When I was in high school, I used to be involved in the desktop publishing department. Essentially, I was a yearbook geek. In most places, you receive your yearbook towards the last month of school. I’ve even heard of some schools distributing yearbooks from the previous year in August! In addition to the regular yearbook, our academy released a “pre-yearbook” in the first month of school so we can get used to all the (few) new faces. I’ve also attended other institutions with a similar publication. They called it “The Dating Catalog” or “The Mugshots.” We called ours the “JCA Buddy List.” That year, we designed the pages in sharp color as opposed to the previous year’s blurry black-and-white.
When the cutting-edge design was complete, I went into production. It took forever to print my “Buddy List!” “Forever” comprised of a whole 15 minutes. I checked the “Print Status” window and discovered the problem. Each side of the page I sent to the printer was at least 50 MB large! It wasn’t actually the printing that took long but the sending of the data. We used a high-grade laser printer. Printing one page took approximately 5 seconds. But sending the data via USB 1.0 cable – which is capable of “fantastic” burst speeds of 12 Mbps – took at least 1 minute!
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I admit, I have a very fast broadband connection at home. My link speed is more than 6 Mbps. You’d think I can’t complain. But there are some files that seem to download for an eternity. Take, for instance, the Windows Vista Beta. On my connection, that 4 GB bloatware *.ISO mammoth took about two hours to download. Even, when I used DownThemAll!, it took about an hour and a half! That is way too much time to spend for downloading.
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It happens many times. You have an extremely fast computer with a high-end CPU and a gigabyte of RAM. Why then does startup seem to take a billion years? Does your computer hang each time it boots up or (in XP) after you log in?
DHCP Server Requests
Some home desktops and laptops tend to do this. Surprisingly, in this age of broadband, there are computers that still do not rely on the 10/100 Ethernet Network Adapter for Internet access. An operating system does not like to leave its network adaptor without an IP address. So, it does what any self-respecting OS does and sends a broadcast request to any free DCHP server out there to issue it one. Stupidly, the operating system does this regardless of whether it detects any cable connection or not. On some operating systems, these DHCP server requests carry a timeout period (usually 30 seconds) in which the computer is paralyzed waiting for an IP issuance. If the is no replay (like in the event the network cable is not even connected) the operating system will have a NULL IP address.
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