Another City photograph from last summer. Since the Punjab is a region of India, how can it be the Punjab National Bank? Anyway. I have distractions at the moment, so posting is erratic.
Friday, 5 May 2017
Punjabi National Bank
Another City photograph from last summer. Since the Punjab is a region of India, how can it be the Punjab National Bank? Anyway. I have distractions at the moment, so posting is erratic.
Tuesday, 2 May 2017
April 2017 Review
Maintenance month.
I watched a number of car maintenance and driving channels in April, and prompted by Scotty Kilmer telling us that he changed his oil every 6,000 miles and that anyone who didn’t was storing up troubles, I checked the service frequency on the Punto. Uh-huh. I was around 37,500 miles and should be having services every 12,000 miles. So I booked it in a local Fiat dealer and got a full service, with oil changes and other good stuff. This requires driving there at 06:30, leaving the car on the street, taking the slow train to work, and then taking the slow train back, and driving home in the evening. It makes a change, and if you look along the track at the station you could be in the country. My regular station is much less domestic and friendly.
The garage found a bunch of other things - leaking gearbox seal, worn rear shock bushes, a hole in the exhaust and thin front break pads - that I drive away, thought about, called them and said YES to. I’m passing on the new set of tyres for a few more months. I can’t tell you how many pounds lighter I am for all that.
The back porch acquired a vivid green sheen, which I killed with mosskiller. I tackled cleaning the path to my front door, which has been looking grungier as the years have gone by. This is not rocket science: wet the path, pour on diluted cleaner from a watering can with sprinkler head, scrub in with stiff bristle broom, count to a hundred, water again and scrub clean. However, it’s a lot more effort on muscles I don’t use in the gym. Lower back. Gardening is hell on the lower back.
My brown garden waste bin from Hounslow Council arrived within days of me applying for it at the start of the month - I was expecting it in mid-May - and I spent the first two shots getting rid of lawn cuttings and other stuff from months ago. This week they are taking away some plant trimmings and more grass cuttings. I’m far more motivated to do an hour’s hard labour with shears and trimmers when I can dump it all in the bin and not have to drive to the Tip. This is as big a result as buying your own washing machine and never going to the launderette ever again.
Talking of launderettes, I read a book about sleeping, and it prompted me to try cleaning my duvet and pillows. These are always washed, even if you take them to a Dry Cleaner. I took one of my duvet+pillow sets to the local launderette for a service wash, and while they got the duvet right, I had to air out wone of the pillows and dry out the other one with heaters and radiators. Not going back again, but the idea is a good one. Except, it isn’t cheap. Unless you have expensive Siberian goose-down pillows, it may be cheaper simply to replace them. In cost terms, two washes = one new feather duvet.
And yes, I did the thing with the mattress and a vacuum cleaner - I have a Dyson V6 with an animal-hair brush head - and it didn’t pick up a darn thing. But then I use a mattress cover. I washed the newer one and replaced the worn one, requiring a trip into John Lewis in Kingston, something I usually try to avoid as much as possible.
And as described elsewhere, I got my little Asus back working well again. Curse Windows Update.
So that was all the exciting stuff.
Sis and I just squeezed in a supper, at Native in Neal’s Yard. The food was good, but the atmosphere was a little too casual. Quite where they found carrots that small I have no idea. I had a trip to Gulu Gulu after the gym on Payday Friday. Oh yes. I know how to live it up!
No movies. None. I finished off Angel S4.
I read Nick Littlehale’s Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, and I thought it had a lot of good ideas. I have definitely switched over to thinking of sleep in 90-minute (ish) cycles. Also David Ley’s The Myth of Sex Addiction, Alex Reinhart’s Statistics Done Wrong, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ I’ll Sell You A Dog, and Thomas Oliveri’s anthology Geek Art, and I finally finished Michael Rush’s textbook on Video Art.
Maintenance. Does anybody really budget for it?
