I need another CPU

I like to listen to music when I'm working. Often I will listen to music from Pandora or Last.fm using their flash-based players.  This is great when I am processing email or browsing the web, but if I am doing serious work, especially when I am in Netbeans, none of the flash-players seem to cut it.  It seems that whenever Netbeans is thinking hard (which is almost all the time with its new context-sensitive editor)  every flash player seems to stutter and skip.  The listening experience goes down the drain.  I suppose if I had one of those new-fangled dual core laptops I'd be in good shape, but with my 2 year old Ferrari, I have to use a more traditional desktop music player like xmms to get a good, consistent listening experience from my laptop. 

Sounds like it is time for an upgrade, now to convince my boss.

 Update:  What laptop do I have?  It's and Acer Ferrari 4005, running Ubuntu Edgy Eft.


 

Posted on: Aug 01, 2007

Posted by: plamere

Category: music

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Comments:

Easy, just use the word 'virtualization' somewhere in your request. Bosses love that stuff :)

Posted by Dick Davies on August 02, 2007 at 03:40 AM EDT #

Could you tell us the specs of your laptop? I think it would be hard to justify you need a new laptop to use Pandora ;-) BTW, nice blog (my first comment though I've been reading it for a while)

Posted by luis on August 02, 2007 at 04:56 AM EDT #

Did you try playing with priorities? If you make netbeans lower priority than flash, it might help.

Posted by Marc on August 02, 2007 at 07:28 AM EDT #

It shouldn't be too hard to justify. You'll be using it for "research" (into new music) and it'll help you "multi-task" better.

Posted by Andrew Hitchcock on August 03, 2007 at 03:27 AM EDT #

Try nice-ing the flash/browser process.. there's no substitute for another CPU tho :)

Posted by RJ on August 05, 2007 at 07:10 AM EDT #

While Ubuntu is nice (I'm running it on the same laptop, although Feisty), it's kernel is pretty bad when it comes to responsiveness... Using a better kernel (e.g. -ck ) would help... Not using a custom kernel on Ubuntu, but when I used Gentoo it was easy to switch kernels, and it gave big improvements.

Posted by georgz on August 06, 2007 at 08:01 AM EDT #

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