Well when you have it on working overnight anyways... I'd previously had a computer set up as a media center, but it also was seeding torrents like linux distros and the like. My computer was always busy.

Not so much today. That computer had a 300Watt PSU and was decent for the time. My newer one is 600-800watt and having that much power running with nothing else, yes i agree... So instead i have a laptop i can download with instead.

I've tried it. When the computer's on all night only takes a day or two, and if it's a few hours while i'm on at a time looking at news, it may take a week. Yes waiting is annoying. But it's not impossible. Depends on your needs i guess.

Huh? Are all programs/processes paused when you lock the screen? This is news to me. Sides a Win+L can quickly lock the screen.

I don't know what kind of PC/OS you got, but mine can be locked and still have background processes running.

However, it's true that while the computer is on, the disk data is accessible without an encryption key (albeit password protected by the OS) so it won't be of much use to a passerby, but someone physically stealing my computer while its on (and who has the good sense not to turn it off) could potentially figure out a way to access my disk data at their leasure (not my realm of expertize, but it is feasible), something they couldn't do if the computer is off without brute forcing the disk encryption.

Thanks for the info, and I've thought about something like that a few times over the years, but I am seriously lacking in Network understanding. Being self taught there are big gaps in my knowledge, especially as I don't think like most coders ... which is why I use AutoIt ... more of a language for the ordinary person, rather than nerd types. Most technical computer jargon does my head in.

Keep us posted on how the Xmas experiment turns out. :)

Yes, this is pretty much my pet peeve with the cloud overall. Its all extremely centralised at two separate layers.

First, clouds providers leverage a lot of open-source technology to build a cloud, but by themselves, those technology lack a top-level amount of polish and require an additional 10%-20% of glue code to operate properly which cloud providers are happy to implement internally for their customers, but they never open-source that extra layer of polish, ensuring that any small to medium sized operation that want to similarly self-host a cloud-like experience on their own local physical infrastructure (like an hospital would want for example) has a gargantuan amount of work on their hand just at the software layer (the overhead at the hardware layer is unavoidable, but the overhead at the software layer is pure neglect in my opinion).

And then in turn, everyone who leverages those cloud providers for their internet application tend to package their application in such a way that it is only usable via a centralised server under their control for the end users. It doesn't seem to occur to anyone, ever, to package their application in such a way that end users can self-host in the cloud (in a user-friendly way, but still using best practices).

To me, all of this is a little mind bogging. We literally have the tech at this point to empower people at the layer below us to self-host (in their own physical infra for app developers should they need that and with their own self-provisioned cloudified apps for end users) which would open up a lot of doors, but we are too much a bunch of greedy control freaks (my personal take on the motivation here anyways) to actually go there.

Anyways, can't promise it will pan out, but it would certainly be an interesting experiment if you want to go there with me. Right now, I got to take care of upcoming production at work, but I'll keep you appraised of developments after that.

That is exactly one of the main reasons I bought a Raspberry Pi4. It uses so little electricity and doesn't even need a fan (so it is totally silent too) that I don't mind keeping it turned on over nights, or even for several days or weeks.

I've used it to e.g. download lots of my GOG games/updates to an external USB hard drive that have taken a long time, downloading something from the bittorrent or ed2k network that has trickled down at mere 5kB/s or even slower (because it is some ultra rare file which only one person on the whole wide world shares online, and they are online only a couple of hours per day or something like that) etc.

I've been meaning to re-encode a couple of terabytes of my old video files to some better and newer format so that they would take less space on my hard drives, and that re-encoding could take several weeks with e.g. ffmpeg. I could leave my Raspberry Pi4 running doing all that stuff day and night.

Magnitus' idea of using a cloud VM for such low-intensive but time consuming work sounds interesting as well. I guess it wouldn't work for my ffmpeg re-encoding project though as that will eat lots of CPU cycles = costly to use a cloud VM for that.

Afaik DLs like the ones from GOG won't run while the PC is on the lock screen of Win 10/etc. Also locking can only be done if one is awake and near the PC, so if one leaves it running while sleeping or out of the house they can't lock the screen quickly/easily if need be.



-

Money is tight atm, so I can't do things like that right now...but maybe some day I might look into it.

Naturally, it was just a generic suggestion because I was once there, trying to figure out what would be the most feasible and sanest option for a "low power computer that could run 24/7" for whatever tasks it is for.

I considered some of those old "mini-PCs" with 1GB RAM and Intel Atom 32bit CPUs that were around like over 10 years ago (they originally ran Windows XP, but it could be replaced with some sort of low-end Linux), or whether some Android tablet could do the tasks I wanted (tablets generally are too restricted for general computing, also maybe not feasible to connect USB hard drives and such to them for extra storage)...

...but Raspberry Pi4 ended up being pretty much the perfect device for such tasks.

Also, fortunately RPis are very affordable, RPi4 (2GB RAM) prices starting from under 50€ here (probably cheaper abroad).

Is this a troll post?