But I like getting maintenance done. And I don’t mind paying for it. Which doesn’t mean I rush about finding stuff to do, but I don’t grudge it when I have to do it. It’s a form of looking after myself. It lets me know I’m not letting everything slide.
And over Easter, I ate my way through a Tre Marie Columba from Lina Stores.
I watched a number of car maintenance and driving channels in April, and prompted by Scotty Kilmer telling us that he changed his oil every 6,000 miles and that anyone who didn’t was storing up troubles, I checked the service frequency on the Punto. Uh-huh. I was around 37,500 miles and should be having services every 12,000 miles. So I booked it in a local Fiat dealer and got a full service, with oil changes and other good stuff. This requires driving there at 06:30, leaving the car on the street, taking the slow train to work, and then taking the slow train back, and driving home in the evening. It makes a change, and if you look along the track at the station you could be in the country. My regular station is much less domestic and friendly.
The garage found a bunch of other things - leaking gearbox seal, worn rear shock bushes, a hole in the exhaust and thin front break pads - that I drive away, thought about, called them and said YES to. I’m passing on the new set of tyres for a few more months. I can’t tell you how many pounds lighter I am for all that.
The back porch acquired a vivid green sheen, which I killed with mosskiller. I tackled cleaning the path to my front door, which has been looking grungier as the years have gone by. This is not rocket science: wet the path, pour on diluted cleaner from a watering can with sprinkler head, scrub in with stiff bristle broom, count to a hundred, water again and scrub clean. However, it’s a lot more effort on muscles I don’t use in the gym. Lower back. Gardening is hell on the lower back.
My brown garden waste bin from Hounslow Council arrived within days of me applying for it at the start of the month - I was expecting it in mid-May - and I spent the first two shots getting rid of lawn cuttings and other stuff from months ago. This week they are taking away some plant trimmings and more grass cuttings. I’m far more motivated to do an hour’s hard labour with shears and trimmers when I can dump it all in the bin and not have to drive to the Tip. This is as big a result as buying your own washing machine and never going to the launderette ever again.
Talking of launderettes, I read a book about sleeping, and it prompted me to try cleaning my duvet and pillows. These are always washed, even if you take them to a Dry Cleaner. I took one of my duvet+pillow sets to the local launderette for a service wash, and while they got the duvet right, I had to air out wone of the pillows and dry out the other one with heaters and radiators. Not going back again, but the idea is a good one. Except, it isn’t cheap. Unless you have expensive Siberian goose-down pillows, it may be cheaper simply to replace them. In cost terms, two washes = one new feather duvet.
And yes, I did the thing with the mattress and a vacuum cleaner - I have a Dyson V6 with an animal-hair brush head - and it didn’t pick up a darn thing. But then I use a mattress cover. I washed the newer one and replaced the worn one, requiring a trip into John Lewis in Kingston, something I usually try to avoid as much as possible.
And as described elsewhere, I got my little Asus back working well again. Curse Windows Update.
So that was all the exciting stuff.
Sis and I just squeezed in a supper, at Native in Neal’s Yard. The food was good, but the atmosphere was a little too casual. Quite where they found carrots that small I have no idea. I had a trip to Gulu Gulu after the gym on Payday Friday. Oh yes. I know how to live it up!
No movies. None. I finished off Angel S4.
I read Nick Littlehale’s Sleep: The Myth of 8 Hours, and I thought it had a lot of good ideas. I have definitely switched over to thinking of sleep in 90-minute (ish) cycles. Also David Ley’s The Myth of Sex Addiction, Alex Reinhart’s Statistics Done Wrong, Juan Pablo Villalobos’ I’ll Sell You A Dog, and Thomas Oliveri’s anthology Geek Art, and I finally finished Michael Rush’s textbook on Video Art.
Maintenance. Does anybody really budget for it?
But I like getting maintenance done. And I don’t mind paying for it. Which doesn’t mean I rush about finding stuff to do, but I don’t grudge it when I have to do it. It’s a form of looking after myself. It lets me know I’m not letting everything slide.
