Betty's Pub 20.1
Main Menu => Old inactive posts. => Topic started by: blueangel1977 on June 15, 2015, 07:26:27 PM
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hotlinked images dropped
On Youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pnq8ikZhhU
(http://fs2.directupload.net/images/150607/6o8zcu34.gif) (http://www.directupload.net)
I resized the oversized pix, & re-served them from our server to avoid your servers annoying trackers. I also made some of the smaller ones larger, some of the blurry ones sharper, & tried to clean up the ones where the kids were very dark orange like pumpkins. Below, I added a few more.
Enjoy!
-Betty Pearl-
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That's a seriously overloaded post. Do you know you posted about 5mb of oversized pictures in a single post?
Almost half our visitors visit on phones & small tablets that have data/bandwidth limits, caps, & reduced data speeds. You bog down their browsers with limited CPU & ram on their portable devices, & push their monthly cap limits by oversized posts. On some people's data connections it would take a whole minute just to load that post, or 2 minutes on dialup. In some areas we serve, there is no connection other than a slow data or dialup connection with caps.
Please try to limit you image sizes to no more than 60kb per image even if the images are being served externally from your own image servers.
One of the most popular things about Betty's is that anyone can visit & use the system on almost any device or connection quickly, smoothly, & efficiently.
It's pretty hard for me to write posts & blogs about other websites overloading their pages so they overload people's devices, browsers, & connections if someone post 200-800kb images on our pages.
It's a waste of bandwidth anyway, because our boards will only display them in a size no larger than 500 pixels high & 600 pixels wide. So posting bigger ones makes no difference in the view. If you had posted a 2200 pixel wide image at some forums or blogs you could have even crashed their phone, tablet or browser too.
You can resize & compress your images with a great simple, easy free program called irfanview.
http://www.irfanview.com/
It's not that our browsers all suck, it's overloaded pages that waste bandwidth & processor resources that suck.
Below is the 838kb 1500x2250 image you posted above. By shrinking down to normal internet size its only 34kb in size. It looks no worse but doesn't overload everybody's portable devices, browsers, & data limits.
This isn't 1999 anymore. Almost half our users are on portable devices from all over the world, not quad core gamer units, with 32gb of RAM, & a lightning speed fiber optic connection.
We don't have a separate wireless feed for portable devices. The people visit from the mountains of Chile, to the middle of Siberia, a desert, or ocean all get the same feed. We have visitors from 97 countries & some remote areas.
An overloaded page just causes them problems & is not fun.
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Betty, Do you have a suggestion for MAC users?
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Most of the decent apple apps you have to pay for the app because software makers feel anybody who's gonna pay 3 times more for a PC should afford them. I'm not aware of any free app as good & easy to use as irfanview for macs. I'd check some mac forums about that.
You can buy a used decent refurbushed, off-lease windows 7 machine under warranty for $69-$200 to run your favorite windows stuff from Tigerdirect.com. An extra machine & different OS around the house can be real handy. Since I don't travel well anymore, I leave my windows laptop plugged into to my TV as my primary media center most of the time. It was built in 2005 so only has a single core 1.8ghz AMD in it, but it does great playing HD video, music, surfing the web, & other typical computer stuff. Won't play the newest HD games, but that's not what I need a computers for anyway.
I got my primary PC "as is" from tigerdirect delivered to my doorstep for only $99 in 2005. It's a 3.466ghz intel dual core. It came with no OS so transferred the windows license from my old machine to it. It only had 1gb or RAM, & a defective hard drive, but did run fine enough right out of the box. It was originally designed for Vista. Back then I put XP & linux on it. Added another gb of ram, & 2 hard drives (All for under $100). Today I'm running windows 7 & Linux Zorin on it. It will run circles around any new computer on the store shelves today. It even survived gotting hot, & being under water during the fire (let's see a mac do that).
Tigerdirect's refurbished PCs are ready to plug-n-play though & have a warranty. But for modern times, I'd go for one of their dual core windows 7 refurbished ones. If you must go for one of their cheaper single core refurbished models don't go smaller than a 2.4ghz processor with no less than 2gb of RAM. Avoid the mini desktop models, & get a full sized version. There's no room inside mini desktops to add much like video cards, other cards, or a dual drive system if you want to expand or upgrade your unit in the future someday.
