My main vice these days is Warcraft 3. (Not WoW -- I don't have nearly enough time for that.) It's been frustrating, though, since it could get extremely choppy. Maybe 5 fps choppy. Dropping all the settings to lowest didn't help, which really puzzled me since although a GeForce fx Go5200 isn't the most powerful 3d card around by a long shot, a 2.8 GHz p4 should have been able to render this stuff in software.
I didn't do anything about this at first but I got good enough at the game that I started losing games because of the choppiness. So a couple nights ago I went on a killing spree with Task Manager to see if it was a background task causing the problem. I didn't see any likely candidates, and sure enough, it didn't help.
I did notice my Insprion 5160 runs rather hot, though, and I wondered if it could be underclocking the CPU and/or GPU to cool off. This program verified this theory: my cpu clock oscillated every few seconds between 2.8 and 1.8 GHz.
Now, even the lowest setting of 1.8 GHz is plenty for wc3. Apparently Blizzard did something dumb (a friend who knows more about windows programming than I suggested it might actually be a win32 API problem) and sets its timer based on the maximum clockspeed, and doesn't adjust when it drops down. Turning speedstep off in my BIOS, which sets the cpu clock to its lowest setting permanently, fixed my warcraft problem. I'd be pretty ticked if I still had to run, say, Eclipse, but 1.8 GHz is also plenty for Emacs. So I'm happy for now.
I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...
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If enabled it will also draw a nice diagram of processor speed vs load.
I think I saved $100 getting the p4 model instead of a Pentium M. Wasn't worth it.