update-manager --no-focus-on-map ??

[Liam Proven]

On 2 January 2016 at 01:21, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:
> But who are not "average users"...
>
> Installing an SSD into most laptops means swapping out the old disk,
> inserting a new one that is either half the capacity or double the
> price, moving everything across from the old disk etc. At least with
> Linux we don't have the whole Microsoft licensing nightmare, but it's
> still not cheap, not easy, not quick and not simple. For desktops or
> two-drive laptops it's easier, but you still have a lot to do, and
> that's assuming you know how to do it yourself. It's a LOT more
> expensive if you have to pay someone to do it for you. Anyone can swap
> RAM sticks, and even if you have to get someone to do it for you, it's
> ten minutes' work for your local computer shop.
>
> Adding RAM is cheap, easy and *in general* affective at improving PC
> performance. I absolutely agree that it is not *always* the right way to
> go, and that gets more true the more RAM you already have. I'm certainly
> not suggesting adding RAM blindly, or advising against SSDs (which are
> fantastic), I'm just saying look at the RAM situation first.
>
> This is not really an Ubuntu discussion any more, BTW.


Actually, I think it's still pretty OS-relevant.

There are certainly things that might help one OS that wouldn't
another. It's much harder to sensibly split Windows across 2 drives
than it is on Linux, where it's almost trivial, for instance

If someone is smart enough to install Linux on a Windows computer, I
reckon they're smart enough to move their system onto an SSD with a
big of Googling. Especially if they dual-boot.

Stick the new drive on the end of a £3 USB cable, use Ghost4Linux or
Clonezilla to duplicate it across, swap drives, reinstall bootloader,
done.

As for SSD prices, you are again out of date, I think.

~250GB ones are now about £50 / US $ 65.

~500GB ones can be had for under £100 / US $150.

Try froogle.com or Amazon. You might be surprised.

1TB SSDs are available. Sure they're expensive, but let's put it this
way -- I've paid more for a spinning hard disk *several* times in my
life than a 1TB SSD costs now. But I am old and SCSI drives weren't
cheap in the mid-late 1990s.

Now, on a single-drive machine, going all-SSD doesn't mean a small
drive -- half a terabyte is still a lot of space! The Mac mini I'm
typing on has a 512GB HD, with a full backup of all my files going
back 25y, and half a dozen OSes in VMs, including Windows 10 & a few
Linux distros among others.

It is showing 225GB free.

So, no. Unless you have a particularly old (>5Y) or low-RAM machine
(which today I'd define as <= 2GB, meaning probably significantly >5Y
old), then no, adding RAM is *not* a surefire way to add performance
any more. Go from 4GB to 8GB, as I did on my ultraportable last
summer, and you won't be able to tell the difference.

(I did it because it was cheap -- £15 as I recently sold the old RAM
for a tenner -- and I do run VMs on it sometimes. Now, I can run
Windows 7 under Ubuntu fairly comfily.)

2GB was a decent amount of RAM in the Windows Vista era. Vista came
out 10 years ago this year: on my birthday in 2006.

But replace a spinning HD with an SSD in any machine, from 1 week old
to a decade old, and you will see it transformed.

-- 
Liam Proven • Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
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