Just want to mention that 1GB of RAM is extremely small - even if using virtual memory - for today's operating systems.
"Today's operating sytems". Whose "today's operating systems" are these?
Chickenlegs, I am right there with you in my loincloth, had an Inspiron until last spring, when the screen backlight died, and upgraded it to a chronologically similar Latitude so I could simply swap out the hard drive and continue using the same computer. Windows XP, not the greatest OS but for the most part problem free for web browsing. My system is at 2G RAM, which is actually *the maximum* the hardware will support or even recognize. For all you new computer owners, 2G of RAM was not so long ago considered to be insane overkill, something you would need only if you did professional graphics work.. For Windows XP, it is much, much more than enough.
I'm excited by the number of responses to this thread... I expected some people would post saying "you are ungrateful it is a free site it is great and you are a weenie". Well, they did. And I probably am. But I notice that a bunch of these responses are from people who joined in 2012 or 2013. To these folks I would like to say: I forget the exact date of the site upgrade, but in 2011 the BYC forums ran different software; I would have hesitated to call it "blazing fast" at the time, but it is looking that way now. There were still ads; they were non animated ads which you could click on, and sometimes I did, of my own free will. I also visited several of the site sponsors' websites - which I was interested in because they were chicken related. I do think BYC is a good resource, and I've been participating in that resource since 2009. It pains me to see the site becoming harder to use.
Posting to the new forums was significantly slower for me from the get go. I lost a number of long, carefully thought out responses when the page crashed in mid post, and the experience was so depressing I simply gave up rather than try again. I've done a little research and suspect it may be a memory leak or sloppy coding in the new forum software, which probably expects IE to manage memory in a competent way (ha!) I may have to try Chrome again. The last time I ran it, I found it a little irritating and they were still working out bugs.
When the large, auto activating flash ads were added, it made page loads much slower. And Blackheart Rum, Arm and Hammer Kitty Litter,
Wal-Mart and a YA drama about Bling Something are not smart targeted advertising for this site. Especially when they are accompanied by a darkening of my screen, a blast of synthesizer music and an interruption of what I was doing, and when my mouse was inches away from the ad activation area the whole time. This phenomenon is probably what the people on this thread meant who have complained about "pop ups".
I have escaped the worst of it for now, by telling Internet Explorer that I do not have Flash installed.
Editing posts and PM's is still incredibly slow, though. I edited this message elsewhere and cut and pasted it in... the experience of sweating, swearing and clawing at my face as I wait for text to appear, at the rate of one letter per minute, is not worth enduring except for demonstration purposes.
A final note, most of the content we BYC'ers see, read and write are short passages of ASCII - often short works like "my bantam leghorn Kiki is so CUUUTE here she is I am hoding her". Accompanied by a 400x600 pixel picture. Believe it or not, this is material we could have read on the web in 2000... without our ancient, primitive computers breaking a sweat.
I am all for BYC trying to be the best it can be, but making it bigger and heavier and slower is maybe, unnecessary, when you look at what people come here for. Answers, pictures... and each other.
