How to speed up Windows

Everything is marketing

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I'm not saying the marketing or speed rating system will happen, I'm saying it could happen, and as I have been saying all along, you feed people information they want to hear, they will believe it. Right now, you see everywhere about bigger = better, a few months of instead saying faster = better and people will have forgot "it stores this many songs and videos".

It's not all marketing. Not even close. It's about the consumer's needs and for most people, they need space. Like I said before, people want to be able to save their music, pictures and videos. I dare you to do a marketing campaign that tells people their pictures are not as important as a speed boost. The only time it "could happen", as you put it, is when SSDs have the same capacity as HDDs and don't cost 3 times as much. I get the feeling that you think the consumer is an idiot. They are not. They have the ability to think logically, and something that's super fast but won't store all their pictures, videos and songs can not be drilled into people as something that will work for them. If you didn't think they were idiots, you wouldn't keep pushing marketing like it's the bone tossed to a dog.
 
It's not all marketing. Not even close. It's about the consumer's needs and for most people, they need space. Like I said before, people want to be able to save their music, pictures and videos. I dare you to do a marketing campaign that tells people their pictures are not as important as a speed boost. The only time it "could happen", as you put it, is when SSDs have the same capacity as HDDs and don't cost 3 times as much. I get the feeling that you think the consumer is an idiot. They are not. They have the ability to think logically, and something that's super fast but won't store all their pictures, videos and songs can not be drilled into people as something that will work for them. If you didn't think they were idiots, you wouldn't keep pushing marketing like it's the bone tossed to a dog.
+1.

You give the consumer way to much stick - to a certain extent things are about marketing (if you have competing technologies that are pretty much identical but one's marketed better, that'll probably swing it.) But people don't just get up and buy what they're told to with no reason, especially in this day and age when there's less spare cash floating around and people are generally more budget conscious.

For the speed of SSD's, that is why when you use an SSD, you put your OS and frequently used programs on them.
This is where I think you're arguing against yourself somewhat - you're saying the average consumer is stupid enough to buy into any marketing crap they're thrown at, but they'll be able to use the space effectively by working out how to just load the OS onto the SSD along with a few frequently used programs, and whack everything else on the other drive?! As I've said previously, forget consumers all having two drives, it just won't happen. If SSDs do take off on the desktop it won't be until their storage capacities are big enough to rival those of conventional hard drives, I'd say at least hitting the 500GB mark with not too much of a cost difference over a regular drive.

Where marketing works is where you can say "pay a little bit more and get all you've got at the moment plus a big speed increase!"

Where it doesn't work so much is where you have to say "you can pay many, many times the cost of your current hard drive to get one that's faster but it's got a lot less capacity. Though you can mitigate this difference by buying an external drive, or an internal one that's not an SSD so you still get a decent capacity while..." etc.

I would sooner take £80 on an SSD than £80 upgrading my CPU or graphics card, the SSD will give the bigger performance gain, but of course, upgrading isn't an option many people think of, they just buy a new computer every few years.
You've argued against yourself there - consumers don't really upgrade components, so SSDs won't take off just because of consumers upgrading.

For Bluray, nobody wanted HD DVD, it was marketed poorly, the whole system was worse than bluray, from the way it was set up to technology used. It was out at the wrong time, it was managed poorly. Bluray was, and is, better, I agree, but it still isn't "all that", after nearly 3 years, it is still a ridiculously low number that use a technology that should have overtaken DVD by now. Bluray will eventually take over, but not for a good while yet I don't think. SSD's are different though because they aren't similar to hard drives, other than they too store data. They give massive pros over hard drives, with the only con really being price (for now). Once that con isn't any more because the prices get closer, why would anyone choose a hard drive over SSD? There are more devices that can utilise SSD's than there are DVD players (potential bluray players), so more chance of it taking off.
Well, taking your Blu-ray / DVD analogy you could say the same thing - why would anyone choose blu-ray over dvds? Surely if the cost is the same then the former is the better option?

