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.
At my day job, I write code for a company called Berkeley Data Systems. (They found me through this blog, actually. It's been a good place to work.) Our first product is free online backup at mozy.com . Our second beta release was yesterday; the obvious problems have been fixed, so I feel reasonably good about blogging about it. Our back end, which is the most algorithmically complex part -- as opposed to fighting-Microsoft-APIs complex, as we have to in our desktop client -- is 90% in python with one C extension for speed. We (well, they, since I wasn't at the company at that point) initially chose Python for speed of development, and it's definitely fulfilled that expectation. (It's also lived up to its reputation for readability, in that the Python code has had 3 different developers -- in serial -- with very quick ramp-ups in each case. Python's succinctness and and one-obvious-way-to-do-it philosophy played a big part in this.) If you try it out, pleas
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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.