4 ms·
As a hardware nerd I always kind of like that moment when the CPU starts really working and you hear fans spin way up. The auditory feedback is like a throwback
by porknubbins 5y ago
As a hardware nerd I always kind of like that moment when the CPU starts really working and you hear fans spin way up. The auditory feedback is like a throwback to a more mechanical age, like a manual transmission vehicle where you can judge when to shift by engine speed.
- wumpus 5y ago... and then you get an electric car, and the only time you have any auditory feedback is when it's very hot out and you supercharge.
- thelopa 5y agoWhen I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.
- laurent92 5y agoAnd it dates back from 1988 for me. I’d always rely on the nice scratching sound of the HDD and the LED to know whether my computer had crashed or was just loading. There was no need for a spinning wheel when you could hear the data getting loaded ;)
- samplatt 5y agoI could tell what boot phase my 386 + 486 desktops were at by listening to the ticking of the HDD heads. When I installed Win95 on the 486 (the poor thing), the time until the o/s was finished with the drive quadrupled.
- fomine3 5y agoAt the same time, we are losing disk access LED.
- skavi 5y agoI like it if the laptop only starts the fan up when the device actually is working. Not constantly turning it on and off during like light web browsing. My 2018 MBP 13” and the Surface Laptop I’ve tried did that well. An XPS 15 I’m currently using does not.
- freeone3000 5y agoWeb browsing isn't a light activity anymore. Web pages consume more memory and more CPU than my text editor
- skavi 5y agoThat’s why I specified “light web browsing”.
- mgerullis 5y agoHas there been a time in history where web browsing was lighter than text editing, ever?
- exikyut 5y agoNo, but there is now, "thanks" to Electron :P More specifically, HN would use less RAM than VSC would to open a .txt file. Eh, not bad. not good; we don't know what the new goalpost positions mean yet.