Seniors and computers.

[Chippy_Tea]

In the past 20 years nothing has got faster, in fact it's slower & it's also harder to find where they moved the menu option to. (I'm looking at you ms office)

I recently bought a new desktop to replace my ageing one that would not show my drone footage in UHD it also wouldn't update to windows 11, i went for a UHD monitor, a fast processor, lots of ram, a dedicated video card (to make use of the monitor) and an SSD it is a lot faster than my old one.

My internet speed has jumped to a capped 150Mbps and i think i could have 900Mbps if i wanted but i dont need that speeed.

 

[Stu]

Pah. Windoze my ****
You should have been using a terminal emulator in DOS to talk directly to the 2400 baud modem on the com port& typed in the at commands to connect to the pre internet bulleten boards.

I've actually got a radio with a packet modem on the back and we have a packet network.

It's like going back to 1992.

 

[Stu]

There was a lad in school with me in the 80s,quiet chap but decent...computers mad.
Sold his company(IT)when he was 40,about 16 years ago for 4.5 million and retired....

Until he died a couple of years back, I've been friends with Alan Solomon, otherwise known as Dr Solomon, for probably 15 years. The most unassuming geeky fella you could have ever met! His wife was lovely too.

After he sold up to Symantec, he semi-retired, running a few servers in his garage and also he was an absolute ace at recovering "dead" hard drives. Companies will pay hundreds and thousands to recover data.

He'd actually get the drives running again, get the data back, clean them up and give them away.

I work in IT and used to work in server management, so in my PC, I had RAID 5 +1 using loads of his free disks.
Obviously, with SSDs and cloud, that's no longer necessary. Not to mention I have loads of PCs and Macs running in my house which back each other up.

 

[Druss]

My internet speed has jumped to a capped 150Mbps and i think i could have 900Mbps if i wanted but i dont need that speeed.

I went for the 900Mbps, really don't need it either and it's a bit more pricey.
But I have two high bandwidth using, whining children, and a medium bandwidth using whining wife who regularly whine about the crappy internet speed.

I generally just watch the occasional YouTube video in the shed, but when I do I want it in crisp HD!

 

[Agentgonzo]

But back in the early 80s people had to be clever to get a computer with limited speed & memory to do stuff
In the past 20 years nothing has got faster, in fact it's slower & it's also harder to find where they moved the menu option to. (I'm looking at you ms office)

No, you're just getting older

 

[jof]

My internet speed has jumped to a capped 150Mbps and i think i could have 900Mbps if i wanted but i dont need that speeed.

You know that there is no point in going for super high speed if all your devices connect via WiFi, as the speed will be capped by the WiFi bandwidth.

If you want to utilize the full speed of a 900Mbps connection, you will need an old fashioned ethernet cable, cat 5E or above.

 

[MashBag]

View attachment 109065

Not quite..

 

[MashBag]

You know that there is no point in going for super high speed if all your devices connect via WiFi, as the speed will be capped by the WiFi bandwidth.

Does it depend on the number of users?

 

[jof]

Not quite..

View attachment 109122

I love the fact it's printed on Sinclair silver thermal paper

Does it depend on the number of users?

It's easy to search the interwebs for this stuff, so here is my interpretation of that mixed with a bit of practical experience if anyone can be bothered to read it

It depends on several things.
Yes, the total bandwidth will be shared between however many devices you have, but something streaming HD video will use a lot more than your phone on standby that will check email/WhatsApp etc notifications once every X minutes.

The frequency the devices support. The original 2.4GHz frequency you would be lucky to get 100Mbps sat next to the router. 5GHz should get you up to 500Mbps.
It's not linear because the technology uses other clever electronics tricks to make it go faster, like using multiple channels.

If you are using 2.4GHz in your garden on a drizzly/foggy day it will be much worse as the frequency is very close to what your microwave oven uses to heat (be absorbed by) water.

It can be a problem if you live in high density housing as everybody's WiFi will be fighting each other. Like the old days of turning the tuning dial on a MW radio.

Now, more modern WiFi devices claim they support WiFi 6 & 7, which get very fast, but that's not really much good unless your purchased top end new devices that support those speeds.