Oh - and you've got the whole HD-DVD / Blu-ray timescale thing back to front. It was out at a better time than Blu-ray (it beat it by a few months) which actually could've worked in its favour if they played the cards right. Besides, I don't reckon blu-ray will ever really take off - I think it'll be superseded by holographic storage before it ever really hits the masses. Why? Well, if we go any better in resolution Blu-ray conks out as a format. Holographic storage has the ability to store terabytes on a single disc, so it gives us the option of scaling up to resolutions unheard of as of yet, as well as providing whole series on a single disc. It's also much, much faster to read and write so forget the slow loading times of blu-ray. But of course, it'll be years before we see that emerge in the marketplace!
 
I am a consumer, I am an idiot. With the exception of when buying/building computers, I am an idiot. I do of course do research before buying anything, but there will probably be better for what I payed or for what I want, and someone that knows the specific area could have told me that straight away. Take for example a mobile phone. I use my phone for texting and making calls, that is it, I Think in the last 5 years I've taken about 3 pictures with my phone too. In the last 5 years, I've been through 3 phones. The first lasted ~3 and half years, it was a Motorola Razr V3i. I loved it, but managed to kill it by leaving it in my pocket, then putting the jeans with phone in the washing machine. I could still text, but couldn't speak. I got a new phone, I don't even remember the model, it was £10, some cheap thing that could phone and text, but had black and white screen, could send 1 text, as in 180 character,s at a time so long texts would have to be sent seperately, leading to confusion, but everything worked...for a couple of months, when it would no longer recognise my SIM card. My sister was then getting a new phone on her contract, so I took her 2 year old phone, which I've had now for ~6 months. The bracket that holds the screen on is starting to come away, it finds signals when it wants, it will say the battery is low or turn itself off when the battery still has full charge.

My point is, I wanted cheap, I got cheap, I payed the price. I got told it will work just fine and I believed it, but it failed, rather than paying lots of small sums, if I'd have payed more upfront one time, I'd have had a decent unit. Listening to marketing of the phones, what the manufacturers say and what others have said, I got crap deals out of it.

Now of course, hard drives (generally) aren't prone to immediate or iminent failure, they will last a few years, but the quality of speed is much lower, the drives are slower than SSD's, even though you pay more.

I completely agree prices are too high for the general consumer now, but when SSD's are affordable, but still several times more expensive than hard drives, correct marketing will make people part with double the money for them, even if they lose capacity.

When you said that consumers need the space offered by hard drives, I could not disagree more. My parents use their computers as general users, they go on facebook, twitter, my mum stores photos, music and videos on her system, my step dad likes to go on motoring forums, they aren't gamers, they aren't programmers, they don't burn massive amounts of DVD's, they are your standard user. Of the 320GB drive in my mums computer, with ~5 years worth of photos on there, she has about 100GB of her 320GB drive used. My step dad has about 70GB of his used. Add my sister into the mix, with uni work, music, and light games (mainly the Sims) she has a whole 40GB used. The average consumer do not need the storage.

For the DVD thing, I didn't say Burays were out first, I said HD DVD came out at the wrong time, as did bluray in my opinion, they would have much more sucess bringing it out around a year ago than when they did. Relatively few people used HD or needed the extra storage, they had a tiny market.

Finally, I should point out, and it is deffinitely my fault, I have been mixing standard consumer/knowledgable user in my posts. Certain points are for those that understand upgrading or at least a little about components of a computer, and those that think a computer is a single object that can't be changed at all. I will expand on that later when I have more time to post, but I'm not on my system and have to finish my post here due to time
 
When you said that consumers need the space offered by hard drives, I could not disagree more. My parents use their computers as general users, they go on facebook, twitter, my mum stores photos, music and videos on her system, my step dad likes to go on motoring forums, they aren't gamers, they aren't programmers, they don't burn massive amounts of DVD's, they are your standard user. Of the 320GB drive in my mums computer, with ~5 years worth of photos on there, she has about 100GB of her 320GB drive used. My step dad has about 70GB of his used. Add my sister into the mix, with uni work, music, and light games (mainly the Sims) she has a whole 40GB used. The average consumer do not need the storage.
But this has been my point time and time again - the average user that you describe doesn't need (and in the future, most likely won't have) a desktop at all, they'll make do with a laptop or a netbook.
 