And over Easter, I ate my way through a Tre Marie Columba from Lina Stores.
Thursday, 27 April 2017
Dear Captain Capitalism, Men Don't Demand Female Beauty
Aaron Clarey, aka, Captain Capitalism, is one of the smarter men out there. But he has a blind spot. Here it is again:
Female beauty isn’t a commodity. We can use a commodity to create something of value: as wheat is used to create flour is used to create bread. Female beauty cannot be used to create anything. It has value to the woman insofar as she can use it to manipulate and gain advantages from others, but for anyone who is not having sex with her, her beauty has value in the way that art has value. People who say that art is a commodity are trolling you, not making a serious point.
Even for pimps, madams and hookers, female beauty is not a commodity. The commodity is sex. Beauty is a competitive advantage, a unique selling point.
For another thing, men do not demand female beauty. Don’t listen to what men say, look at what men do. They settle for… well, by definition, in a country where over half the women (and men) are overweight, most of them have to settle for Four and below. Sixes may be sexy and attractive, but they are not beautiful. Beautiful is above the Pretty Line, and that's a very small proportion of the 18-40 population. Three per cent or less, and in some places, it's zero per cent. And yet the guys line up to court and marry overweight, unattractive women. Lenny Bruce got it right: "You put guys on a desert island, they’ll do it to mud!"
Men don't demand youthful beauty. They fantasise about it. They have the same fantasy about Ferraris, holidays on some Pacific archipelago, getting a Knighthood, seven-figure bonuses, or any other form of fame, fortune and recognition. All these are unavailable to them, and any idea they could have any of it is a fantasy.
As the regular man grows older, the fantasy fades and he accepts what he can get. Until she divorces him, the boss sacks him, and the cost of everything goes through the roof while his salary stays the same. At that point he discovers that what he thought he was getting was as much a fantasy as dating Gigi Hadid.
What about the men who don't accept what they can get? They don't get into long-term relationships, and they sure as heck don't get married. We bachelors enjoy women's company from time to time, but she needs to meet our minimum standards for the time period involved in the interaction. (This is proportional to her hotness, logarithmically proportional to her ability to maintain a reasonable conversation, and inversely proportional to the sum of the work required to entertain and / or to to seduce her. This means that unavailable smart hotties don’t get lots of time, which makes sense, as it’s all wasted, since she’s not going to have sex with us. But I digress.)
The good Captain doesn't understand what motivates men. Neither does Rollo, who makes the same mistake. For the majority of men, women are not a reward, a status symbol, a source of validation, or a goal. They are an activity with costs and benefits, a resource with uses and hinderances. This is not an explicit calculation, by the way, it's instinctive, it's the immediate sensation of "Nah" or "Yea" when someone suggests something: we can invent reasons afterwards, but none have anything to do with that immediate reaction. It's probably a simple algorithm: we avoid the stuff that was tedious last time, and we do the stuff that was rewarding last time. Hence that overwhelming feeling that in all human affairs, you're only as good as your last (enter activity here).
The women I see, day in and out, on and in the trains, pavements, offices and shops of London don't inspire me to do anything. And I'm sure they feel the same way about my grey-haired ass. There's a brief moment in our lives when men and women matter to each other, for reasons that make no sense ten years after, and then it sinks into indifference, so we can get on with inventing gadgets, discovering medicines, building bridges and castles and sewers, solving mathematical problems, creating art, and all that other good stuff that life is really about. Babies are a by-product. Boeing 747's are the real product. Life is about business.
I have said it before, and I'll say it again, and the reason I'll do so is because it's true, but the most valuable commodity in the world is not oil or gold, silver or diamonds, copper or plutonium. The most valuable commodity in the world is female youth and beauty. And the reason why is very simple. Because it's true. No other commodity in the world is in as high of demand as female youth and beauty. And the reason why is that half the world's population (they would be men) demand it. And not only do they demand it, they demand it highly. They demand it so much that they built civilization to afford it win it over, so much so to the point we could say nearly all of human civilization and global historical GDP was created to get it.Ummm. Nope.