Are screensavers/auto locking after say 5 minutes not a thing anymore? Do you have to be at your seat in order for your computer to work? I seriously wonder... Because if i can put my compuer on lock and i can still hear say a Youtube video playing, then the browser is still working. If the browser i still working then it's still downloading whatever i last had it download.,

Now if you are talking about the client only downloading if a number of conditions apply then that depends on the client. I know Epic's would stop downloading when you started a game. I commented this annoyance and they fixed it in about 2 days giving an option NOT to stop background downloading when starting a game.

Now as for Windows 10, i would prefer not to touch it. It is possible that when locking a screen it pauses/sleeps all processes, that would make sense to a degree for multi-user switching. But i have yet to see that on any system. We aren't on DOS anymore where you only had 1 and only 1 process running at a time, instead you have a time sharing system on a single CPU where process A gets so many ms of processing before it switches, then it goes to the next, based on what it asks for and how high it's priority is. With multiple cores, you have N cores with N processes all going some ms amount of time at the same time. And when you run out of processes to run it may a) Turn off cores, b) slow down processors to conserve power, or c) run the default 'idle' process, which just nop's away....

While the thread topic seems to have expanded or drifted, I'll toss in my "recent past" DL experiences:

Basically - no problems (with "throttling" or anything).

About a year and a half ago I upgraded my internet from 25MBs to 250MBs.

(Or is it Mbs? I don't bother to remember if the speed rating is in bits or Byes - because it has remained about 10-times faster than it was pre-upgrade).

Now, for GOG, what that meaningfully translates to, for me is: Each 4GB GOG DL takes about 4-minutes. To me that says "about 1GB-a-minute".

1GB-per-minute has been sufficiently fast for me not to complain. And I've more-or-less gotten that speed continuously since my internet upgrade 1.5 yrs ago.

As I "own" 960 games here on GOG; I don't download just "rarely" or "occasionally", but "semi-regularly".

Not sure what speed the OP is noting (in terms I pay attention to - like 1GB-per-minute) - and I certainly won't say the OP (or anyone else) DIDN'T experience "throttled" speeds; but isn't it at all possible that the problem lay someone else in the "chain" of hops between GOG and the person DL'ing?

Or, is the OP upset because 1GB-per-minute isn't enough? Not sure; but my experience is limited to the speed I get; and it's been both good-enough, and consistent for me.

"Throttling" by GOG, from my perspective, either isn't happening; or it only affects a reduction of speeds higher than 1GB-per-minute. "Throttling" by other links in the hop-chain seems more likely.

Hopefully, it stays that way. :)


[edit]: some typos and grammar

Sounds good....again, thanks or the suggestion/info. :)

=-=-=

All I know is that on my copy of Win10 the browser's DLs seem to cancel out/stop when the PC is locked.
|
|
v
Update: nvm, it seems the DLs stopping was more likely due to other factors like random restarts(win10 restart bug, which i've taken care of) and some other factors.

Yeah that would certainly break the download. Though i've had with Firefox if you restart the browser it will resume any downloads it had going (or attempt to, some file sharing sites once the connection is inturrupted you lose all progress and can't resume, others should be fine)

It's usually represented in bits. Same for modems, and even codecs for encoding video and audio. So Mbps (Mega (Million) bits per second)

Doing a little math, that comes to about 17.8MB/s or 143Mbps (ignoring parity bits, which is more like 180Mbps to get that speed). To compare USB 2.0 transfers up to 480Mbps.

I doubt it. I've seen complaints before on the speed, while going near max would be nice i think most are happy if they get 8Mb/s, but speeds may more likely be 1.5Mb/s or lower. It really depends on location more than anything if you get good speeds.

Well, tbh, it may be roughly that speed, but my 1GB-per-minute isn't a scientifically accurate timing. It's my rough approximation based on casually looking at it now and then, and being comfortable with the speed (and thus not feeling a need to bother calculating some presumably highly accurate "take" on it). In actuality it may be some bit faster or slower than the rough approximation.

But as far as comparing it to USB 2.0 speeds, that seems irrelevant to me. May as well compare it to some other protocol that can be even faster. It doesn't address the speed-degradation effects from any bottlenecks on the hop-path of ones current internet connection - which is a highly likely cause. Doesn't matter much if some other protocol, without bottlenecks, can be faster or not.

Indeed there are always complaints about the speed. On basically any internet gaming forum/community, you see some complaining about download speeds and so forth. That's because there are always situations on the internet where one may experience reduced bandwidth (often transitory).

The more pertinent issue would be - is GOG "throttling"? Not whether there bottlenecks on the internet that one might attribute to GOG when it isn't them (because, yes, that is going to happen).

Is GOG "throttling"?

I don't know. But I've not seen it in my own semi-regular downloading experience (if it doesn't happen to me, it doesn't happen at all - amirite? /sarc). Basically, I am saying - how is one sure it's GOG and not some other bottleneck someplace else on the hop-path?