Let’s Not Throw out the Powerbook Just Yet
In my last entry, I bemoaned the fact that a $189 PC I bought at Fry’s this weekend was faster than my 2 year old Powerbook (which cost considerably more than $189).
I may have been hasty.
While it is true that the PC runs my Craps program written in Ruby faster than my Mac… I wasn’t taking into consideration some other items, namely, how long it took to start Ruby in the first place. What looked like a 30% speed advantage for the PC, turns out to be closer to a 50% disadvantage.
When running the WEBrick webserver for testing Rails applications, suddenly the Powerbook is almost 10 TIMES faster. Serving the same application.
This difference is almost assuredly caused by memory (slow hardware, bad OS management, and/or lack of it). Plus the hard drive is slow, and the network interface is probably not the best.
I could fix all those things, but then it wouldn’t be a $189 PC, now would it? (As a matter of fact, I already put 512MB of RAM in it, making it a $228.99 PC) I don’t plan to add anything else to it. Continuing with my stated goal of bashing Windows at every available opportunity… I would like to point out that my 3 year old AMD machine (with LESS memory than the Windows PC) blows it out of the water while running Gentoo Linux. The difference may be a little in the hardware (the AMD was a nice machine 3 years ago, while the new one is CRAP, but current), but I think that most of it is in the operating system it’s running. I have not had a machine running Windows in almost two years… and as far as I can tell, I haven’t been missing anything.
All in all, not a bad showing for a 2 year old portable vs. a current purchase, no matter how cheap.