I have been going through several interesting projects lately. There were a couple of important ones which required processing large and somewhat twisted SQL databases. The other, "weekend" projects, made me dust off Eclipse and fix some cool Android code to make it work on KitKat. But this article is not about large files or databases. It's about those small but pesky JPEG files we often overlook and underestimate, but which seriously affect performance of our aging laptops.
So here is the story.
About a couple of months ago I went to our local toy Tigerdirect and bought the latest 1TB Seagate hybrid drive for my laptop. I expected it to be better than its predecessor, the Seagate Momentus XT which I used for a couple of years, but which started to show its signs of wear.
I was very happy with the new drive. For about a day or two. Then I noticed that the laptop boots up slower than before the upgrade. But the worst hit was to see web sites load noticeably slower. You know, those that unroll their galleries of high quality photos when you scroll down your mouse wheel. One of my favourite ones is the Autoblog, but it looks like all of them are now going that way in web design.
Well, you may say that the new drive is only 5400rpm while the former one is 7200, but that's not the show stopper for me.
I started thinking and decided to look at how the antivirus software works on my machine. Of course, I have MDF and LDF files excluded from active scan, for obvious reasons. What else? So I gave it a thought and decided to turn off scanning of JPEG, JPG and PNG files. Why? Because they are pictures. I don't care if they have any code in them. I don't rename them to exe and launch just to test. That would be quite foolish.
Well, now my web browser runs faster and smoother. No more stuttering on large web sites like Autoblog and others. And I can live with this new larger but slower drive until Seagate makes the faster version.
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