Wednesday - May 25, 2011

Purposeful Downgrade

UPDATE:

It all comes down to your computer.

I’m using 4.0.1 and love it. Much faster than the previous version and runs at about half the load. Wonder why our experience is so different?
Posted by Pal2Pal

Pal2Pal -

Because your computer is newer and stronger than mine. I looked things up and found that FF4 requires a much newer system to run properly than did FF3.6 -

FF4 needs at least a Pentium 4 CPU with SSE2 (2004 or newer) and 512 MB RAM
FF3.6 will run on any Pentium 233Mhz or faster and needs only 64 MB RAM

My system is a Pentium 3 at 733Mhz with 384MB RAM. At best it has SSE1, if it has any SSE at all; I see to recall MMX being an extra cost option around the time I got this machine (1999). Without going all techno-geek, SSE2 and MMX are technologies that allow for a basic kind of parallel processing (vectored SIMD - Single Instruction, Multiple Data), which is what the Pentium chip was really designed to do. The “Pentium” name comes from it’s design, which is one CPU controlling 4 other CPUs; the whole idea was to break up a given computing task into 2 to 4 smaller parts that could run simultaneously, thereby getting lots more work done for a given CPU clock speed. Great idea, hard to implement from the code end. SSE2 added lots more chip instructions to make this kind of processing possible. Today’s chips do this kind of thing automatically, and dynamically, to the point where CPU clock speed is largely irrelevant. Today’s Quad Core™ chips are far more than just 4 latest generation Pentium CPUs mounted together (given you the parallel power of 20 80386 super high speed CPUs), but they can be made to work that way. Firefox 4 takes advantage of some of those chip instructions, which is why it runs so darn fast on more modern PCs. But on older PCs it’s going to be utter confusion, with chains of instructions queuing up to run through a single processor that doesn’t have the necessary instructions. Limited amounts of RAM make things even worse, forcing the CPU to page instructions in and out. In other words a) the code is better than my computer can handle, and b) I can see the writing on the wall and I realize that the days of this PC are numbered. I want to get another 2 years out of this one if I can, because by that point the next generation of CPUs will be on the market in large enough quantities to be affordable, and from what I have read they are going to utterly outclass even today’s best Quad Core chips.

Shopping for a new PC? Buy the biggest and fastest CPU you can afford with the largest on board cache you can find and load the system down with as much fast RAM as it will take. You can always go get another hard drive later on. You can always go get the next generation video card later on too. It is almost always less expensive to buy the RAM with the PC than from the aftermarket, but that can change, so keep your eyes open. Those last two statements applies to folks shopping for a desktop system. If you’re looking for a notebook, fill it with RAM from the factory, and the best video card. Those machines can be very difficult to take apart for doing owner upgrades.

I’m slightly annoyed at Firefox. Any program running on your PC can access information about your system. I’m not talking spy stuff, I mean the program can find out what kind of CPU you have, how much RAM, what BIOS version, etc. Just a few lines of code could determine whether the new version of FF would be a blessing or a curse. But no. I got the same “We strongly urge you to update to the latest version of Firefox for security reasons” message everyone else did. Those lines of code weren’t in the installation package either, and they should have been. “We’re sorry, your PC is not able to support this version. You need at least this for a CPU and at least that for RAM. Installation terminated.” sure would have saved me some headaches.

I just uninstalled Firefox 4.0.1 and put in the older Firefox 3.6.17. Version 4.0.1 was a total pig on my older, slower PC. Worse than being slow, every two or three minutes it would feel the need to take over my hard drive and churn away for several minutes at a time doing something; during that time I could do NOTHING at all with the PC. Even closing the damn thing took 5 minutes. Downloads were slow as heck too. And I could never get rid of the extra “Welcome to 4.0.1” tab whenever I loaded the thing. I gather this version no longer uses the prefs.js file.

Frog all that.

Buh bye little piggy, roast in hell.

But it fought me. There was no entry for Mozilla 4 in the Windows Add/Remove Software thingy in the Control Panel, only one for 3.6.4, which didn’t function. Using the Firefox Helper.exe application didn’t work - it wouldn’t even run! So I deleted the whole Mozilla directory structure, then used my tune up software to clean out the Registry entries and shortcuts. And yet somehow, the newly installed older version managed to come up the very first time with all my bookmarks, which I had exported to a .html file, but never specified to be used. So I guess other parts of the program hide in other places. I really don’t care, as long as this version doesn’t make a pig of itself.

Thanks to Roger for the 3.6.17 link.

Posted by Drew458     on 05/25/2011 at 04:36 PM   
Filed Under: • Computers and Cyberspace •  
• Comments (9) • Trackbacks(1)  Permalink •  

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