Speeding Up Web Access

[Trixter]

It seems with a faster CPU and more memory, I shouldn;t fall behind his laptiop.

His laptop is probably 2 or more cores, whereas your P4 is a single core. Loading a web page does many things in parallel, so more cores helps you, to a point. Also, as others have noted, later versions of CPU can do twice as much in a single clock cycle as your P4 can. You can't go by CPU speed any more.

 

[vwestlife]

Yeah, even now I still catch sites using the FONT tag when it's been deprecated for years. Frames are bad, too, especially when it's relatively easy to fake frames (for e.g. a navigation bar or newspaper-like sidebars) using DIV and CSS.

Some sites have no reason to change what still works fine for them, even if their HTML coding is archaic. Such as this message board, which is still very popular and active, despite its layout and appearance remaining unchanged since 1997...

http://www.musicradio77.com/wwwboard/

My other pet peeve is sites that were written with the expectation that we'd all be running Internet Explorer 5 or 6 on Windows 98 forever, and that the W3C standards meant nothing as long as someone's dodgy scripts ran. This was endemic with government sites written about 15 years ago (at a time when a lot of stuff was just being put online and Netscape was considered passe). I've even heard of sites like these not working properly with newer versions of IE!

I have encountered a lot of commercial web sites which either dumb-down the functionality of their site or even refuse service entirely to anyone whose browser agent string they don't recognize, even if it's a totally modern and up-to-date browser. For example, the Pale Moon offshoot of Firefox tried to remove the reference to Firefox in its browser agent string. The backlash from users about this causing "broken web sites" was so strong that they were forced to put it back in, under the guise of being an enabled-by-default "Firefox compatibility mode".

 

[lee4hmz]

Some sites have no reason to change what still works fine for them, even if their HTML coding is archaic. Such as this message board, which is still very popular and active, despite its layout and appearance remaining unchanged since 1997...

http://www.musicradio77.com/wwwboard/

Well, I mean sites that were written recently and have no excuse to not be using CSS. Stuff that's actually from the era is fine.

I have encountered a lot of commercial web sites which either dumb-down the functionality of their site or even refuse service entirely to anyone whose browser agent string they don't recognize, even if it's a totally modern and up-to-date browser. For example, the Pale Moon offshoot of Firefox tried to remove the reference to Firefox in its browser agent string. The backlash from users about this causing "broken web sites" was so strong that they were forced to put it back in, under the guise of being an enabled-by-default "Firefox compatibility mode".

On one hand, it's difficult to see what features a browser supports unless you check the string or run some sort of compatibility test before rendering anything (I think jQuery actually does the latter); on the other hand, it won't matter a whit if the browser's JS support is disabled or too broken to use. I kind of wish people were better about using FORM ACTION as a fallback in cases where the toolkit's AJAX functions stop working...Vanilla, the forum software I'm using on another site, does a relatively good job of this.

 

[Grandcheapskate]

Which 1.8 GHz CPU does he have? For that matter, which Pentium 4? Pentium-M, Core, and Core2 are all about 50% better clock for clock than the Pentium 4 meaning a laptop with those would be a bit faster than your P4 sometimes much faster thanks to better designed cache.

Are you running the P4 in power saving modes? It takes time for it to spin up the clock speed which could delay rendering.
Ad block or antivirus might cause a slow down as the software contacts home to check the destination site. Or he could have blocked some websites with large download scripts.

I would suggest trying a better video card if you have one available. Newer web browsers have placed more emphasis on having the GPU do more work which an older video card isn't capable of.

I have to check on his processor, but he thinks the laptop is about 10 years old. I am not running in power saving mode and it looks like I am running a basic P4.

I can certainly disable my AV software if we run another test. We went to the same websites using the same browser during the test.

Thanks...Joe

 

[Trixter]

I have to check on his processor, but he thinks the laptop is about 10 years old. I am not running in power saving mode and it looks like I am running a basic P4.

Well then, his CPU is 10 years old while yours is 15 years old, so what I mentioned still stands. He is probably running a mobile version of a Core 2 Duo.

 

[krebizfan]

If the laptop is 10 years old, it would be a single core Pentium M since Core2 didn't arrive until 2006. Not that it matters much; the Core2 is derived from Pentium M with 64-bit extensions. Clock for clock, these are close to equivalent unless the larger cache of the Core2 comes into play.

One other thing to check is if the cooling and fans are all working well. Early Pentium 4s were placed in cases designed for Pentium 3s but consumed more than twice the power. Dust or weak fans could cause the CPU to overheat and force it to run very slow to prevent failure.

 

[Chuck(G)]

For browsing, a 3GHz P4 with a couple of GB of memory works amazingly well, if that's what you have.

 

[Grandcheapskate]

For browsing, a 3GHz P4 with a couple of GB of memory works amazingly well, if that's what you have.

Not quite. I just used CPU-Z and got the following stats:

BIOS Date: 2002
CPU: P4 Northwood @ 2.4GHz
Chipset: Intel 845G
Memory: 1280 DDR, DRAM Freq=132.9
L1 Cache: 8k
L2 Cache: 512K
Graphics: onboard 64MB

I need to run this check on my friend's laptop and compare.

Thanks...Joe

 

[vwestlife]

Today, for April Fool's, www.amazon.com is showing the 1999 version of their homepage -- although it's just an image, and when you click on it, you get the real website.