A sigh.
More and more threads are becoming closed land for my laptop. When I get caught, it can just stand there swapping for ages, well 10 minutes or so to show the next picture, and the only escape is trying to close firefox. It got worse about the time that Don (sorry Don) started with higher resolution pictures (about the last 5 days) and I really want to be able to see Don's threads.
Can anything be done? Mr.Admin?
(I have 261MBy of RAM and run Windows 2000).
Plan A:
Try the opera browser with turbo mode on. All the turbo does is just skipping to download images and ads. Best described as text only.
Plan B:
Find a computer technician (the one that work as such) and chances are he might just have some 512Mb sodimm stick that fits your laptop scavebnged from a dead laptop. He will probably willing to part it for a pizza nad a beer and probably will offer to install it freely.
Plan C:
You know already. XD
The plan b could work with me but im short of laptop sticks atm. Would happily post you one (if we find out which kind of DDR you have, probably DDR1 might be SDR DRAM tho...).
This might be a temporary fix, emphasis on this part, option 3. It would however affect other sites aswell. Another workaround would be to use Adblock+ and block images from the specific 3:rd party servers that are causing the problem. Using thumbnails or small images in picture heavy threads would be a good practice to reduce load times and memory usage.
Easiest fix is for me to re-export the pictures at a lower resolution. The big pile of beamshots is about 150 megabytes which is excessive. I will reupload them at a lower resolution. For anyone who wants them, they are on my Photobucket page in a folder under the one served up called Full Resolution.
Please let me know any other pages that break your browsers where images of mine are at fault and I'll put them up at a lower resolution.
Or getting a new laptop once every 5 years doesent sound too excessive either... I bet the HDD developed some bad sectors as well. While youre at it try this http://www.hdtune.com/ and check if youre gonna loose sime or all of your files anytime soon. Backups are good but ppl that do them are few...
Thanks Budgeteer and SPAMBOT
I used Opera some time ago but dropped it, because it would not download a copy of an internet page to disk (I think).
I will try to tweak firefox.
That's what I had in mind. I think many pictures are overkilled with pixels that does'nt matter. The scaling (to witdh 400) that we do, obviously does'nt mean that fewer pixels should be loaded.
Hi there sixty545, sorry you're having problems. Unfortunately I can't do much on a site level to improve the situation. But you might try a Firefox extension that only loads the images that you want:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/imglikeopera/
Additionally, have you tried a Linux live CD that uses very little RAM? It might leave you with more free for your browser.
Hope this helps!
I agree, scaling does nothing but reduce the image size on screen, not its actual size or the memory needed to view it.
A dozen of 800x600 JPEGs scaled to 600x450 would be no problem, would it?
"A dozen of 800x600 JPEGs scaled to 600x450 would be no problem, would it?"
Thats really not demanding.
The pictures that Don usually takes must be from a DSLR class camera and used properly to get such nice pictures. I bet he does not use stock lenses either. Anyway, he does usually not skimp on resolution. At least his images deserves the pixels as opposed to my futile attempts with a pocket camera... Nikon yes, but if it was available at DX would be NIIKON (or HONEST) and would be worth 20usd at best.
I've resized a lot of pictures on Photobucket. The site-level scaling may induce farther RAM issues on RAM constrained machines. Any threads with pics of mine that make your machine choke, please let me know (Preferably by PM) and I'll shrink more images.
The beamshots are usually done with a Canon point-and-shoot camera, it just works better for beamshots, the DSLR drives me insane trying to focus itself or i manage to manually focus it to out of focus.
Most of the earlier pictures were done with this camera.
Most recent pictures that aren't beamshots were done with a Nikon DSLR - occasionally with very old Nikon manual everything optics (I bought my first Nikon in 1980).
Thanks guys!
I already put in a new hard disk, 60 GBy. Budgeteer helped me find 512MBy RAM for 25 EU, not too bad.
The Firefox plugin might be what I want, so you don't have to change your pictures, Don. But thanks anyway.
Am I really the only one encountering this problem?
You aren't. I've had a PM from someone else saying the same. I wasn't thinking when I uploaded the beamshots the other night, it was just when realising that that was 150 megabytes of images, not including the RAM needed to decompress them. When I looked at my bandwidth stats for the month (Which starts on the 16th for Photobucket's purposes), I've used 14 gigabytes of bandwidth already. I used 36 gigabytes in the 30 days before that, or about three times as much as it used to be. Obviously, at some point I was going to find out just how "unlimited" a Photobucket paid account's bandwidth was so I was going to have to resize or delete stuff anyway.
Skærmkortet og manglende ram er årsagen.
Hi Don, you can resize/resample your images on Photobucket online, without changing the links in all your posts? I thought you would have to download, resize, upload, and then change all the links.
