Press the "Go Faster" Button

I’ve had to change the disk on our laptop this week. I’d actually been planning on doing this prior to the Windows 10 upgrade but the disk started to make odd “servo about to go kaput” noises and throwing up strange errors which rather indicated that it was about to go “phut” in a losing-a-weekend-putting-it-right kind of way.

It was quite fortunate that I had the disk to hand. My intention was to replace the existing disk with a solid state drive so that if the Windows 10 upgrade did something untoward I would have an easy fail back point: just stick the old disk back in. I ended up going for a solid state drive (SSD), a Samsung 850 Evo disc, which is now quite reasonably priced (it was only around £40 more than a traditional hard disk drive) and meant that I had the advantage of a nice quick boot up.

In fact I’ve done a few things to speed up that laptop. It was a cheap Medion branded one which I bought from Asda around 4 years ago for the kids to do their homework. These are often sold by Aldi as “special buys” but you actually get quite a lot of laptop for the money – not least of which was a nice big screen which meant we could use it as a portable DVD player when on holiday. The limitations with it were more down to the chip (a rather creaky Intel Celeron) and limited memory: 2GB.

I had considered buying a SSD a few months back as the laptop was constantly grinding to a halt and I could hear the disk buzzing away like a demented fly. However, I checked the memory consumption and found it really struggling to cope with the 2GB supplied with it. Having checked for spare memory slots I ended up buying an additional 4GB for it (this was only £20) and it cured the slowdowns immediately. It just goes to show what a memory hog Windows 7 can be. Now with the additional solid state disk it feels positively snappy.

Of course the biggest performance improvement we had was shortly after I bought the thing. I spent an afternoon uninstalling all the extra software that the manufacturer insisted on installing that provided no useful functionality whatsoever but succeeded in making it clank along like a crippled difference engine. In fact I’m sure that must be one of the big advantages with Apple computers in that they don’t pre-install that kind of rubbish. It’s just that they charge four times as much for the privilege of not inflicting it on the unwary punter. I’m sure there is a business model in there somewhere.

New Tricks for Old Desktops

I’ve been doing some testing on Windows 10 this week. I’ve had the preview version loaded on an old desktop so that I can check out whether various programs work and, in short, they do. I haven’t looked into too many of the new features but from what I have seen of it they have combined the best bits from Windows 8.1 with an interface that is easy to use for desktop and laptop users and shouldn’t, for the most part, have users of Windows 7 and previous versions running to the hills.

They have also introduced a new browser which is now going by the name of Microsoft Edge. They still have Internet Explorer installed but this is now hidden away and is presumably aimed either at corporate users or for the increasingly small number of web sites that only work on Internet Explorer. To be perfectly honest, I couldn’t detect that much difference between Edge and the other browsers I had been testing although I tend to have a preference for Firefox – mainly as I often use older hardware and this always seemed to work best on “vintage” IT. The desktop I was testing on had a motherboard dated 2007 and was running with a single core 64-bit AMD processor and 3GB memory so we weren’t talking about bleeding edge technology here.

It did get me thinking, though, about which browser works best on older kit. I’ve always found that Firefox tends to be gentler on machines with smaller amounts of memory although I have never determined how the number of CPU cores affects the equation. Given the decrepit nature of my test PC it was a good time to try it out. There are various tools for measuring browser performance and I’ve always been rather suspicious of them – in a way it’s a bit like the official fuel consumption tests for cars in that it is far easier to produce something that will work well in laboratory conditions rather than in real world usage. Still, it’s better than a finger in the air so I chose 3: Peacekeeper, Octane and Dromaeo to give a reasonable spread and tested them against Microsoft Edge, Firefox (version 39) and Chrome (version 42).

The results on the Windows 10 PC were as follows (higher figures mean “faster” – I added all the Dromaeo results together to get an overall score):

	Peacekeeper	Octane	Dromaeo
MS Edge	772	6000	39188
Firefox	1736	7930	63441
Chrome	1260	8946	58122

Out of interest I ran the Peacekeeper one against Internet Explorer and came up with a figure of 834 although consecutive runs of these jobs can produce slightly different figures. The first interesting thing here is that the different tests favoured different browsers. I believe the Octane ones are used by Google developers whereas Dromaeo is used by Mozilla developers so there shouldn’t be too much surprise that they seem to favour their particular software – it’s the old official mpg tests in play again. Peacemaker claims to be independent so their stats are telling. I did run their tests on my work’s laptop (an 18 month old Dell) and they are much closer (just a 10% difference between Firefox and Chrome) which may indicate that they are better tuned to run on more modern hardware. The MS Edge figures don’t look as clever but is it the whole story?

I tried opening the various browsers with a few common websites open: BBC News, Facebook and Twitter. They all seemed to start up in a reasonable manner but how they were running in the background was interesting. Edge has a very memory light application process but some processing is going on behind the scenes. Chrome opens a separate process for each tab and Firefox has everything in a single process. I suspect that this means that Chrome and Edge would make more efficient use of multiple processors but it may also explain why Firefox seems to work better on older kit.

Ultimately, I think it comes down to personal preference and I remain a fan of Firefox. What did impress me, though, was how well Windows 10 ran on my old desktop (this has previously run Linux Mint and originally had Windows XP on it). At one time it was pretty much the case that a new release of Microsoft’s operating system would necessitate new hardware and, inevitably, speed the rate at which the old hardware would be heading to landfill (or, one would hope, a recycling plant). This operating system appears to have the opposite effect and may even give a new lease of life to aging PCs and laptops. They are giving a free upgrade to existing users of Windows 7 and 8 but wouldn’t it be nice if they could have a free (or minimal cost) version to those on older hardware that may have a defunct version of Windows on?

