Quote:
Originally Posted by BetterRed
Curious - how many of those would be running concurrently ?
BR
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Firefox is always open with multiple tabs (either active or minimized). Sometimes, I'd have Chrome open, too, with its own set of tabs. Back when I had a platter drive, restoring just Firefox from minimize is enough to stall my computer. Could definitely hear the hard drive grinding. Even user input gets delayed. Dropbox also runs in the background as well as a couple other utilities. Then whatever other software I actively need at the moment (could be 2, could be 10 but heaviest footprint is still web browser).
The SSD really helps. A
*lot*. While NAND flash is still an order of magnitude slower than RAM, it's a darned sight faster than HDD in terms of latency/random access. If you have a Core 2 Duo or newer CPU, chances are storage is a big bottleneck.
I remember back when I was still waiting for consumer 1TB SSDs to be available. My older 1.3GHz C2D SU7300 ultraportable (with 256GB SSD) was more responsive than my new-back-then 2.7GHz i7-2620M laptop. Granted, the SU7300 could barely handle brute force 1080p H.264 decode. Certainly had trouble with Hulu back in the days pre-HW acceleration.