An unexpectedly busy few days. I'm now working on a new PC which arrived unexpectedly on the 30th and so needed lots of setting up with great anxiety.
My first new machine since 2009. I always smile at Moore's Law at times like this. I remember when, in optimism, they said that computers double in speed each year, then it became every 18-months, and now apparently every two years. In 13 or 14 years then, this new PC should be between 64 and 128 times faster than my old machine - ridiculous! My old PC has an Intel E8400 3.00Ghz Quadcore CPU. This one has a spanking new Intel Core i7-12700. Tests by third party CPU-speed measuring websites rather poor scorn on my old CPU, listing it there merely as a comparison of its relative patheticness compared to just about every other processor. The new 12700 is praised and at the top of today's ratings. In the tests there, the new one is 14 times faster than the old one, far from 64 times...
I have many concerns and worries at this major upgrade. All of my software has been made for the old machine, effectively, and compiled on Microsoft Visual Studio 2013, which is also obsolescent, so I've upgraded to the 2022 version. I've managed to import and compile the Prometheus source code with great ease, far more easily than upgrading the Visual Studio 6 files to 2013. I expected this, but was still relieved when it happened. There was a long pause when running Prometheus for the first time, a seeming lock-up/freeze was induced something of a panic moment, but I wondered if it was due to some security issue... Windows 11 is far more paranoiac than Windows 8. I was right, and after a few minutes, everything worked.
I performed a test render of my latest song, Art For Me. On my old PC it took 2:19.554 to render (139.554 seconds), the new PC renders the same tune in 37.093 seconds. This, for me, is a better test of speed, a test in an actual Windows program, not an abstract 'sprint'. So the new computer is 3 or 4 times faster than the 13 year-old one. Fast, but not amazingly so; almost disappointingly slow. So much for Moore's Law.
In other ways it's remarkably similar to my old machine. It's the same size, slightly quieter (joy!) though contains 4 fans. I don't remotely need the new fancy graphics card, but it will do for now. I had little choice. Oddly, if not amazingly, it has two hard-drive bays and they support at most 2TB each. This is actually less than my 2009 PC. My lifetime of very efficient data storage and use, in music (50+ album and single releases), in visual art (all of my 1000+ artworks have 300DPI scans), 300+ videos; totals about 500GB so far. 4TB is, I can envisage, in my range of the next decade. However, one could say that a computer is for use, and that long-term storage could be done externally or elsewhere. External hard drives can be huge, and, as a 64-bit machine, are probably supported up to massive sizes.
The computer didn't come with a hard drive caddy for a new drive (I've spent a fortune on this machine, I would have thought a few bits of plastic enclosure would at least be provided). This means that I can't move over my existing drive, so I'm in an odd limbo and can't do any work for now apart from setting up Windows and installing things.
This is interesting. I've so far just installed Visual Studio 2022 and Windows. This has already resulted in two bugs. One required a reset of the tray notification icons which had become corrupted (this involved an edit of the registry, a switching off-and-on of Windows Explorer, and a restart. An internet search reveals that this is a common problem. Why doesn't Windows have the option to auto-clean the taskbar? Anything to do with the, increasingly massive, registry is nightmarish. Windows is designed so very badly).
Secondly, a Windows Update for a piece of hardware has failed and repeatedly fails. Windows Update is by far the worst (worst and most bug-ridden) aspect of Windows. It's about 100 times slower to update Windows than to update any other program. Failures are so common that I've never, in 15 years, encountered a computer that doesn't fail at some point. Every error code is a useless 'unknown error' - this, and, (and this is the worst part) it forces updates whether you want or need them and is expanding its power over other programs and drivers like a mind-controlling dictator. The graphics card on my old PC, for example, only worked with the oldest driver. Any update to a newer version would cause the card to fail and it was very difficult to tell Windows to stop automatically updating it.
All it needs to do is actually update! Copy over the new versions of things over old - yet this simple task is beyond a 2022 operating system, as it has been beyond any version of Windows.
The biggest change over Windows since the old days (golden ages?) of XP, 7, 8, is security, which, like the over-arching mind-controlling dictator of Windows Update, is gazing over every activity with a massive, and very inefficient, eye. It feels like half of the OS itself is security, the secret police. Inefficiency, yes. I suspect that it's the badly designed, overlapping and paranoiac security systems that have made this PC 4 times faster, not 14, not (ahem) 90.5096 (which is 2^6.5).
It has some good points. The tiny M.2 2230/2280 solid-state drive(s) are amazing. About the size of a stick of chewing-gum, they can hold a TB or more and are so fast that 'starting' Windows doesn't happen. It's there by the time the monitor activates. I've got a new Beetronics monitor, which is expensive, supposedly a Rolls-Royce of monitors, but is a bit rubbish. It's slow to respond, wake or sleep, would not auto-detect a sole input, and requires a remote-control to access most of the options, and it has a base so badly designed that I had to make a new one to stop it tipping forwards. It is solid though - made of metal, and the screen is clear and bright; again, very much like my 2009 one in capability and look. It is, however, 2-inches bigger.
So, this new machine will take up the next few weeks and I remain in an anxious state of flux. Computers cause me great anxiety because so much of my life has been invested in them, and to some extent my entire life's output, as well as current and future living, exists on and by them.
The new year, in other ways, was lovely. Deb has avoided work-contracted Covid (yay!), so we could meet up for the first time since before Christmas. So yesterday was a second Christmas, with an exhange of gifts, Christmas crackers, and a meal with Deb, mum, and dad. We watched the (frankly not very good) Very Muppet Christmas Movie (I am reminded what a sad loss Jim Henson was to the world). We toasted the New Year by playing Auld Lang Syne on two acoustic guitars due to a gift of songs-for-guitar.
2022 was a rubbish year for the world and had ups and downs here, but each year has ups and downs. I (and we) can but learn as best we can, try our best, locate and address problems in a logical and efficient manner, and build paths to better art, better things, aim for the best.