Female beauty isn’t a commodity. We can use a commodity to create something of value: as wheat is used to create flour is used to create bread. Female beauty cannot be used to create anything. It has value to the woman insofar as she can use it to manipulate and gain advantages from others, but for anyone who is not having sex with her, her beauty has value in the way that art has value. People who say that art is a commodity are trolling you, not making a serious point.
Even for pimps, madams and hookers, female beauty is not a commodity. The commodity is sex. Beauty is a competitive advantage, a unique selling point.
For another thing, men do not demand female beauty. Don’t listen to what men say, look at what men do. They settle for… well, by definition, in a country where over half the women (and men) are overweight, most of them have to settle for Four and below. Sixes may be sexy and attractive, but they are not beautiful. Beautiful is above the Pretty Line, and that's a very small proportion of the 18-40 population. Three per cent or less, and in some places, it's zero per cent. And yet the guys line up to court and marry overweight, unattractive women. Lenny Bruce got it right: "You put guys on a desert island, they’ll do it to mud!"
Men don't demand youthful beauty. They fantasise about it. They have the same fantasy about Ferraris, holidays on some Pacific archipelago, getting a Knighthood, seven-figure bonuses, or any other form of fame, fortune and recognition. All these are unavailable to them, and any idea they could have any of it is a fantasy.
As the regular man grows older, the fantasy fades and he accepts what he can get. Until she divorces him, the boss sacks him, and the cost of everything goes through the roof while his salary stays the same. At that point he discovers that what he thought he was getting was as much a fantasy as dating Gigi Hadid.
What about the men who don't accept what they can get? They don't get into long-term relationships, and they sure as heck don't get married. We bachelors enjoy women's company from time to time, but she needs to meet our minimum standards for the time period involved in the interaction. (This is proportional to her hotness, logarithmically proportional to her ability to maintain a reasonable conversation, and inversely proportional to the sum of the work required to entertain and / or to to seduce her. This means that unavailable smart hotties don’t get lots of time, which makes sense, as it’s all wasted, since she’s not going to have sex with us. But I digress.)
The good Captain doesn't understand what motivates men. Neither does Rollo, who makes the same mistake. For the majority of men, women are not a reward, a status symbol, a source of validation, or a goal. They are an activity with costs and benefits, a resource with uses and hinderances. This is not an explicit calculation, by the way, it's instinctive, it's the immediate sensation of "Nah" or "Yea" when someone suggests something: we can invent reasons afterwards, but none have anything to do with that immediate reaction. It's probably a simple algorithm: we avoid the stuff that was tedious last time, and we do the stuff that was rewarding last time. Hence that overwhelming feeling that in all human affairs, you're only as good as your last (enter activity here).
The women I see, day in and out, on and in the trains, pavements, offices and shops of London don't inspire me to do anything. And I'm sure they feel the same way about my grey-haired ass. There's a brief moment in our lives when men and women matter to each other, for reasons that make no sense ten years after, and then it sinks into indifference, so we can get on with inventing gadgets, discovering medicines, building bridges and castles and sewers, solving mathematical problems, creating art, and all that other good stuff that life is really about. Babies are a by-product. Boeing 747's are the real product. Life is about business.
Monday, 24 April 2017
Things You Don't Realise They Do For The London Marathon No38 - Runner's Clothes.
My walk back to the District Line takes me through St James's Park, unless the weather is horrible or I'm feeling especially knackered. This morning, something seemed to be going on, because there were policemen everywhere and people wearing jackets, and seemingly the London Marathon was coming through St James' Park to end at Buckingham Palace. Didn't it used to end at Westminster Bridge? Then I caught sight of this...
