Blogging from the office. Just wanted to mention how very peaceful it is here.
As I've mentioned before, The Sarcastic Weasel works in what is, truth told, a hole. Actually, a basement with frequent flooding problems. As a result, I cannot leave my computer tower on the floor. Granted, for fan, heat, and dust related reasons, you're not supposed to do so anyway, but who ever does what they're supposed to do?
Instead of being out of sight, out of mind, and out of earshot on the floor, my PC tower lives on top of some metal shelving nearly at ear level. The problem I have with this is that the processor is loud... freaking loud and annoying. Furthermore, it runs all the damn time... ALL THE DAMN TIME! It's always processing something... some damn system idle process.
First, I killed the distributed computing task (goodbye SETI at home... the BOINC is silly Berkeley nonsense anyway).
Next, I went on a total spybot killing rampage followed by an obsolete programs, files, and registry entry holy war (none survived).
Finally, I went into the process tab of the task manager and noted which processes were running and how much of the CPU they were claiming: nothing terrible, just 2-4%... all of the goddamn time.
Turns out the culprits were all related to Microsoft's indexing services. Indexing services are these neat software things included in Windows that run while you system is (theoretically) idle (and that hold a death-grip on your resources for quite some time after you try to use you system again) in order to make and store fancy lists of all of your files. The idea is that you can trade reduced system performance 100% of the time that you are trying to do crap, for a faster Windows file search those one or two times a month that you need to do a search. Also if you processor buzzes right in your ear, it makes sure that never shuts up.
To kill or not to kill? Not much of a decision, really.
For those that would like to kill the damn things on their own machine, follow this advice (Tweak #2 on the linked page):
http://www.geekstogo.com/forum/Easy-XP-Tweaks-t2780.html
It's totally worth it... My God, is it worth it. I can just sit here and bask in the silence... ahh... wait, is that the wind tunnel I hear?
Monday, June 1, 2009
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4 comments:
You use Windows instead of Mac because if you switched you'd have to start dressing like Justin Long and being really self-important and annoying whenever anyone gave you an opportunity to tell them they were stupid for still using Windows.
Plus you don't know enough about indie rock, they wouldn't sell you one.
Why you don't use Linux, is unsure, though there are cases to be made there as well.
Indie rock? Is that like made in Indianapolis? Because I don't think I'd like that too much.
On Linux
Self-Importance:
http://xkcd.com/272/
Time well spent:
http://xkcd.com/456/
http://xkcd.com/306/
Ah well, even Bill Gates can cite XKCD for his purpose. (I think that's how it goes.)
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