Luckily for the collector, each Intel CPU has written on it something called an sSpec, which is a five-digit code (such as SL52R) that uniquely identifies each class of chip. For instance, the SL52R is a 1GHz Pentium III Coppermine with 256KiB of L2 Cache and a FSB speed of 133MHz.

As with any collection, there is a bit of a challenge with some rarer items. For this collection, my hope is to get my hands on one of the recalled 1.13GHz chips produced in 2001. They were recalled due to being completely awful and crashing all the time, so finding one might be difficult.

For me, the Coppermine core represents a pinnacle in x86 micro-architecture design. After the Coppermine and Tualitin core designs (both based on Intel’s P6 micro-architecture), Intel decided to up the ante with the Netburst micro-architecture. Netburst, used for about 4 years in the Pentium 4 series, was widely known for producing more heat than a 2-bar radiator. Indeed, when Intel went back to design the Pentium M and Core 2 CPUs, they based them off the P6 micro-architecture.

I truly believe that computers today don’t need half the power they have. Recently I tried BeOS, an operating system that hasn’t even existed for most of a decade. That ran fine on hardware half as powerful as a Coppermine CPU. It could do email (quite nicely, too), web browsing (with Flash), an office suite is available, all the usual productivity applications. But, it didn’t consume 6GB of hard drive space to do so, didn’t need 1GB of RAM (the virtual machine running it uses about half of it’s 128MB allocation), and didn’t need a 2GHz processor (these are rough installation specs for Windows Vista). It’s starting to become more and more clear to me that we are just wasting so much time, money and energy on doing things that don’t need to be done, like Aero.

So where was I? Oh yeah, bidding on old CPUs.

Last week I stumbled upon this blog post from LifeHacker, and I’ve since implemented it’s suggestions fully (click for full size):

Basically the idea is to double the size of the taskbar and then create groups of icons for the most commonly used programs. Instead of having to click twice to get into Outlook or PuTTY, I now only have to click once. The hardest part is working out which icons are the best to put onto the taskbar. The image above is missing Notepad2 and Firefox, since I originally left them off. They have since been placed on the taskbar as well.

The instant messsaging client I use is Pidgin, and apart from Skype (which it doesn’t handle), it’s the only IM client I ever use. Since about 50% of my time on my computer is wasted in chatrooms and such, Pidgin has a high importance for me. Thus, I’ve made the Buddy List window dock into the side of my screen, so it’s never behind any other window, even when the other window is maximised. It’s best explained with a screenshot.

What happens is that when the Buddy List is the approximate height of the screen, floating, and is then dragged to either side of the screen (I used to have it on the left), it will snap into place and become sort of a taskbar as far as other windows are concerned. To do this with Pidgin, you’ll have to enable this functionality:

1. Go to the Tools menu, and select Plugins.
2. Scroll down the window until you see ‘Windows Pidgin Options’. If it’s not enabled (the tickbox on the left), enable it.
3. Otherwise, click on it once to highlight it and click ‘Configure Plugin’.
4. In the window that comes up, click the tickbox next to ‘Dockable Buddy List’, and click Close twice.
5. You can now drag your Buddy List to either side of the screen and have it docked, ready and waiting to start a new conversation.

If you’re the type that notices such things, you’ve probably noticed that I’m not using the Aero interface (the see-through window effect). And for good reason too. As far as I can tell, all it does is hog memory and CPU, and make my machine very sluggish. Here is a good tutorial on how to do it.

Those are the three biggest changes I’ve made to the user interface in Vista, and all have made me much more productive. If only my laptop had a second screen…