What is going on here? I asked a friendly person with an official jacket. All those plastic bags are the runner's clothes and other equipment. All bagged up and numbered, to be collected on finishing. The things organisers have to arrange. If you had asked me, I would have said that the runners turned up at Greenwich in their running gear, and were met at Westminster by friends and family with coats and drinks. On further reflection, I would have realised that was silly, and that yes, runners would turn up in coats, tracks suits and with stuff to wear on the way home. Also food, probably. Which they couldn't leave in Greenwich.
There were a LOT of these trucks.
What is going on here? I asked a friendly person with an official jacket. All those plastic bags are the runner's clothes and other equipment. All bagged up and numbered, to be collected on finishing. The things organisers have to arrange. If you had asked me, I would have said that the runners turned up at Greenwich in their running gear, and were met at Westminster by friends and family with coats and drinks. On further reflection, I would have realised that was silly, and that yes, runners would turn up in coats, tracks suits and with stuff to wear on the way home. Also food, probably. Which they couldn't leave in Greenwich.
There were a LOT of these trucks.
The front runners were arriving as I was trying to get to St James's station. What surprised me was the size of the gaps between the front runners. There might be four in one little bunch, then a thirty-second gap to a single runner, then a twenty second gap to a pair pacing each other... it wasn't a steady stream, nor a large crowd, as I suppose would have appeared an hour or so later. The elite runners really are running each in their own bubble: high performance is not social.
Thursday, 20 April 2017
1892, Soho
Obligatory photograph of somewhere in Soho, with a backdated posting time, to preserve the illusion that I didn't lose track of the time over the Easter break, and don't have anything to say about much at the moment.
Monday, 17 April 2017
2017 London Restaurant Visit List
Avid readers will know that Sis and I like to eat out once a month, though we didn’t do too much of that last year because I had braces and eating was sometimes painful and always awkward. And then came Winter and Colds. This year I have my teeth back, and it’s April, and we want to do it properly this year.
There are two fixed points in our schedule. A summer trip up the Kingsland Road to a Vietnamese place - this is as much for the atmosphere and summer evening as the excellent food; and Rules in the Game season, when at least one of us goes for the roast Bambi. Rules usually ends the supper season for us, as after that the weather gets cold and December fills restaurants with India and Thomas having their Christmas party.
We started doing this a long while ago, and is it just me, or have the better places got really pricey, and the reasonable places compromised slightly on ingredients? I assume the relentless upward march of London rents is one reason, but I suspect that those with money have quite a lot of money and can afford the higher prices, which serve as much to keep people like us out. There are dozens of high-quality small-exquisite-portions-on-white-plates places with equally exquisite prices, and chains outlets by the score, but no so many in the middle anymore.
Sis is tired of the lamb-shank-brasseries: the places that do well-cooked food, but the menu is steak, chicken, lamb-shank, liver, and a white fish. I’ll happily eat at somewhere like that before a show at Sadlers Wells, but if the food is the point, there’s no point in food like that unless the location is interesting.
Interesting location gives the Oxo Tower a pass, because the menu is fairly ordinary. Maybe one weekend. Same for the River Cafe which would otherwise fail the lamb-shank test.
A lot of the places at the top the Time Out 100 guide seem to have a) long queues and b) long waiting lists, so Barrafina, Time Out’s #1 is out. So for that matter is the Ivory (Sis and I aren’t famous enough). However, #2 Counter Culture in Clapham sounds interesting, as does #4 Som Saa in Spitalfields, and #5 Hoppers in Soho. I have seen the queues outside #7 Bao and, no. Just. No. On the other hand, it would be nice to go to Tapas Brindisa on Broadwick Street, about fifty yards from Bao. I’ve eaten there before, but not with a full set of choppers.
Sis wants to go back to The Providores, which we went to in December 2012 (!), and I want to go back to Gauthier, which we visited in January 2012. She’s also suggested the Merchant’s Tavern in Spitalfields, which I do want to go to.
