Resource hogs

[stormbind]

Does anyone know of a more efficient..

Firewall: ZoneAlarm is a resource hog. It uses more resources than my virus scanner! I cannot decode MP3 smoothly with this monster running in the background

MP3 decoder: MPlayer 6x is very lightweight but obviously not light enough.

This is a P166/80Mb laptop. Years ago, I used to play Unreal on a 133MHz/64Mb at 40fps+. Things like running a firewall & MP3 player were a doddle!

So why is it that today, software that performs the same job, is so much slower?

 

[AlanH]

What's your Internet connection? I can't imagine what a firewall would be doing to consume CPU cycles unless you're downloading lots of stuff, so assuming you're on broadband then you can get get a hardware router with a firewall built in. In the UK, bog standard ADSL routers can be had for £30-50 depending on what else you want. Then you can throw away your software firewall.

Dunno about MP3 though. I run iTunes, of course. My 1 GHz G4 doesn't break a sweat playing MP3

 

[stormbind]

That's a good tip

However, I am saving up for a new life on mars - and I'm not taking my computer with me

Actually, I am on a budget because I have an operation to pay for, wages are dropping at the same time, and I have to buy a top-notch laptop to play Civ4 on

No computer should break a sweat playing MP3s

 

[The Person]

You could try Winamp. It barely takes up any CPU. Put together version 5 has used up 45 seconds CPU time on my 2.4 GHz in 3 and a half hour. If you can find an older version (2.x) I recommend that, as it uses even less resources than version 5. I run Winamp 2.91 on my laptop with 32 mb RAM and 466 Mhz, and no problems, even while running most other programs I run on it! Check it out! (I didn't know they came to 2.95 before they jumped to 5 before I found that site.)

 

[Mise]

Stormbind, I know you're a professional programmer, so I'm sure you can do better than my lousy attempt at making an mp3 player from the libraries at http://www.fmod.org/ , but the one I made did on average 1% CPU usage (and by "on average", I mean observing it through task manager - the built in function that returns cpu usage via the dll says 0.1%, but the front end probably added some because it was inefficiently coded). It took about 5 hours in total to get it up and running, and I used to use it for about a year instead of winamp whilst I was playing games, so I do recommend giving it a go if you have the time.

I share your pain, though! I've long searched for an mp3 player that had low cpu usage with none of the bells and whistles visualisation/skinable crap that comes with programs like winamp or musicmatch jukebox.

 

[stormbind]

Doh! Version 0.2 does not work

I am using version 1.0 and that is much faster than MPlayer, thanks

 

[The Person]

As I said, try an old version. The site I linked to has older versions of around 50 programs.

 

[stormbind]

Mise, even programmers enjoy point & click when it's available

I doubt I could anyway, I'm not very experienced with the Win32 API

TP, thanks for the link. I didn't even know that site existed.

 

[Mise]

Mise, even programmers enjoy point & click when it's available

I doubt I could anyway, I'm not very experienced with the Win32 API

Heh, me neither, that's why I used visual basic

Drag and drop! It's great!

 

[The Person]

TP, thanks for the link. I didn't even know that site existed.

I didn't know about it either before I googled "winamp 2". It was the first result.

Just happy to be of any help!