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Comment by dm2 | Hacker News Reader

"Well, unless AOL messes up my email inbox again:" I thought that was a joke at first, but apparently they are owned by AOL.

Are techcrunch employees required to use AOL Desktop? It looks the same as it did in 1998 http://daol.aol.com/software/aoldesktop97/

AOL badly needs to rebrand themselves. It seems like the company has changed and is very profitable in recent years.

They could offer, "the greatest thing in the world, by AOL", but it's not a company I would ever do business with, I don't have a logical reason for this.

Fun fact: "at one point, half of the CDs manufactured worldwide had AOL logos on them" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/27/aol-discs-90s/

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AOL employee here after they acquired gdgt.com last year.

Can confirm that we are not required to use AOL Desktop. Don't be ridiculous. Only thing we're required to use is the corporate VPN software.

It’s Convenient – With AOL Desktop you have access to your online world, all in one place.

Just use AOL keyword INBOX.

Yeah, AOL also owns HuffingtonPost. They've definitely shifted their focus to content.

I love the requirements, 266MHz processor, 1gb ram recommended. That processor speed makes me think it hasn't been updated really in nearly 20 years.

Wikipedia says it was released at the end of 2011.

Their target market for that application might have extraordinarily low-end computers (non-tech people who haven't bothered upgrading).

It looks like they still support Windows 98 users and computers with 32 MB of ram: http://daol.aol.com/software/90vr

For comparison, Chrome requires 512 MB minimum. I only have 4 windows open and it's using about 4 GB of memory, and this is a very light day.

"For comparison, Chrome requires 512 MB minimum. I only have 4 windows open and it's using about 4 GB of memory, and this is a very light day."

Good heavens. Below is top showing Iceweasel (Firefox in Debianspeak) with theverge, vox, fivethirtyeight, bbc news and theregister and an html5 video playing.

On an old i5 laptop with 3gb ram (64 bit OS).

      PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S  %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
    10272 keith     20   0 1673m 460m  29m R  67.2 16.1  16:23.65 iceweasel

About 30 tabs total, 3 profiles, 2 separate gmails, a few google documents, a couple of privacy extensions, lastpass, a few youtube videos paused. On a busy day I'll have twice that many tabs open, maybe more.

Chrome does a lot of caching when memory is available. I've got plenty of excess memory, especially when there are no virtual machines running, I'd rather chrome use it and be very fast than leave it unused.

Why is your CPU so high? The video? My CPU usage from chrome without a video play is 1%, and my processor is nothing special.

In Chrome, each tab is a separate process by the way, that accounts for some of the extra large usage. Top 5 Chrome tabs using between 200 MB and 350 MB of memory each, that does seem kind of excessive...

Ah, tabs.

I was confused by your window count. The cpu in Firefox spikes when I scroll a long window with lots of 'widgets' in it. On the very few occasions during testing of a pre-release version of (say) Ubuntu, that scrolling is also when I get kernel panics. Runs about 10%-15% most of time.

Doesn't alter the main fact: we demand more from our computers now than we did 15 years ago (RISC OS and then Win95 in my case)

If it were 20 years old I wouldn't expect to see the 1gb RAM recommendation. How much did a gig of RAM cost 20 years ago? I'm guessing about as much as a used Volkswagen :)

Try two new Volkswagens fully loaded. A quick search says it would cost about $28k, which is $45k today adjusted for inflation.

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