This Weather's Killing Me!

I was doing some timing tests on my computer and I couldn't figure out why my excellent code was suddenly running really slow.

Duh! Maybe something else was running in the background on my machine and killing my numbers.

So I open up the Task Manager and see that Internet Explorer is pigging out.

I start killing off Internet Explorer windows. I tend to think of them as fairly passive - they grab stuff off the web and then sit there.

When I killed off Weather.com suddenly my machine was back to normal!

Ahh.... who knows what evil lurks in the heart of a web page. Could be Java, could be Javascript, could be it simply refreshes itself really often.

As part of my current project I am running Windows Server 2003 on an isolated box. When I open up Task Manager on my local machine I see dozens of processes running. When I open up Task Manager on the server machine I see ... about five processes running! It's so cool!

I want one. I want a server machine sitting in a little rack next to my main computer serving up files and running like a bat out of hell. Very cool.

In the old days (seven years ago), I literally had one computer for every kind of task I wanted to perform, because computers (well, Windows) didn't really multi-task very well. If I started compressing a file then that was it for that computer. But now things are so much better that I can hang a ton of peripherals off my machine via USB and Firewire and things pretty much keep working.

But that flexibility isn't free - all of those background processes add up.

I wonder when it will be standard issue for a home to have a server sitting in a closet somewhere (near where the cable or DSL or satellite feed comes in).

I think Microsoft needs to make Windows Server 2003 Home Edition. Of course, they should call it Windows Server 2005 Home Media Server.

© 2005 Stephen Clarke-Willson - All Rights Reserved.