This new phone is more powerful than my gaming PC and I don't know why

tech radar ^ | April 12, 2022 | Tom Bedford

[Wuli]

ZTE Nubia company, part owned by the CCP

[Organic Panic]

I want a phone that doesn’t spy on me.

[Tell It Right]

True that. I don’t have a “gaming PC” per se in that I don’t have advanced graphics processing. But everything else about my laptop is “gamer” in speed, particularly for when I bought it 3 years ago (2.8GHz quad CPU, 32GB RAM at 3300 mHz clock speed, 1 TB SSD). It’s great for running a small MS SQL Server DB instance for my C# apps for downloading ETF and mutual fund prices for a little swing trading (more a hobby than actual wealth building, I make only slightly higher return than buy and hold in mutual funds) and analyzing telemetry from downloads from my solar inverters.

[Myrddin]

The OS and apps are tightly controlled on phones and the hardware has a fixed configuration. Desktops are often a Frankenstein build of parts from multiple suppliers with Microsoft trying to put out a bloatware OS to accommodate all of the diversity of hardware while not breaking the software. Uncontrolled hardware config. Uncontrolled QC on software added to the system. The net is poor overall QC and reliability. Apple, Sun and HP all tightly controlled their hardware, OS and software releases. The config management pays off in better quality and stability, but comes at a higher price point.

[Crusher138]

After a long hiatus from gaming PCs I decided I wanted back in last year.

I custom configed a machine from ibuypower.com with an i9, 32GB RAM, 1 TB SSD drive and a 5 GB Data Drive, a NVidia 3080...yeah, I went a little nuts...

The thing is...I wanted a machine that just works. I had gotten spoiled by my years of Mac. I gotta say that while Windows 11 does have it’s issues, it is stable. And my machine is fast. Nothing I throw at it even makes it hiccup.

By contrast, I have a Windows box at work that is an I5 with 16GB RAM, a 1 TB SSD Drive and a 2 GB Data Drive and built in video. It is a snooze fest. Quickbooks brings it to it’s knees.

As for our phones...my son strayed from the Apple plantation and went with a Samsung Galaxy because a friend at work raved about his. At first he wanted to show it off. That lasted about three months. Then the b!tching started. I am now getting updates on how many days he has until he qualifies to trade in his phone for an iPhone. He says the iPhones just work and his Android “doesn’t always”.

[Conan the Librarian]

Not sure about the excitement about the 16g of RAM.

My phone came with 64gig of ram. I put in a 64gig SD card because I had it and didn’t want to spend the money on more.

[Tacrolimus1mg]

I have my old laptop (12+ years old) for, “internet stuff” and my new laptop that never touches the net. Wifi always off. If I want something, I move it to my new one via external HD. Really, most everything is on the EHD. Just programs on the new one.

[fireman15]

However, with multiple installations of Firefox Portable, and two of Vivaldi, each for its own general purpose (right now 3 for forums and documentation, and two of my own web sites, 3 for comparison shopping, one for banking), hacked so as to enable multiple rows with multiple tabs open - much, much more efficient than bookmarks), plus multiple documents, then RAM gets used up. Of course, that need not slow down computing much due to the speed of writing to the NVME drive, but it can over stress explorer.exe.

I of course started out with an assortment of “home computers from the early 1980s when 16 KBs of available RAM seemed pretty good and the 38 KBs usable in a Commodore 64 seemed great. Of course, the first IBM PC clone I put together had 512 KBs and that was astounding! I of course developed a habit early on of closing programs that were running in the background to maintain maximum performance. Although these days Windows actually does a pretty good job of keeping things sorted out even when you leave multiple programs running.

I mean no disrespect, but your post reminds me of an episode of the IT Crowd where Jen wants Roy to fix her laptop because she has too many programs running on it. This is a funny clip!

https://youtu.be/xXXTeq06s4M

[SunkenCiv]

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