So here’s a list:
The Providores, Marylebone High Street
Gauthier, Soho
Merchant’s Tavern, Spitalfields
Counter Culture, Clapham (seats at the counter)
Som Saa, Spitalfields
Hoppers, Soho
Tapas Brindisa, Soho
Native, Covent Garden
Oklava, Shoreditch
Rules, Covent Garden
Tay Do, Kingsland Road
Eneko, Aldwych
The Shed, Notting Hill
The Holborn Dining Room, Holborn,
Gymkhana, Mayfair
Pizzaro, Bermondsey
Plus we have to consider The Ledbury, and then not organise it. Again. The Ledbury takes a lot of organising.
There are two fixed points in our schedule. A summer trip up the Kingsland Road to a Vietnamese place - this is as much for the atmosphere and summer evening as the excellent food; and Rules in the Game season, when at least one of us goes for the roast Bambi. Rules usually ends the supper season for us, as after that the weather gets cold and December fills restaurants with India and Thomas having their Christmas party.
We started doing this a long while ago, and is it just me, or have the better places got really pricey, and the reasonable places compromised slightly on ingredients? I assume the relentless upward march of London rents is one reason, but I suspect that those with money have quite a lot of money and can afford the higher prices, which serve as much to keep people like us out. There are dozens of high-quality small-exquisite-portions-on-white-plates places with equally exquisite prices, and chains outlets by the score, but no so many in the middle anymore.
Sis is tired of the lamb-shank-brasseries: the places that do well-cooked food, but the menu is steak, chicken, lamb-shank, liver, and a white fish. I’ll happily eat at somewhere like that before a show at Sadlers Wells, but if the food is the point, there’s no point in food like that unless the location is interesting.
Interesting location gives the Oxo Tower a pass, because the menu is fairly ordinary. Maybe one weekend. Same for the River Cafe which would otherwise fail the lamb-shank test.
A lot of the places at the top the Time Out 100 guide seem to have a) long queues and b) long waiting lists, so Barrafina, Time Out’s #1 is out. So for that matter is the Ivory (Sis and I aren’t famous enough). However, #2 Counter Culture in Clapham sounds interesting, as does #4 Som Saa in Spitalfields, and #5 Hoppers in Soho. I have seen the queues outside #7 Bao and, no. Just. No. On the other hand, it would be nice to go to Tapas Brindisa on Broadwick Street, about fifty yards from Bao. I’ve eaten there before, but not with a full set of choppers.
Sis wants to go back to The Providores, which we went to in December 2012 (!), and I want to go back to Gauthier, which we visited in January 2012. She’s also suggested the Merchant’s Tavern in Spitalfields, which I do want to go to.
So here’s a list:
The Providores, Marylebone High Street
Gauthier, Soho
Merchant’s Tavern, Spitalfields
Counter Culture, Clapham (seats at the counter)
Som Saa, Spitalfields
Hoppers, Soho
Tapas Brindisa, Soho
Native, Covent Garden
Oklava, Shoreditch
Rules, Covent Garden
Tay Do, Kingsland Road
Eneko, Aldwych
The Shed, Notting Hill
The Holborn Dining Room, Holborn,
Gymkhana, Mayfair
Pizzaro, Bermondsey
Plus we have to consider The Ledbury, and then not organise it. Again. The Ledbury takes a lot of organising.
Thursday, 13 April 2017
Windows Update Was Sucking The Life From My Netbook
I have mentioned my ASUS Eee PC 1005P Seashell that Amazon tells me I bought more than five years ago. It has the Atom N540 processor with 1.66GHz and a maximum of 2GB of RAM, which I have. It has Windows 7, and while it was okay when I bought it, running anything on it recently has been painful. The processor is too slow even for a modern full-weight Linux distro, and I was about to abandon the thing when I ran across a review of Linux Lite, a stripped-down Ubuntu version.
