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.
Topic: Tempura Kidz (Read 17159 times)
