comment. We use it in our office and it is far superior to Word (though unfortunately I have to use Word when others don't use WP).

Because you like it. Otherwise you wouldn't have bought it. Isn't that the way markets work?

You should try a recent linux distro, such as Fedora Core 3 on Dell or IBM notebooks. Installation, web, mail, dvd/cd burning seem painless. Samba shares are easy to set up (System Settings/Server Settings/Samba). Same for ftp and http, nfs, etc.

At least get a duplicate drive and try linux on it, while keeping your other config safe. You might be surprised, and at the worst you'd have a spare drive.

http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/3/i386/iso/

If you need to use sound/dvd codecs that are proprietary you can get them from livna.org.

It's not nearly as impossible as you make it sound.

I don't understand why an economist would curse at Microsoft. You (economists) kept telling me that the consumer is a rational being that makes rational choices that are in his best economic interest. So clearly, you believe that your choice of Microsoft and security problems, and blue screens, and thrashing added to the dollar cost of your purchase was still a favorable deal. So why curse at Microsoft?

what kind of laptop do you have? not all configurations, chip-sets, whatever, are made equal. the ibm-intel-microsoft combination work very well together. it's like if you're going to choose one, you should probably get all three.

I've never heard an economist rule out the concept of buyer's remorse. The good professor can curse away.

Software engineers are fond of the quote:

"If we didn't bring those processors to their knees, no one would ever upgrade."

Well, the way memory works these days is that your physical ram gets eaten up instantly and a lot is paged out to disk. There are reasons for this being a better strategy. There was a discussion on the LKML about using ramdisks as Swap partitions (swap partitions being the linux equivalent of MS's virtual memory AKA page file). I remember some kernel developer saying that this would actually cause a performance loss and that you'd be better letting the OS do it's usual thang with that memory and still use a disk for your swap. Why this is, I do not know, but many claim to get performance improvements by using a ramdisk as swap. There's probably a way to do this in windows, but you'll need a lot more ram.

Well, the way memory works these days is that your physical ram gets eaten up instantly and a lot is paged out to disk. There are reasons for this being a better strategy. There was a discussion on the LKML about using ramdisks as Swap partitions (swap partitions being the linux equivalent of MS's virtual memory AKA page file). I remember some kernel developer saying that this would actually cause a performance loss and that you'd be better letting the OS do it's usual thang with that memory and still use a disk for your swap. Why this is, I do not know, but many claim to get performance improvements by using a ramdisk as swap. There's probably a way to do this in windows, but you'll need a lot more ram.

Folks,

It's quite likely that Brad is speaking of a Mac laptop, not a PC.

Uh, people, if you'd read Brad's other posts you'd know he's a Mac zealot - I'd assume he's running M$ Word & Xl on a Mac with OS10.

Kinda makes the advice about Linux, fixing Windoze, etc beside the point.

But Brad, 640 MB should be more than enough for anyone!

(Oh come on, someone had to say it.)

I gave up on MS after I bought Office 98 with a previous Mac. To upgrade to Office for OS X was more than I was willing to pay - rational consumer that I am - I now use NeoOffice J (cost = free). Works fine for me, and I have yet to have a problem opening or composing (excel and word) documents. Just my 2¢...

try nisus writer express. opens word documents, excellent table and layout tools. small footprint.

for excel substitute, not my forte, as i am not an economist and don't crunch numbers.

Is this computer of which you speak the one that serves as the server for this blog? Maybe if you can figure out how to get the most out of that 640 MB, the blog will FINALLY post expeditiously!

I use OpenOffice and don't have any problems with thrashing.

I use OpenOffice and don't thrash at all, even with less memory.

That does sound like an odd memory config and I agree with the earlier poster's comment about all the crap running in the background eating up your available memory.

I have an XP workstation with a gig of RAM that is the best-running Windows platforms I've ever held my nose and worked on (of course it's a relatively fresh install, too). I do my computational stuff on a Debian workstation and my own G4 PowerBook.

A good rule of thumb to follow with computers is to think of them like cars: Every 2 or 3 months, give them the proverbial "tune-up": Kick the tires (use some utils to look at your registry, running processes, etc. to see what's going on), change the oil (do a disk check and defrag your hard drive) and check your tranmission fluid (plug your computer into a network (or if it's wireless, don't plug it in) and scan your machine with something like Nessus to see what everyone else is seeing.

And above all, back up, back up, BACK UP!

On OS X, disk space is also critical. RAM won't be used efficiently without enough free disk space. It's my understanding that the more RAM you have, the more free disk space you need because the swap files are larger (or something like that). Anyway, to help diagnose your problem, download MemoryStick from versiontracker and you can easily monitor your memory usage and when swaps and pageouts occur. I keep MemoryStick open always... It's set as a startup item. Like you, I have lots of RAM. I have more than I would ever need on OS 9. I only have about 2GB of disk space, and this becomes a problem, even though 2GB seems like a lot.