You will find that almost every device you have will have a cheap WiFi chip that supports both 2.4 and 5Ghz at their standard rates and costs manufacturers 10p

If you look at the blurb on any WiFi device you buy it will have a collection of numbers & letters like 802.11acn.
The number refers to the general WiFi standard.
The letters refer to what frequency & speed it supports, so they are the important bit.

 

[Clint]

I like it when people can talk factually about a subject they're either qualified in or passionate about they've learnt it and understood.
What I can't stand are bullshitters that know that you know they're full of it but still carry on.

 

[soupdragon]

Not quite..

View attachment 109122

I remember typing in about 4 pages or so of code from Sinclair User magazine. Simple program to keep track of money in our bank account. I was gutted when I ran it to find that it wouldn't load....
I was so impressed when I read through the lines of code and realised that a single line that would carry over the running total from one day to the next (or something similar as I don't recall the exact issue now) was missing. I really was chuffed when I entered the code that I thought would fix it and found that it worked
I had a smile on my face for weeks

Cheers Tom

 

[Twostage]

But back in the early 80s people had to be clever to get a computer with limited speed & memory to do stuff
In the past 20 years nothing has got faster, in fact it's slower & it's also harder to find where they moved the menu option to. (I'm looking at you ms office)

I used to write commercial software applications (finance, payroll, stocks and shares etc.) that ran on CPM (remember that ?) and Apple II computers that had 32K of RAM.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

You know that there is no point in going for super high speed if all your devices connect via WiFi, as the speed will be capped by the WiFi bandwidth.

All our devices can use 5Ghz we get full strength signal and full 150Mbps speed everywhere in the house the eero routers that TalkTalk supply with FTTP will switch channels automatically if they detect you are on a congested channel which i mention below i think people suffer congestion more on 2.4Ghz than on 5Ghz my scan using the analyser below shows that in my case.

This is my mobile on 5Ghz test take a few minutes ago.

The main thing according to many threads on Thinkbroadband that can slow your wi-fi speed is congestion i used the analyser below a few minutes ago and our 2.4 Ghz is congested similar to the screen shot below the 5Ghz is nearly clear, if you have a router that allows you to change channel you can use the analyser to see which are the clearest channels and switch to one of those.

These are not my results they are copies from the apps page on google store.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=abdelrahman.wifianalyzerpro&hl=en_GB&pli=1

 

[Chippy_Tea]

2.4 GHz vs. 5 GHz vs. 6 GHz: Difference in Speed​

In addition to channel characteristics, typical data transfer speeds are influenced by factors such as other devices using the band, physical objects or walls reducing signal strength, or limitations imposed by an internet service provider (ISP).

• 2.4 GHz can deliver a typical over-the-air max speed of up to 100 megabits per second (Mbps).
• 5 GHz can deliver up to 1,000 Mbps.
• 6 GHz can deliver up to 2,000 Mbps.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

Here is how slow page loading was for large images using a 56k modem but it was amazing to all us new to it -

 

[MashBag]

I love the fact it's printed on Sinclair silver thermal paper

That thermal paper was well ahead of its time too. A large % of mail label are thermal now.

 

[jof]

Modern internet pages are very slow to load anyway because lazy developers link in 100s of Ks of unnecessary JavaScript libraries and tracking junk. The only reason you don't notice is because the network speed has gone up so much.
If you had to use your mobile phone for data & it only got 3g, you would soon start complaining & that's loads faster than an old us robotics 56k dialup modem.

 

[Chippy_Tea]

I drive in the lakes and it used to be a nightmare with lots of places having no signal and some places having 3G (around 200 Kbps to 2 Mbps) which was painfully slow then we got H & H+ which made a difference but again only if you could get a decent signal, then places started to get 4G the jump in speed was amazing.

3G is considered very slow compared to newer network standards, with typical download speeds ranging from around 200 Kbps to 2 Mbps, making it suitable only for basic web browsing and simple tasks, not for streaming video or large downloads; most users would consider it significantly slower than even basic 4G speeds.

H & H+ - H stands for HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) which is a 3G technology, while H+ represents HSPA+ (Enhanced High Speed Packet Access) which is a faster version of HSPA essentially offering improved speeds compared to just H.