My Mac experience is just mostly fixing them, rebuilding them, OS installs, or cleaning viruses & other malware out of them. Due to their draconian digital/media rights restrictions, odd licensing, & expensive software I usually don't play with adding more apps to them. OS X is a hand-holding OS, it doesn't really allow you to do much to the system or add stuff not approved by the company.
Usually if mac owners want to do more with their machine, I just install a user friendly version of Linux alongside OS X for them to use. Linux has a vast array of free apps to use that install real easy.
Macs & Linux also have WINE, which will run windows software on them. Irfanview will run great with WINE on a mac. Macs, like Linux are built ontop of Unix with a user-friendly interface.
https://irfanview-forum.de/showthread.php?t=5925
https://irfanview-forum.de/showthread.php?t=9645
From what I've read, most mac & Linux users prefer installing irfanview with WINE than using any alternative imaging software actually designed for macs & Linux.
I have an old ibook I got for almost nothing. But it stays in a box most of the time. I use it mostly for testing mac stuff, & site operations on mac. I put Linux on it too. I run it as a Linux machine more than OS X.
Someone heard that I fixed my sister's old ibook a few months ago, & offered me their dead one for free. Too late to use for parts for my sister's as I had already fixed it. So I kept it & got it running for myself. It still needs a new hard drive & more RAM, but it runs good enough for now.
They were built in 2005 just like my windows laptop & PC. The ibooks were in & out of repair shops every year or 2 for problems. My computers haven't broke down since 2000 (a power supply died in one of them in 2000). I was surprised opening up a 2005 ibook & discovering it was all 1990s technology inside. All last-century Chineese & Samsung chips in there. These sold for over $1,000 back when I got my brand new solid Windows laptop for only $400. It also go very hot in the fire, & pretty wet, but still runs perfectly. Originally designed for XP, I got windows 7 & Linux running on it without a problem.
I see those ibooks for sale for $60-$90 these days. My old laptop still sells for over $200 used, 10 years later.
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Recent computer deals:
Samsung Duo 1.86GHz, 2gb RAM, 160GB HD, DVD, Windows 7. $75
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9206019&CatId=2627
LG Duo 2.20GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HD, DVD, Windows 7. $90
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9206021&CatId=2627
Lenovo Dual-Core 2.60GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD-ROM, Windows 7, 64-bit. $95
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8748692&CatId=2627
HP Duo E6400 2.13GHz, 2GB RAM, 80GB HDD, DVD, Windows 7, 64-bit. $100
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8990676&CatId=2627
Lenovo Duo 3.0GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, DVD-ROM, Windows 7. $110
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=7457605&CatId=2627
* These are only a few examples out of many there. Beware that used or refurbished computers mean used hard drives. It's potluck how long they last. Switching hard drives is easier than changing the oil or spark plugs in your car. Some are almost as easy as switching the light bulb in your ceiling light. Some of these basic computers only have basic power supplies in them. So if you plug a lot of graphics & other cards inside, the power supply may get overloaded. Also if you plug tons of USB stuff that draws a lot of power it may work an undersized power supply hard. Most modern power supplies have a reset button if overloaded in the back or inside. Unplug the unit before you put your fingers inside the computer.
Don't run them without anti-virus & windows firewall. I recommend at least free AVAST anti-virus.
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Laptops:
Lenovo Duo 1.8GHz, 2GB ram, 80GB SSD, 15.4" Display, Windows 7, 64 bit. $170
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9631490&CatId=4935
HP Compaq Duo 2.00GHz 2GB ram, 80GB HDD, 14.1" Windows 7, 64-bit. $170
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8913457&CatId=4935
Windows tablets:
Acer, Windows 8.1, 8" HD (1280x800), Wifi, 1GB ram, 32GB Flash Storage, Quad-core 1.33 GHz, Dual Cameras, Bluetooth. $150
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9585116&CatId=7699
Dell, 1.83GHz Quad-Core, 32GB, 8", 1280 x 800, 1GB ram, Windows 8.1, Dual Cameras. $200
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9183874&CatId=7698
Budget androids:
Almost half our visitors come here using something like these. There's countless androids running from $29-$69 that you can get on the internet with (via wifi, data, or bluetooth). By far, our users using portable devices visit Betty's use Samsung phones & tablets the most. The first on the list is the most common tablet used here.
