When does a laptop need more ram?

Answer, when the commit charge is double the size of physical memory. And the disk activity light comes on steady and the machine slows to a crawl.
Windows uses an old operating system trick, when it runs of out memory to run programs, it swaps stuff in memory out to hard disk and loads whatever it was that wanted into memory. This allows Windows to run modern bloatware on small memory computers. When the bloatware is too fat to fit into memory, Windows just loads the part immediately needed, and swaps in other parts when necessary.
This works after a fashion, but when over done it leads to thrashing. Windows swaps in something new and throws something else out of memory. Then the part just tossed is needed so Windows loads it back over something that is needed next and so on. Progress drops close to zero and disk activity goes berserk.
Laptop had been hapily running MS Office, Firefox, Thunderbird, and WinXP all in 256 Megabytes of RAM. Then I asked Kodak Easyshare to print a single picture on the inkjet. Hoo boy. Machine locks up, disk activity LED comes on solid. Minutes pass. I wait and eventually the print emerges from the inkjet. Many minutes.
I look in Task Manager (Ctl-Alt-Delete). Physical Memory 256 Meg. Peak Commit Charge 556 Meg. Uh oh. Commit charge is Microsoft jargon for all the physical memory in use plus all the stuff waiting in the swap file to get into physical memory. Easyshare is so plump that it requires twice as much memory as the poor old laptop has.
Hmm. Maybe 256 Megs of Ram is a little chintzy these days. Open up the bottom of the laptop and find just one memory stick, a 256 Meg stick, plus an empty RAM socket. All I gotta do is buy another stick of memory and double my RAM. Some time later at Staples, they don't have 256 Meg memory sticks anymore, they are obsolete. But $30 gets a 512 Meg stick that fits, and the laptop boots up with 256 + 512 = 768 Meg. Cool.
When I started in this business 128K (K not Meg) of Ram on a PDP-11 was enough to run a seven user timeshare system. Now I need 768 Meg just to print a picture.

Why is Windows slow?

'Cause it's as full of stuff as a Christmas turkey. Case in point. Plugged in a printer to the laptop. Just to make sure everything was hunky-dory I clicked "Print a Test Page". It did. Good deal, the printer works.
Read the freshly printed test sheet. It lists ALL the software files used to print the test page. THIRTY SEPARATE FILES, just to make the printer work. That's thirty times as many files as it ought to be. Printer drivers are simple animals. All they do is take stuff out of disk files and send it to the printer. Every so often ask the printer if it's feeling OK, and if not, put up the Out of Paper indication. Only Microsoft would use thirty separate programs to handle a task that single 8.5*11 page of C code can deal with.

Free money to end Great Depression II

"Good News! The porkulus bill the President Obama signed into law in February 209 provides for a one-time payment of $250 to Social Security beneficiaries".
Lead sentence on a note from the Social Security Administration that hit my mailbox yesterday. Wow. $250 in free money. I didn't know that little bennie was hidden in the porkulus. I'll take it, I mean who turns down free money?
Will I go out and spend my free money to stimulate the economy? Not likely. It goes into the checking account and will pay bills. There are always bills to pay.
How much did this add to the national debt? If there are 10 million SS recipients, the cost is only $2.5 billion, a pittance compared to the $787 billion porkulus bill.

