benchmark Archives - The Silicon Underground

Why did old PCs have a turbo button?

Dave Farquhar — Tue, 01 Aug 2017 11:00:21 +0000

Old PCs, especially PCs from the 1980s to the mid 1990s, have a button with the curious label “Turbo.” On some PCs, a number on the front changes when you push it, or an LED toggles on or off. Why

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Clean malware from a router

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 05 Aug 2016 11:00:10 +0000

I see a few misleading articles out there promising to tell you how to scan your router for malware or viruses. Unfortunately they don’t really explain the problem. They also don’t explain the alternative way to solve the problem you

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Outsource your DNS to make your Internet connection more reliable

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 29 Aug 2014 11:02:08 +0000

Early this week, Charter had a major outage affecting most of its customer base. Those who use third-party, non-Charter DNS servers were unaffected. This is a case where making a performance-related change to your system also makes it more reliable. I’ve

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The ultimate budget smartphone: The Moto E

Dave Farquhar — Fri, 20 Jun 2014 11:00:22 +0000

I wanted to like the Moto E, for sentimental reasons. The Motorola who made this phone isn’t the same Motorola who made the MC68000 CPU in my Amiga, and it’s not the same Motorola that built the hulking briefcase-sized bag

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The Asus Memo Pad HD 7 review: It’s a nice inexpensive tablet

Dave Farquhar — Sun, 24 Nov 2013 11:00:14 +0000

I’ve been messing with an Asus Memopad, the 7-inch version. I think it’s a well-built, good-performing tablet for $149, and when you can get it on sale for less than that–and this is the time of year for that–I think

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Benchmarking Android

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 06 Nov 2013 11:00:44 +0000

After rooting a device and loading a ROM or two on it, it’s easy to start to wonder what tweaks and settings actually make a difference in performance or whether you’re just imagining things. For example, my devices all have

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Use Apachebench to test your webserver optimizations

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:18:05 +0000

If your web server is slow and you want to fix it, it’s nice to be able to quantify what you got. Enter Apachebench, which is part of Apache and probably already on your server. The Apachebench caveat Usage is

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Tradeoffs at the low end: Cores or Cache?

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 11:47:41 +0000

I’m looking at building myself a new PC for the first time in years. That’s a little bit of a misnomer though. Today, building a PC can mean bolting as few as two components into a case and connecting four

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DNS and iTunes and other streaming media

Dave Farquhar — Thu, 30 Dec 2010 20:00:07 +0000

There are reports floating about regarding third-party DNS affecting downloads of movies and other media, particularly from iTunes. So, if tweaking DNS settings used to be what all the cool kids are doing, maybe it’s about to become less trendy,

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4 more questions about RAID

Dave Farquhar — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 00:44:33 +0000

Longtime reader Jim ` asked me a few more worthwhile questions while I was procrastinating working on yesterday’s post about RAID. Let’s go to Q&A format. Q: Does the choice of file system formatting make any difference when one is

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