Samsung Galaxy 7" Android 4.2, 1.2 GHz Dual Core, 8GB Storage, 2MP Rear Camera, Bluetooth 4.0, White $100
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8807630&CatId=6845
Mach Speed 8" Display, 1024 x 768, 1 GB ram, Android 4.1, 8GB, Wireless LAN $50
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9692175&CatId=6845
Ematic 7" Android 4.4 KitKat, 1.1GHz Dual-Core, 512MB ram, 8GB Storage, 5GB of Cloud Storage, 7" Capacitive Screen, Dual Cameras, WiFi. $70
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=8993269&CatId=6957
Azpen 10.1" 8GB Quad Core Android 4.4, 1024 x 600, Bluetooth, Android 4.4 Kitkat, Dual Camera $80.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9182735&CatId=6957
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Thanks Betty, I have always used mac desktops because I was a school teacher and our school had a slew of them. I always got a good discount on them also. This is my 3rd one bought it in 2007 and still going strong. I bought the first one in 1987 and never had a problem with any of them. I admit they are limiting but have always proved dependable for me.
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Having a 24 inch screen 8 GB of RAM and terabyte hard drives, I sometimes like the over-large pictures. But:
I agree with Betty's policy for this site. Maybe a compromise would be to post the resized versions with a link to the original (kind of like andyg0404's flickr posts but with photos instead of titles above the links) so that anyone who wants to view the full sized version of one of the photos can do so.
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our school had a slew of them
Ah, our tax payer money at work. Why buy a regular computer like everybody else can afford when as long as the taxpayer is footing the bill, they can buy something that cost 3-4 times as much?
The mid-2000s Macs, esp. their G4 ibooks were particularly nasty machines. Antiquated chips, Chinese cooling fans that prematurely died causing the units to overheat & fry, defective/poor solder joints, failing motherboards (apple calls them logic boards for some reason), 4200rpm cheap Chinese drives, old 1.3ghz processors, & cheap defective RAM chips... one of which that isn't even removable/replaceable, it's permanently poorly soldered to the board. Imagine that. A non-upgradeable mac so you're forced to buy a new one as the times change.
Boy did they make a killing on those ibooks. It was a $200 machine & they were selling them for around $1,000. Mac fanboys were paying for the name, not any quality.
My sister was a Mac fan since the late 1990s. She happily took her macs to the apple store to be fixed every year or 2 while giving them tons of praise. Maybe she was a heavy computer user like me so wears them down more than average.
Then she got forced into early retirement because of leg problems, so can't afford the mac store anymore.
She wouldn't originally let me fix her macs because what I told her was wrong was not the same story the mac store was telling her, until she didn't have money to pay them anymore. Inside info: They're not even allowed to tell you when when you got a virus or maleware, or it was built wrong. They'll give you some lame excuse like the hard drive failed or something, so their sales dept. can continue says that macs don't get malware & are reliable.
But the ibook of hers & 1 that was given to me free, the store said it could not be fixed. They said it is so out of date, it wouldn't function if it was fixed anyway. My sister was stuck using using her girlfriend's stupid vista machine (windows vista & windows 8 suck).
She was gonna give me her old mac for free for the parts. I told her it could be fixed, & she said the mac pros said it couldn't. Well, I fixed for her, plus got another one I got as junk that "couldn't" be fixed, running too.
She looked like I was calling her best friend dirty bad names, when I told her what was wrong with it, & that it was full of viruses & malware too. She didn't believe me. But the truth is, I got it running cheap when the mac shop said it couldn't. 6 months later it's still running great, & much better than her friend's vista machine. And she's got Linux on it too, to run some cool stuff she couldn't before.
I think you got lucky by waiting until 2007 to get a new one. It was around then that they abandoned those nasty cheap mid 2000s designs & architecture, so you got a better machine. They also had a different Chinese company make their new stuff around then too.
http://macintoshhowto.com/hardware/how-do-i-get-my-broken-g4-ibook-fixed.html
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Having a 24 inch screen 8 GB of RAM and terabyte hard drives, I sometimes like the over-large pictures.
It's not about screen size, it's about resolution. If you move closer to a screen it looks bigger, further away it looks smaller. The moon may look the size of a coin from here, but up close it's a whole world.
Back before I got laid off, I frequently used a 23" 1920x1080 monitor. So to post a 2250 pixel tall image is a moot point because even that monitor would only display less than half the image at full size. One has to scale it down considerably just to make it fit the screen, so it's kind of a waste of pixels, bandwidth, & resources.