They probably will supersede plattered hard drives, eventually. But i'm not sure we'll see them in data critical servers any time soon...

I'm just going to point out one thing. that is that is is already becoming standard to use an SSD device in a lot of servers, where the speed of the host machine is critical.

Certainly at the company I work at we've been deploying SSD devices as a servers principal on-board storage on data critical servers since mid last year.

no, we're not seeing SSD devices used for massive data drives, but when you're talking about massive data drive in a professional sense then you're also probably looking at using SANs possibly with hundreds of disks in them. whilst SSD is fast, it's also expensive, (to expensive to have lots of redundant disks), and there isn't a lot of point.

I mean there does come a point when the bottle neck isn't the speed of the disk, but the speed of the transport.

What I mean to say is you'll now regularly find SSD devices in hypervisor machines for example because that allows the hypervisor to perform as fast as possible, but you're unlikely (at least at the moment) to find large arrays of SSD disks used in SANs for database servers, or data warehousing where arguable the existing SAN solutions are fast enough (because there is a lot of spindles), and large disk arrays are able to max out the fibre between the disks and the server anyway, so there is no performance to be gained.

also, the cost of SSD devices mean that it's infeasible to waste so much cost.
where in a large SAN you may have at least one redundant disk in each shelf, if you have 8 shelves you're wasting 8 disks. that's not a bad thing when you're talking about a disk that costs £100,
but since SSD disks are smaller in capacity, you're going to need more shelves, then with at least one redundant disk in each shelf you're wasting a few grand to redundancy, you're also using more rack space by having physically more shelves. so the whole solution costs more. (too much to be offset by any power saving).

SSD's do have a place. that place is just (at the moment) only
high end home systems. (so decent gaming machines),
specific server applications, (where a wait of a fraction of a millisecond may become important. -especially important if you've visualised 14 machines onto a single box and still want good performance!
net books and laptops, where the power saving can mean more battery life and a lighter device.
car PC's or other devices where excessive shocks and vibrations can affect traditional spinning drives.

in a year when SSDs are bigger in capacity, and cheaper in cost, this argument will just seem silly
 
@berry, I very much doubt the desktop will die out any time soon, if ever, even for your average user. Once even 250GB or less SSD's because cheaper, you will see them getting implemented, even if they are to replace larger drives because people will start to market the computers to demonstrate the speed, not the storage, because everyone, even the end user, knows that they don't really need the storage space, they just think bigger is better. It is such a tiny number of people that ever need that much space, at least for the moment.
 
@berry, I very much doubt the desktop will die out any time soon, if ever, even for your average user.
I disagree. Die out isn't the term I'd use - but become much less common, certainly. We're already seeing it in fact - most people I know who just need a computer for the average email, word documents and facebook only have a laptop. Compare this to a few years ago when practically everyone who owned a laptop owned it in addition to a desktop PC; they're far less common than they used to be.
 
I disagree. Die out isn't the term I'd use - but become much less common, certainly. We're already seeing it in fact - most people I know who just need a computer for the average email, word documents and facebook only have a laptop. Compare this to a few years ago when practically everyone who owned a laptop owned it in addition to a desktop PC; they're far less common than they used to be.

I agree the proportion will shift in favour of laptops/netbooks, however there will still be a substantial number of "mainstream" users that own and want a desktop rather than a laptop, and I don't mean if you include gamers, programmers and the like
 
however there will still be a substantial number of "mainstream" users that own and want a desktop rather than a laptop
I'm not convinced - to a lot of people these days it's just something that "takes up more space" which is something people try to avoid.

Regardless, I'm going to declare myself out on this one I'm afraid - I feel we'll only go round in circles by continuing and we've both made our points well enough!
 
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