It still remains to be seen exactly what Microsoft’s plans are and I am hoping the 29^th July rollout will go smoothly. If Microsoft are sticking with a paid for licence model on older equipment there is still the Linux route but I think they would be missing a trick with that one.

VW Golf : First MOT

My Volkswagen Golf is now coming up to its third birthday which means I’ve just had to send it for its first MOT test. I normally regard these as more of an inconvenience than anything else as a properly maintained car should always be able to pass first time. Nevertheless there is always the worry that some unseen problem will be uncovered and end up costing the proverbial arm and leg.

I took out AA breakdown cover a few weeks ago which includes half price MOT tests at National garages as a perk (although they didn’t check my membership so his may just be a marketing ploy). The nearest garage that did this was in Dunfermline so I took the kids along to have a play in the park whilst the test was being done. It was a nice drive through Fife at least. This should have been harmless enough but I managed to twist my back again after falling down a hole looking for faeries or something. At least that was my excuse.

Searching for the source of VW's surreally expensive engine oil.

The car passed its MOT without any hassle – I’d expected this this as I’d had the rusted rear brake discs replaced a couple of weeks before. I had these done at my local garage which was £100 cheaper than the main dealer although the main reason was out of convenience as I couldn’t be bothered taking it into Stirling. The garage used APEC brakes rather than whatever the official VW ones were. The mechanic seemed to think very highly of these and they did seem to bed in almost instantly. They certainly work as well and I think it’s worth trying something else – the car was probably in storage for 3 months between leaving its rental fleet and me buying it so the rust may have set in then but, even so, discs should not corrode that badly.

I’ve tried to work out the annual running costs of the car in terms of depreciation and non-scheduled maintenance. It’s difficult to determine exactly but so far it seems to work out at about £1200 per year which is not too bad. Part of this will be down to the relatively cheap purchase price but after 3 years the worst of the depreciation should be over and it is still a relatively new car and so far has proven to be 100% reliable (rusted brakes accepted). The best part is that I still like the thing even if I do occasionally lose it in car parks amongst the other masses of boring silver Golfs. Hopefully it will continue to keep me in happily uneventful motoring.

Orkney

The annual family holiday: and this year we went off to Orkney. I’ve never been to the Northern Isles before – the furthest I’ve made it to was the Northern coast of mainland Britain which has such attractive sights as the remains of the Dounreay atomic plant and John o’Groats whose one claim to fame is being 874 miles from Land’s End, which is only of any consolation if one is in Land’s End at the time. Anyway, we headed off, if not quite to the land of the midnight sun, it was the land of the midnight twilight.

Orkney just past midnight - it is possible to read in that light

In fact we had to go via John o’Groats to get to the Ferry that runs to South Ronaldsay, the southernmost island which is now connected to the Mainland via a series of causeways known as the Churchill barriers. Part of the attraction of Orkney is the abundance of historical sites and we had a first glimpse of this passing the island of Stoma – now uninhabited but with the ghostly ruins of the islanders’ farm houses and the Lighthouse – the only remaining sign of active human activity aside from some grazing sheep.

Stoma Lighthouse (ruins in distance)

The islands are full of ancient archaeological remains and a great example was just 30 minutes’ walk from our cottage in the shape of the Broch of Gurness – a fortified iron age settlement dating back some 2,000 years.

Broch of Gurness - entrance

The islands are home to a UNESCO world heritage site consisting of the Ring of Brodgar, Stones of Stenness, Maeshowe and Skara Brae. These all date back some 5,000 years and are well worth seeing, although I have to say that the ring, in particular, was mobbed by tour busses when we saw it which did rather spoil my romantic notion of an ancient, mystic wilderness.

Stones Of Stenness - me standing by them for scale.

Ring of Brodgar

Maeshowe entrance.

Skara Brae - 5,000 year old village.

In fact once away from the well-advertised tourist route there are literally dozens of sites to see. I was quite taken with the Unstan Burial mound which is hidden away behind a private cottage but well documented by Historic Scotland.

Unstan from the outside

Inside Unstan burial mound

The more recent past of Orkney is marked by a series of museums, many run by the local council and with very engaging and knowledgeable staff running them. One place we visited on the recommendation of the museum staff was the Barony Mill, a working watermill (in fact we bought some oatmeal from there – it makes fantastic porridge.)

Barony Mill water wheel

Barony Mill inner workings.

The more recent history of Orkney is centred around its history as a naval base during the World Wars. The German fleet was scuttled there after the First World War and the Churchill barriers were built by Italian prisoners of war after a Royal Navy ship was sunk by a U-Boat. The Orcadians seem to have a great fondness for their Italian “guests” but the Italians also left a delightful artefact of their own in the form of a chapel next to one of the barriers. This was build out of a Nissen hut but with a designed fascia and a beautifully decorated interior.

Itialian Chapel (Orkney)

Italian Chapel - alter

We also had a good look around Kirkwall which is the most populous of the islands towns. The Cathedral dates back to the 12th Century. However one of the most fascinating places was the Wireless Museum – essentially a single room but packed to the roof with all manner of radios, Morse machines, naval equipment and even a working version of the Pong video game.

St Magnus Cathedeal, Kirkwall

Orkney Wireless Museum.

We didn’t venture on to the surrounding islands (there are a series of ferries connecting most of the major islands) but I did manage to get a shot of the Old Man of Hoy from the ferry on the way back – at least that’s it through the rain and mist (there is also a puffin there if you look carefully).

Old Man Of Hoy - in the rain