No matter how big one would like their pictures, they look better if you can see the whole thing on the screen rather than the top half or bottom half cut off.
1920x1080 makes sites, text, & sites look too small though. If you read a lot on a screen, or type a lot of code, you quickly get eye fatigue sitting too close to the screen to see the small stuff. So I typically keep my computer's resolution set to around 720-768 pixels high no matter what monitor I'm using so everything looks a little bigger, & I can sit back comfortably from the screen.
Most people on a PC or decent laptop, have their resolutions at 720-768p high, with 768p being the most typical. So by using the same settings, my view of stuff is the same view as the typical computer user sees. It's best to get the same view as most people get of a site.
At those resolutions, some pixels are taken up menu & browser bars at the top, with status or task bars on the bottom. With pixels taken up by that stuff, a 500-600 pixel tall image just about fills the remaining space on the screen of the typical user.
Then, almost half of internet users are on portable devices like phones, tablets, & tiny netbooks. Their resolutions are only 320 pixels to 700 pixels tall, with about 600p tall being about average on a good one. So all the resources, bandwidth, pixels, RAM, & browser work is wasted on oversized pix because they're re-sized smaller to fit their screen, or cut off.
Odd, that getting laid off & becoming poor has actually made my computer screen sizes get bigger. People gave me 756p 26" & a 32" broken LED monitor/TVs almost for nothing, to use as parts. But I got them running instead. Just in time too. My old 26" LCD TV, was built around 2001-2002. I rebuilt it after it got wrecked in the fire. It was showing signs of age, & didn't expect it to last much longer. It still runs, but the old thing sits in a closet now. These broken TVs I got for almost nothing run & look like new now.
But I just made it backwards. I recently just switched the 32" TV to use as my PC's monitor, & use the 26" TV as my TV. Most people use the bigger screen for the TV viewing.
Due to heath reasons I don't travel well. So my 15" laptop usually just stays plugged into my 26" TV to use as my media center. So it's 15" screen stays off. So by being poor, suddenly I'm using 26" & 32" monitors. Most modern TVs are just monitors with a TV tuner built in these days, & can function as a great monitor.
I'm saving a lot on my electricity bill too. My old LCD TV drew 90 watts. The 32" draws 28-36 watts (depending on what I set the backlight at). The 26" TV draws around 22-28 watts. I removed my nVidia graphics card from the PC because it draws 90 watts. Everything runs just as good without it. I miss the dual display feature, but with 2 computers in the same room, I don't really need dual displays.
You don't really need 8gb of RAM & a TB drive to view large pictures or even HDTV online. But viewing 19 mostly oversized pictures in a single post will still tax your browser, bandwidth, & connection. And those with bandwidth caps, or get throttled down after they use so much a month, have to take care about where every MB is going.
When you figure almost half are on underpowered portable devices like phones, tablets, & small netbooks, plus all those on older, cheaper, or smaller machines, with limited, capped, or slow connections, means much more than half of internet users have a big problem with overloaded pages & sites.
My single core 1.8ghz laptop with only 1.5gb of RAM can view any large pictures or HDTV online. Before I upgraded it from XP to Windows 7, it could do it with half that much RAM. But most people won't have a clue on how to streamline their OS, browser, & computer. Many of them aren't even customizable without a lot of work anyway.
You know one of the bottlenecks that slow down people's machines are oversized drives. It takes the computer longer, & has to work harder to sift through very large drive to access what it needs to.
It's best to get a 60-120gb drive for your OS, programs, & to quickly save some most used & accessed files on. Then put the rest & large files on external drives. Or if there's room & a connection for a second drive inside, install a second larger drive in there for everything else. You'll get a big speed & performance boost, until the OS drive becomes almost full. So get one big enough to handle the basics & the OS with some room to spare.
The same doesn't hold true for SSDs (solid state hard drives). Access speed isn't dependent as much on the the drive size, & you get a tremendous performance boost by using them as your OS drive. But they wear out because they only have a limited amount of times they can write data. When writing data they must force electrons through an insulating layer to hold a charge to hold the data. After several thousand times of doing that, the insulation layer starts to break down, & won't hold the charge, or not hold it long enough.