Kodak Easyshare. The software, not the camera

Kodak confuses us customers by marking "Easyshare" on the cameras and then using it as the name of the camera support program. You know, the CD that comes packed with a new camera. It's the program that sucks photos out of the camera and onto the hard drive. Anyhow, I am talking about the Easyshare program, not the camera here.
I'm currently on the lookout for a Easyshare replacement. What do I have against the factory program? Several things.
1. Slow and fat. It takes forever to load. Tries to become ram resident, i.e. load automatically at boot time whether you need it or not. Which slows the computer's boot up. After I defeated Easyshare's automatic loading, it still worked, but it wouldn't stop and shut down. It hung around in ram slowing everything else. I used Windows Task Manager to kill it off and the machine became noticeably quicker.
2. You can't find your photos out side of Easyshare. This is a pain. To upload photos to Facebook or other websites you must find the photos on disk, using programs other than Easyshare. Easyshare uses numbers for filenames. So, is the cute photo you just uploaded 110575.jpg or is it 110492.jpg? Who knows?
3. Easyshare's "albums" don't coorespond to disk file folders. I upload some photos into a album 20-03-09. (automatically generated album name of today's date.). I sort them out, moving some pictures into album "cats" and others into album "model trains". When I go to upload the pictures from "model trains" I can't find the files in folder "model trains" they are still in folder "20-03-09" Cool. I'm having trouble locating photos I sucked in today. God help me finding anything next year.
4. Easyshare offers to put your photo's on the web, so others can link to them. Only it doesn't work. To get a link to a photo on the web, you have to pay money to buy "Gallery Plus". Cheaper is to put your photos on Photobucket, which is free and will give you a link to the photo for use on other websites.
5. Easyshare won't "move" a photo from one album to another. All it does is copy. To "move" you have to first copy the photo to the new album and then delete it from the old one.
6. You can't back up your Easyshared photos on your hard drive. The "album" information (which photo from which folder goes into which album) is hidden somewhere on hard drive. Just backing up the Easyshare folders to CD won't get the album information. And without that, you will never find the photo you need out of a modest collection of only a thousand photos.
So, soon as I find some other program that will suck the photos out of the camera, I'm ditching Easyshare.

Blame Elliot Spitzer for the AIG collapse

Charles Gasparino of the New York Post gets it right. Spitzer forced Hank Greenburg, the founder and long term CEO out of AIG. The place went down hill under Greenburg's successors.

Can Obama end Great Depression II?

Obama is making speeches. He's good at that. He says that federal health care, education, and alternate energy are "investments" that will pull the economy out of its death spiral.
Oh really? Let's go one by one. Health care. The real problem with health care is we put too much money into it. We put 16% of GNP into health care. That's twice as much as any other country in the world. Health in the United States is no better than health in the other industrialized countries. Life expectancy, and infant mortality are just as good overseas as they are in America. But in America we spend ("invest") twice as much money on health care.
This is a disaster. The cost of American products is jacked up 16% just to pay the worker's health care. Our overseas competitors products only get marked up 8%. Guess who wins the contract? Or, why is production moving overseas (outsourced)? To get away from the 16% of GNP health care cost imposed upon American produced goods.
Obama is pushing universal health insurance. Want to bet that greater health insurance coverage will increase the percentage of GNP "invested" in health care? In short, Obama's universal health insurance push will make a bad situation worse.
Education? We have college graduates running out of our ears. There are so many excess college graduates that we have them driving cabs and waiting tables. And we graduate too few scientists and engineers and too many black studies, women's studies, education, sociology, and other silly studies majors. We don't need more college education to save the economy. We need more economy to offer jobs to the college educated.
The one place American education needs help, the inner city ghetto schools, just got a kick in the head. Charter schools got defunded in Washington DC. And Obama didn't speak out against it.
Alternate Energy? Windmills and solar panels. Cool and oh so green. Very expensive. And useless. The electricity has to stay on all the time. Windmills get becalmed, and the sun goes down at night. So responsible electric utilities have to build real power plants to handle the load. Most of your electric bill goes to paying the utilities mortgages on plant and equipment. Fuel costs are small compared to capital costs. Alternate energy spending just raises capital costs. You have to pay for just as many real power plants plus the alternate energy plants. Alternate energy could double electricity costs.
In short Obama's plan[s] to pull us out of Great Depression II mean dumping more money into health care, paying more college tuitions, and raising the price of power. Does not sound like a winner to me.

WSJ attacks Comic Sans

The rise of the font snob. Comic Sans (sans serif) is an informal font packed with Windows. It's quite popular. The WSJ article goes on at length (and with tongue in cheek) about the rise of people/groups who dislike Comic Sans and agitate to stop its use. Wow. Next thing Comic Sans Tea Parties.
It makes me feel old. I used write letters in Comic Sans to the children at summer camp (No email at summer camp). At the time I thought it was a nice informal font trying to look handwritten. The anti Comic Sans rant in the Journal makes me feel totally lacking in proper taste, proper style, and je ne sais quoi.
Actually, Comic Sans still looks pretty good to my untrained eye.