"pamela" wrote in message
...
On 10:41 26 Nov 2015, Rod Speed wrote:

pamela wrote
Rod Speed wrote
David Paste wrote

I have recently installed Ubuntu 15.10 and after past failed
attempts at adopting Ubuntu, this time it is going very well
(I'm even considering buying an SSD for the machine).

I have some questions though:

In the System Monitor, under the Resources tab, the second display
down is "Memory and Swap History". I understand that Memory is
displaying the amount of RAM being used, but why does it slowly
increase when using Firefox? Even when just one tab is open.

Because Firefox is a steaming turd and does that on all platforms.

Its mostly due to the way it handles some web pages.

What is Swap?

Stuff that needs more physical ram than the system has. That stuff
is put in the swap file, on the drive that is used for the swap
area.

If you could reply in the simplest way possible, I'd be grateful!

I don't use Firefox but I thought all those memory leaks and
resource problems it used to have years ago had been fixed.

Not with browsers.

They certianly needed fixing as they caused a lot of trouble for some
users.

Yeah, real pain with some web pages.

Sad to see Firefox still has such basic problems.

Yeah, it has driven the browser industry to some extent.

As an aside are you still using Samsung HDDs?

Yeah, still haven't bought anything else.

I haven't upgraded my PC in years

I did relatively recently.

and still use the same HDDs I bought years ago.

Yeah, I stopped buying more for the PVR files that I hadn't
got around to watching or cleaning up. I bought more
drives for years but decided that it didn’t make much
sense and have got off my arse and have been cleaning
up the PVR files to get rid of the stuff I have watched
and some of the stuff that I decided I would never watch.

Still have something like 10TB of stuff I likely wont ever watch.

Some years ago, when I was looking into glitches with my own Humax PVR,
I remember some folks were increasing the recording time of their PVR by
putting their own HDD.

I toyed with the idea of doing it too but never got round to it. 10TB is
impressive but I guess it gets swallowed up quickly if you start saving
HD movies.

Problem is that they aren't HD movies |-(

Almost entirely docos and SD.

I wonder if Samsung are still outright leaders for
low-noise, reliability and value as they used to be.

IMO they still are, but were taken over by Seagate.

I'm so out of touch now that I wouldn't know
if they still make HDDs without Googling.

Not 3.5" hard drives anymore, that part of
their operation was bought by Seagate.

Didn't realise Samsung's HDD division had been taken over.
Must have been fascinating to be a fly on the wall when
Samsung's development team met Seagate's.

Seagate has always been very unusual in that area.

They just let the operation they take over carry on regardless
and just change the name on the drives produced. That's why
Seagate had so many models that look so similar in size but
are quite different in detail. I haven't bothered to check what
the new Seagate model numbers are because I havent needed
to buy any new drives since the takeover.

I guess those Samsung engineers were taught in house
and must have discovered some unique methods for
themselves to make their HDDs so quiet and cool.

I think it was more just a different emphasis.

Seagate drives in that era were notorious for getting stinking
hot in comparison when run loose on the desktop.