A properly installed SSD using the proper SSD firmware can last a long time, because it will spread out the data usage over the whole drive in time rather than just using the same sectors over & over. This way the insulating layers don't get used more than others & wear out early. Proper firmware should detect bad or worn sectors too, so they skip trying to use bad sectors. But over time, there is less & less layers & sectors that are still good.
So the larger the SSD drive is the better, so it can spread the data & usage over many sectors, & when they wear out, they have plenty of good ones left that they can still use.
I've seen people wear out their SSDs in just a couple months because they weren't installed properly, had the wrong or no SSD firmware, & didn't know how to use them right. A properly managed a big one could last years. Still not nearly as long lasting as my nice Western Digital mechanical drives. All of mine are at least 10 years old & running. Some seem to think 3 years is a normal lifetime. I hope they're still happy with that lousy seagate or fuji drive when it loses all their pix, music, & movies in 3 years.
SSDs are great performance boosters. Installed properly, with the right software, & controller, it can make a small underpowered 10 year old laptop blazingly fast & high performing. Just don't keep any crucial data on it that you can't afford to lose, & back up everything to another or external Western digital mechanical drive once in a while just in case.
The best senario for an SSD is to just keep your OS, & the programs you need to access on it. Then put everything else on a second drive inside, or external drive. NEVER defrag an SSD. It will wear them out faster. Get more RAM if possible so you're using the RAM more rather than wearing down the SSD reading & writing stuff all the time. With the proper SSD firmware & settings, the OS will try to use the RAM more rather than wear down the SSD.
Highly recommended for a massive performance boost. Not recommended for crucial data or reliability.
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I certainly agree about the SSD drives -- I nearly got a hybrid for my computer (a laptop) when the hard drive died a couple of years ago.
Things on its 15 inch 1366x768 built-in screen appear about the same size as on my 24 inch 1280x1080 secondary screen -- meaning text can be a bit hard to read. The only reason I mentioned the size of my hard drive is that I like to save pictures and videos, many of which eventually get deleted from their original site. I even have the originals of a couple of old Youtube videos whose sound tracks have since been removed. Although text, especially browser text, is a bit hard to read, unfortunately, I am running Windows 7 and if I try to throttle back the resolution on my secondary monitor below its maximum, the clock "gadget" I use stop working -- and there are some other minor unpleasant side-effects as well (thanks, Microsoft!).
The bottom line for me is that if I can get an image that gives maximum detail on my screen, that's the one I save. Also, the tiny screen of my son's new smartphone actually has higher resolution than my big monitor (??why?? -- it's nearly impossible for the human eye to see the difference at that size), and I expect someday to have a monitor with comparable pixels per inch -- allowing me to view those too-big photos without shrinking them.
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Most browsers have a zoom function for small text. One of the things I like about the Pale Moon (a derivative of firefox), & firefox browsers are they're very customizable. I've moved the "+ -" zoom controls to the menu bar at the top of the screen for quick & instant access to zoom controls, or I can reset the zoom to default. It also has the option to zoom "text only" or the whole page.
You can also change the fonts in the browser too. But once again Pale Moon & firefox have the advantage to click to view websites in their default fonts, or click a box too display them in your own font settings... like something a little bolder. You can also customize the font size too. But only change font size a little & don't get carried away or you'll see text overlapping images or buttons you need to click on.
Most of the time I leave my browsers set for, "Arial Rounded MT Bold" fonts for all text to make it easier to read. Most of Betty's uses that same font, so by using that setting, it still looks the same, but text at other sites look a bit bolder & easier to read. I rarely check the box to have font's display the site's own font settings.
Why would you strip the sound off a video when there's a mute button & volume control?
I don't know what kind of clock gadget you're using, but every app I've used designed for Windows 98, 98SE, 2000, XP, Vista, W7, & W8 runs fine on Windows 7 at any resolution down to 640x480. I never seen any clock app for windows that wasn't chock full of bugs or malware though. I'd consider giving up any clock in favor of windows default clock if it's gonna compromise or rule my resolution, functionality, or capabilities. I even have a clock on the wall, but I'd get rid of it if it started screwing with my OS or denied my screen settings.