Oops! The minimum screen requirement is 1024x600, while Linux Lite needs a minimum of 1024x768. I went looking for another Linux distro, and though Lubuntu might have done the trick, I've just lost that hobbyist drive to mess around with installing operating systems. Using Macs will do that: the darn thing does just work so well that I'm not tempted to go poking around in the underlying UNIX to sped it up a bit, so I'm out of a) practice with hobbyist OS tweaking, and b) don't see why I should do it because MS or Apple or Canonical or whoever should just build the frikkin' thing right in the first place. But I really don't want to give up on the Asus - I'm cheap like that.
So I started it up, called Program Manager and looked at the CPU performance. 50% when I wasn't doing anything? WTF? Looking through the processes, there was a svchost.exe hammering away when my hands were not on the keyboard. So asked Google questions like "Why is svchost taking so much CPU" and similar, and back came a number of sites, which I read, did the bit where you can show the processes a service is running - highlight the service, right-click, Show Processes. Scroll, scroll, hah! It's Windows Update isn't it? Of course it is. I set Windows Update to Manual, ignored the warnings about my bank accounts being vulnerable, re-booted and... Yea! Now running Evernote with tiny CPU usage. Which is the way I've always heard it should be.
I've also set Dropbox to manual, although it seems to start anyway at boot-up, then read its settings, see it's not wanted, and shuts down. Running, it takes around 100MB (Wha! How?) and I only have 2GB of RAM, of which, as I write, I need 715MB for Windows 7 and Evernote. I'm not doing a lot of Dropbox-y-things at the moment. When I do, I'll take the RAM hit.
So yes, my poor Asus was being choked by a virus called Windows Update. Now look, I have more respect for Microsoft that many people with Macs. But to insist that Windows Update be live all the time, and then have it hog half the CPU cycles of a 1.66GHz Atom is just bad and / or lazy engineering. I'm going to check out what it does on Win 10 next.
So now I have my Asus back. You Tube loads and plays in a snap. Windows Media Player is updating itself off my NAS as I type. And I still have spare CPU cycles. Result.
Oops! The minimum screen requirement is 1024x600, while Linux Lite needs a minimum of 1024x768. I went looking for another Linux distro, and though Lubuntu might have done the trick, I've just lost that hobbyist drive to mess around with installing operating systems. Using Macs will do that: the darn thing does just work so well that I'm not tempted to go poking around in the underlying UNIX to sped it up a bit, so I'm out of a) practice with hobbyist OS tweaking, and b) don't see why I should do it because MS or Apple or Canonical or whoever should just build the frikkin' thing right in the first place. But I really don't want to give up on the Asus - I'm cheap like that.
So I started it up, called Program Manager and looked at the CPU performance. 50% when I wasn't doing anything? WTF? Looking through the processes, there was a svchost.exe hammering away when my hands were not on the keyboard. So asked Google questions like "Why is svchost taking so much CPU" and similar, and back came a number of sites, which I read, did the bit where you can show the processes a service is running - highlight the service, right-click, Show Processes. Scroll, scroll, hah! It's Windows Update isn't it? Of course it is. I set Windows Update to Manual, ignored the warnings about my bank accounts being vulnerable, re-booted and... Yea! Now running Evernote with tiny CPU usage. Which is the way I've always heard it should be.
I've also set Dropbox to manual, although it seems to start anyway at boot-up, then read its settings, see it's not wanted, and shuts down. Running, it takes around 100MB (Wha! How?) and I only have 2GB of RAM, of which, as I write, I need 715MB for Windows 7 and Evernote. I'm not doing a lot of Dropbox-y-things at the moment. When I do, I'll take the RAM hit.
So yes, my poor Asus was being choked by a virus called Windows Update. Now look, I have more respect for Microsoft that many people with Macs. But to insist that Windows Update be live all the time, and then have it hog half the CPU cycles of a 1.66GHz Atom is just bad and / or lazy engineering. I'm going to check out what it does on Win 10 next.
So now I have my Asus back. You Tube loads and plays in a snap. Windows Media Player is updating itself off my NAS as I type. And I still have spare CPU cycles. Result.
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