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.
Earlier, I wrote about how ORM developers shouldn't try to re-invent SQL . It doesn't need to be done, and you're not likely to end up with an actual improvement. SQL may be designed by committee, but it's also been refined from thousands if not millions of man-years of database experience. The same applies to DDL. (Data Definition Langage -- the part of the SQL standard that deals with CREATE and ALTER.) Unfortunately, a number of Python ORMs are trying to replace DDL with a homegrown Python API. This is a Bad Thing. There are at least four reasons why: Standards compliance Completeness Maintainability Beauty Standards compliance SQL DDL is a standard. That means if you want something more sophisticated than Emacs, you can choose any of half a dozen modeling tools like ERwin or ER/Studio to generate and edit your DDL. The Python data definition APIs, by contrast, aren't even compatibile with other Python tools. You can't take a table definition
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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.