I've used Macs, I've used PCs. In one job I had a Mac and a PC and switched between them, depending on what I was doing.

Give me a PC any day. Macs can get just as funky as PCs, and they are more aggravating to use.

(Assuming that Brad is running a Mac, like a sensible person.)

Doesn't happen on my iBook.

Have you run "repair disk permissions" in disk utility lately ? You
don't have to reboot to do this. These problems can give rise to odd performance hits.

Go to the command line (terminal) and run top. see what is really using up your cpu. As an example, X48 (a HP calculator emulator) and Appleworks both sometimes collide with other
programs and use lots of CPU just sitting there. If so, turn the
program off and see if things improve.

Theat's the "Dance of the Electrons", a new feature of MS Office, meant to accompany the Paperclip. Did you break it by turning the Paperclip off?

I switched to an ibook and all these sorts of problems went away (I upgraded to 512MB). Everything just seems to work, and when I have to use a PC it feels primitive. My main problem, is now my whole family wants to use it instead of the desktop PC, so I am planning on buying an imac.
I am also completely addicted to the Expose feature, where you hit F9 and all the windows shrink and move till they tile the screen, then you click on the one you were looking for and zoom they all come back with the one you want on the top.

Note on problem reporting: this post is not sufficiently specific. To get the most from the knowledgable reading this blog post in a form like: Running Word x.x and Excel y.y (or, alternatively, Office z.z) under MacOS 10.3.1 on a Dell laptop with a Pentium IV, so iii Meg memory, nnnG disk with mmmG free, I am getting thrashing.

If the problem starts with a specific set of actions say what they are. In any case try to give enough information so that someone with the same system could try to replicate the problem.

Having said this, I agree with MikeM that this should not be happening. His suggestion about task manager is a good one unless, of course, you are running MacOS. In that case some of the same information is available from Process Viewer. Although not as detailed as Task Manager, it will still tell you just what is using the memory. It's not always what you think.

If nothing else helps, and your memory is in fact 640M via a 128M and a 512M, I would try removing the 128M chip and see what that does. I know this sounds crazy, but when you don't have good ideas you try bad ones, and varying the problem often gives useful information.

If you're running a PC, try Ubuntu Linux, which can be found here: http://www.ubuntulinux.org/

It's based on the Debian distro, which in and of itself can be very out of date, but it also has a most excellent package management system that gets rid of the compilation headaches most people have. Ubuntu takes the creamy update goodness that is Debian and adds the most recent packages. I'm developing an addiction to it myself.

If you're hooked to Windows, for whatever reason, I've written a document on cleaning up Windows XP boxen that is probably applicable to other Windows variations at the following URL: http://twiki.iwethey.org/twiki/bin/view/Know/WinXPLockdown

The TWIKI that document is on is currently undergoing DNS migration issues, but hopefully should be back up soon.

Here's a tip about setting Windows to keep the kernel in RAM:

http://www.tech-recipes.com/windows_tips241.html

Provided you really do have more than 256MB of RAM...

I assume you're running the latest version of Mac Office, which seems to be a massive memory hog, much more bloated than Office v.X. My new PowerBook has 512 MB (to which I'll be adding soon), and I notice a big slowdown when I have two Office programs running as well.

I do all of my non-scholarly writing (i.e., correspondence, class notes, and, yes, blogging) in Mariner Write, which is a light, nimble, and stable program with enough power to handle all but really complex documents.

I might add that 640 MB isn't all that odd a configuration for a PowerBook from a few years ago, or even for a recent iBook. Until recently, lots of Mac laptops shipped with 128 MB installed; throw in another half-gig, and you're at 640 MB. My now-deceased iBook (purchased in early 2003) had that configuration.

"His suggestion about task manager is a good one unless, of course, you are running MacOS. In that case some of the same information is available from Process Viewer. Although not as detailed as Task Manager, it will still tell you just what is using the memory. It's not always what you think."

Apple has a free program called BigTop, which is like ProcessViewer on steroids. It's part of the CHUD package, downloadable from Apple. CHUD is a bunch of programmer's software optimization tools.

(Actually, for some reason BigTop doesn't quite work on my G4. It draws the grid on the graph, but doesn't draw the actual lines that measure things. It does work on my iBook. )

Run top from the terminal see where your memory is going. Considering that this is likely a Mac laptop, you'll want to make sure that the second DIMM slot is being used, as there's a currently known issue with Mac G4 laptops where the second ram slot is non-functional.

To be stupid, selfish, and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost. Gustave Flaubert (1821 - 1880)

Note: Ubuntu Linux will run on Macs as well as PCs.