Most modern sites are designed for 768pixel high displays because that's the most common resolution. By keeping your display set for 700-768P makes most sites look like they were intended to. Of course, just because someone can make a site, doesn't mean they actually know what they're doing... even big shopping sites. Some design them to look & run good on their particular computers & browser settings without realizing most of their users are using something else with different settings. There's the older standard of designing sites to look best at 600x900. Many still use the old standard. But on a 700-768p display text & other stuff may look too small, or the page doesn't fill the screen, so have big empty space on the sides. Then there's those who designed their sites for their 1080p display. On a normal display it looks too big, or the text & images run off the side of the screen.
But if you're mostly a web junkie & surfer, 700-768p is the industry standard for most normal places.
Yeah, I can't understand why my 4" phone screen has 1000x600 pixels. Even with strong reading glasses one can't see all those individual pixels on the small screen. It uses a lot of processing power & resources to run all those pixels, which also drives down battery life.
I see people having HD video stutter, video freezes, or lock ups on portable units, small or underpowered units, or older ones. It just doesn't have the resources to process HD video at full resolution. Just set it to a lower resolution, & it will be fine. On seriously underpowered or old devices, set the display to 16 bit instead of 32 bit to free up more resources. Most video don't look too bad at 16 bit, & it looks a lot better than jittery, skipping, or freezing frames, or the player locking up & stuttering.
I think they just like to push devices with big numbers as a selling point to those who don't fully understand them. Most people know more resolution is great when comparing VHS tape to DVD, & DVD to HDTV. But a DVD quality video will look just as good as HDTV on a small screen tablet or phone. But seriously, if you're sitting 10 feet or more from your 48" TV, you won't notice the difference between 720p & 1080p/i because the screen looks smaller at that distance.
Now the new tech BS is 120-240 frame rates or refresh rates. All movies & videos only made at 24-30 frames per second. So any more is pointless, but the numbers look good as a sales pitch. The human eye cannot detect motion faster than 24 frames per second. Your cat or an owl might, but they don't watch much TV. The quality of the motion on a display will be more dependent on how good the display's processor is, video cards, & device playing the video than it's refresh rate. Refresh rates are usually measured in how fast it can turn every pixel just on & off at the same time. Full motion HD video is much more complex that that, so refresh rates are almost meaningless. A good processor & design will give good performance regardless of the refresh rate... as long as it's at least 30 per second.
Then there's 4K ultra HDTV TVs & displays coming out more now. But unless you'll be sitting within a couple feet of a 32"-48" display, or have a wall sized, theater sized display you won't notice a difference.
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Why would you strip the sound off a video when there's a mute button & volume control?
Ah, I think you misunderstood. Youtuibe stripped the sound off, not me -- probably a copyright challenge. The older version I downloaded still had the sound.
The "clock gadget" is one of Windows 7's "gadgets" -- windows 7 feature that is being discontinued in future releases. I need the reminder of a glaring clock fice right on the screen or I'd probably stay up all night. Anyway, the clock kept disappearing on me and I had to struggle to get it back till I found (can't remember where) that changing a monitor's resolution from its default was the cause.
And, yes I'm aware of my browser's "zoom" feature; I use it all the time. I just wish web sites wouldn't try to override my choice of font size with something way smaller, forcing me either to zoom in or to set my browser to override ALL the font choices (not just size) on ALL web pages.
Also, I don't know why but the remote software I use to control my computer from my tablet when I don't want to lug my computer along on a short trip makes me throttle down the resolution every time I log in (my tablet has even higher resolution than my monitor, but, well, at 10 inches vs 24 ilnches it is nearly impossible to read anything). That's an easy fix, however: I simply turn off the external monitor when I leave and use the built-in monitor's lower resolution.
I've been using computers since the mid 1970s -- DEC PDP-11's with their OS's RSTS/E (programming in BASIC) and RT-11 (programming in FORTRAN). Since then I've worked on IBM mainframes (including fixing my company's assembly programs when they went from 24-bit to 32-bit addressing), DOS/Windows computers and midrange Unix systems, having served time as a Unix sysadm. My first "portable" DOS machine (on loan from work), was a Compaq dual floppy unit, about the size of a portable sewing machine. The bottom came off to become the keyboard and uncover the (8 inch?) monitor and floppy slots. Back in the DOS daysI used to do some "C" and Assembly programming, and even today the first thing I fire up when I start my computer is still a command window (my kids think I'm crazy: "Why don't you just point and click?" -- and I think -- and click, and click, and click...).
Much more of this discussion and we may need to move it to the "tech talk" section.