Chrome or Edge Browser? Which is Better?

by KateWild 56 Replies latest forum tech-support

• 

  Simon

  Most people don't need 1Tb of space, let alone 2Tb. It encourages data-hoarding and ultimately, loss. If you "need" so much space it's because you're treating is as your primary store and not a window on it. What you should be doing is using the cloud and only using what is current. Whether it's music, photos, videos or whatever - it should be on cloud storage to be safe. Even a backup at home is not safe.

  A decent sized fast SSD is the exact same price as a large but dog-slow 5400 RPM HDD so it makes no sense to "make do" with something 20x as slow when it's going to cost the exact same amount.

  Most sensible people buy the best option that they can for the money, I can't understand being willing to buy something that's slower but costs as much.

  "hey, they didn't have the fast car I wanted but I got this tractor for the exact same price!! I don't mind that it takes me an hour to get to work, I'll just drink coffee".
• 

  Landy

  Most people don't need 1Tb of space, let alone 2Tb. It encourages data-hoarding and ultimately, loss. If you "need" so much space it's because you're treating is as your primary store and not a window on it. What you should be doing is using the cloud and only using what is current. Whether it's music, photos, videos or whatever - it should be on cloud storage to be safe. Even a backup at home is not safe.

  The trouble is, most users, if not all, do data hoard. Especially home users. They'll have ten years of family photos on there, their music collection and quite possibly downloaded films. You can't change user behaviour easily and the current requirement is for more storage, not less. The sensible ones will back it up to some sort of cloud storage but you also have to bear in mind a lot of cloud services sync the data (dropbox, livedrive, etc.) and keep a local copy thus you still need the disk capacity.

  A decent sized fast SSD is the exact same price as a large but dog-slow 5400 RPM HDD so it makes no sense to "make do" with something 20x as slow when it's going to cost the exact same amount.

  In the real world it's nowhere near 20x as quick. I've got a 1TB SSD in my work laptop and yes it's quicker booting up and a bit quicker to open apps, but 20x? No way. The bottleneck in system speed isn't always the disk.
  

  Most sensible people buy the best option that they can for the money, I can't understand being willing to buy something that's slower but costs as much.

  Because a larger disk may suit their needs better. You have to remember 95% (if not more) of the PCs out there are still using normal hard drives and getting along ok with them. As the capacity of SSDs grows and PCs get replaced then the industry will migrate across. Yes, that's a good thing but don't expect the user to suddenly go 'wow, isn't this wonderful'. We'll still get the same grumbles about slow apps, slow internet etc.

  "hey, they didn't have the fast car I wanted but I got this tractor for the exact same price!! I don't mind that it takes me an hour to get to work, I'll just drink coffee".
  

  Because they might also want to plough a field. ;)
• 

  Landy

  It's beautiful and I never have to spend time diagnosing driver issues or hacking around the registry or trying to figure out why the sound doesn't work after the latest Windows update or it won't wake up from sleep like happens with every PC desktop or laptop I've ever owned. Also, no viruses or adware. I've had adware installed from Microsoft provided downloads. They just don't seem to 'care' the same way.

  I sort of agree. Macs, in a sandboxed, isolated environment are nice. If I wanted a PC at home to surf the web, watch youtube and answer the odd email then I'd consider a mac.

  But it's no coincidence that if there's a mac in the networks I support then you can bet your bottom dollar that the single mac will give me more grief then all the other PCs put together when it comes to interacting with the rest of the network, be it printing, accessing network shares or whatever.
  
• 

  zombie dub

  re: the 20x thing, I have many apps that took 40 seconds + to boot on a 7200rpm HD that open in a couple of seconds on an SSD.
• 

  Simon

  The 20x reference is for that component. It may not make the entire PC 20x faster but the impact it will have will depend on which components are involved at any point in time.

  Very often though the hard drive is the slowest thing by far and is the bottleneck in the system. Using an SSD often gives the other components a better chance to run at full speed.

  The boot process and app loading is often most dramatic because it's almost completely constrained by disk loading. At the same time, it's actually the "best case" usage for older hard-drives - when your PC is up and running and disk access becomes more random, their performance gets even worse (vs loading large contiguous files).

  This translates into sometimes abysmal performance when the PC uses the disk for caching as web-pages are viewed, sometimes to the point that the cache (which should speed things up) and be making little difference vs downloading from a fast broadband connection. A webpage could load hundreds of little pieces (scripts, styles, images etc...) and each request takes extra delay for the disk to locate it (the head has to move to the right track and the platter has to spin round to the right point). It's a physical limitation - actual mechanical moving parts.

  Ultimately, your internet experience is slow (slower than it should be) even though you have a fast connection and a fast processor, plenty of memory and lots of disk capacity.
• 

  Landy

  re: the 20x thing, I have many apps that took 40 seconds + to boot on a 7200rpm HD that open in a couple of seconds on an SSD.

  I've just done a real world test.

  My work PC, i5, 16GB RAM normal HDD - outlook 2013 double click to app open in 9 seconds.

  My work laptop, i5, 16GB RAM 1TB 6GBps SSD - outlook 2013 dbouble click to app open in 8 seconds.

  Ok, not definitive as doesn't include add-ins etc, but in the real world that's the sort of diiference it makes. The biggest benefit you get is in bootup/resume from hibernation.
• 

  Landy

  The boot process and app loading is often most dramatic because it's almost completely constrained by disk loading. At the same time, it's actually the "best case" usage for older hard-drives - when your PC is up and running and disk access becomes more random, their performance gets even worse (vs loading large contiguous files).

  When posts cross. ;)

  And bear in mind when you haven't much RAM you may have large paging files. These are much better with SSDs, but better still to have more RAM.
  
• 

  Simon

  You need to do a test from cold, Office could have been pre-loaded at startup so it's in the PC's memory cache. MS don't mind making other apps slow to make theirs fast - it's their PC after all, not yours (well, they think).

  Benchmarking things accurately is difficult. You can easily end up measuring the wrong thing if you don't know how things work at a lower level or how different apps have been optimized to 'cheat' in inflate their own scores.

  Yes, RAM and paging file play a part too. It's important that a system is balanced to match the intended use.
• 

  Landy

  You need to do a test from cold, Office could have been pre-loaded at startup so it's in the PC's memory cache. MS don't mind making other apps slow to make theirs fast - it's their PC after all, not yours (well, they think).

  Benchmarking things accurately is difficult. You can easily end up measuring the wrong thing if you don't know how things work at a lower level or how different apps have been optimized to 'cheat' in inflate their own scores.

  Yes, RAM and paging file play a part too. It's important that a system is balanced to match the intended use.

  I agree with all of that - but it also pretty much proves my point that in the daily real world use of a PC, the impact of SSDs, while definite, isn't earth shattering.
• 

  Simon

  Not really, it shows that MS have optimized things to make their own app as fast as possible. A 50Mb doc loaded from an SSD will be faster though and using any other app that doesn't pre-load itself will also be faster with an SSD.

  Hard drives have no problem with continuous streaming of data like loading a movie - that is a great use-case for them. But for the type of access that happens with an internet cache, the mechanical nature and latency of a HDD makes them much slower than SSD.