It is almost as fast to resize, reupload and relink posts as it is to resize them on Photobucket. Hopefully that's most of them done now. There may be the odd one left but if people tell me I'll resize them.
I used to be the go-to OS/2 guy at $previous_job (*cue Dilbert strip* ;-)) because I actually liked the system for its simplicity and its design. I've also been responsible for the design, development and, subsequently, the support of more than a few embedded devices. So... what I'm trying to say is that I certainly do appreciate that there is a lot of legacy hardware and software out there and truth be told, I rather like it. Heck, I still have very fond memories of my first 286 and I do still own my very first Pentium 60 (yes, the one with the P5 FDIV bug) which at that time, was just about the coolest thing money could buy (most programs and even games were absolutely unusable even after hitting the turbo button). Now that I've tried to establish my geek cred, I'd like to offer a contrary opinion.
Old hardware is great and as far as I'm concerned I can do without a lot of the Web 2.0 bells and whistles. I regularly use the browser on our Kindles, phones and a bunch of embedded systems. But, and here's my point, it is 2011. RAM is relatively cheap, netbooks come with 1+ GB of RAM, my phone has 576 MB of RAM and that's probably not even close to cutting edge in this country (let alone Europe or Asia). I am not saying "get with the times". Rather, my argument is that you really don't need a new computer with great specs for most stuff, unless you care about the latest Facebook redesign. From a usability standpoint, it simply doesn't matter if you click half a dozen buttons or if let some uber-complex Ajax magic take care of figuring out what you had in mind.
Pictures and video, however, are a completely different issue because details do matter. Watching a football game (or soccer or handball or whatever) in HD is nice. I wouldn't want to miss it. But I'd still be watching football and soccer if there wasn't a HD version. I care about the game. That's why I am glued to the TV. Everything else is a bonus. Flashlights are different. I do care about the "everything else" because it helps me make up my mind. Those extra pixels make a difference. And that's not in some esoteric, "if I had a high-end setup"-kind of way because even the default Windows picture viewer thingie supports zooming. I really do appreciate all the hard work Don and others put into taking great pictures and I even when I check BLF on the go on my netbook, I often go back and pull up old threads on the HD big screen in the living room to make sure I don't miss any important details.
Soooo... long story short, how about a compromise? Resized, compressed (think lossy compression) thumbnails linked to high-res, lossless pictures, perhaps?
I don't think Photobucket supports that - I'll take a look at ImageShack which does. Ten megapixel images are definitely excessive (The recent beamshots page came to over 150 megabytes) - probably 1600x1200 which is what I've resized most to will work. That's close enough to the 1920x1080 of HDTV
I've used minimal JPEG compression to keep the quality as high as possible. If you'd like to compare the full resolution images of the other night's beamshots to the 1600x1200 ones, you can find the full resolution ones in an album called Full Resolution on my Photobucket account. Like all the images of mine there, feel free to do anything non-commercial with them as long as you give me credit for them.
Even my oldest Computer (bought it 10 years ago) is able to handle all the photos without any problems ^^ At the moment I'm using a 4 GB Ram, Q9950 and it's really fast. BTW you are using win 2000 o_0 I would give Ubunutu a try.
Budgeteer: I LOL'd so hard, thanks. Back in the day (before i co-founded space150.com) I worked on Nikon USA account at "the web division of a alarge agency" in Minneapolis. I would guess that all of these electronics companies know, now more than ever, about "clone" products from many countries. But mainly China tho, to be honest.
sb56637 & SPAMBOT: As far as site scaling causing a "double exposure" in some browsers, that might actually happen and would be great to test. As if the browser was decoding the JPEG, and then scaling it into a second bitmap and not getting rid of the 1st version in memory. In fact I would guess that's probably the way that MOST browsers NEED to work that aren't using GPU acceleration for the scaling & Sys>Vid Blit. If they didn't work that way, then any JPEG that resized (via javascript etc) would need to be decoded every time the size changed.
Don: What you could consider, even though it's more work, is to have the images scaled exactly at 400 width for the thread, but to also make them link to the original photobucket images however you like. That would get rid of any possibility of causing even more memory to be used for resizing, and the pictures as viewed from the thread would enjoy a proper resizing algorithm, not the quick & dirty method browsers use.
sixty545: 256 ram isn't horrible for Windows 2000 so you might consider seeing what all you have starting up with your system (programs & services at least), but 512 is certainly much better. Heck, if you're upgrading memory, go as high as you can. 1GB+. :)
I'm just writing this on OS/2 and Firefox 2.0.
OS/2 still works here on 64MB RAM!!! Just to let you know ;-)