Greetings random people who I probably don't know!
I'm taking a graduate class in Cryptography as part of my Masters in Computer Science this semester at UNC. Why is that of interest to you folks? It probably isn't. BUT I am sort of hugely excited about it and therefore I figured I'd throw a little blog entry about it out there. Read on if you like, if not I'm sure you've plenty of other things to do :)
As I mentioned in the previous post, I recently wiped out everything and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 on my personal laptop. After that, as any self-respecting ColdFusion professional would (kidding...sort of), I installed the Developer's edition of ColdFusion 9 application server and ColdFusion Builder. Also installed the MySQL database server, but that is sort of besides the point for the purposes of this post.
Anyway I was starting to feel pretty happy about my newly setup development environment when I noticed the memory usage slowly starting to go up. That reminded me that running an application server continuously in the background on a personal laptop is probably not a good idea. So initially I created a shortcut to Windows "Component Services" on my desktop and figured I would just start and stop the ColdFusion services as needed. But that was taking about 4 clicks and 80 seconds (yes, I counted) to start/stop all those services. Certainly did not seem to be the most efficient solution.
Aloha fellow humans (and bots)!
Recently, as in this past Sunday, I updated my laptop which is a HP dv4t from Windows Vista to Windows 7 and boy am I glad or what! I wiped the machine clean and did a fresh install. After restoring all my data and reinstalling majority of the programs I use, I found that this whole exercise had freed up almost 30 GB of space on my machine, which I think is pretty ridiculous. Either I had way more bloatware on this machine earlier than I realized or Vista hogs up hard disk space much like it hogs memory.
Now I say Vista is a memory hog because that is exactly what it used to do, at least on my machine. This laptop has 3 GB of memory and the memory usage used to be around 50-55% when Vista would start up. On the other hand, I'm noticing that the memory usage is only 25-28% when Windows 7 starts up.
