Hard Drives and Soda

So last night I found myself giving computer advice to a couple friends who both have better computers than I do. They both built their computers from the ground-up, they both do frequent upgrades, and neither one of them had ever considered moving their system swap file off of the system drive.

Now, this information has been basic knowledge to me for years. But apparently, it's not something that some experienced computer people ever consider. As such, let me lay it out as quickly as I can.

One of the main bottlenecks on a current system is hard drive access times. The easiest way to give a system a BIG performance boost, especially during boot-up, is to put the swap file on a different drive than the OS. For a typical desktop system, this involves adding a new hard drive and then configuring the system to use the other drive for its swap file space.

The important things to understand about the above is that you need a different physical drive. A different partion on the same physical drive won't do much, if any, good. Another thing to realize is that your swap file should really be on an internal drive, so that it's not accidentally disconnected while in use (that, and there are speed and technical issues possibly by doing it any other way). That means no USB hard drives to serve as swap file space. They're great for quick storage, but they don't quite solve the problem at hand.

Unfortunately, for laptops, this isn't usually an option, so my advice for a laptop is that if you need performance in a laptop, go with a 7200 RPM drive (it's also a wise choice for a desktop system -- stay away from the 5400 RPM drives unless you're only using them for extra storage).

With the low hard drive prices and people loading so much utter and complete crap on their systems these days, there really shouldn't be anyone out there without a second drive to host a swap file.

There, that's my public service announcement for the day. I'd be happy to elaborate on this information, but unless someone asks, I'm not going there. Just trust me on this, having the swap file on a second drive is the way to go.

Anyway, on to bigger-and-brighter things. Well, should be, anyway. Nothing notable has happened since my last post, so I'll just kind of wing it today.

Has anyone noticed that toilet paper has recently gotten narrower? I probably wouldn't have noticed, but I had a four-pack of the "old" stuff and had bought a four-pack of the "new" stuff (same brand, typ, etc.). Placing them side-by-side under the sink, I found that the "old" stood taller, and I thought it odd. Since, I've noticed toilet paper seems to have narrowed up as an overall, not just the brand that I use. Our collective asses are getting WIDER, not narrower.

Another alarming trend is for "individual" amounts of soda to be increasing. Back in the 80s, soda came in eight-packs of twelve ounce (returnable glass) soda bottles, or twelve-packs of twelve ounce cans. Then, the "individual" packaging became more prevalent, and you could buy a sixteen ounce (non returnable) glass bottle. Then, they went plastic, and they had a thick black plastic bottom cap on the plastic bottles. Then, with recycling issues, they moved to thinner plastic on the bottom of the soda bottle, with no thick plastic cap. Then came the twenty ounce bottles (plastic). Somewhere in there, six-and-eight-packs of these non-returnable bottles became the norm. Now, while you can still get a single twenty ounce bottle pretty much anywhere (soda machines, gas stations, restaurants, etc.), the size seems to have made a drastic change. Mutliple packs seem to come in either twenty-four ounce size or one liter (16.9 ounce) size. What I want to know is, who determines what size of soda I can buy? I'd like to see the studies that determine that Coke should come in one liter bottles, and Pepsi in twenty-four ounce bottles.

Oh, and one more note on soda. The flavor-of-the-month has to stop. Diet Coke with Lemon. Diet Coke with Lime. Dr. Pepper with Berries and Cream. Dr. Pepper with Black Cherry. Vanilla Coke/Pepsi. Seriously, stop it. We had enough with Cherry Coke. That was the last "flavored" brand-soda we should have seen. The only thing that should flavor soda besides SODA flavor is LIQUOR. Spiced rum and cola, sure. I don't drink mixed drinks, but even I know that.

No funny stories today. Peace, yo.