This happened quite a few years ago - the late 90s in fact, so wind your mind back to that era and computers at that time.
This user had a top end computer. It had a large hard drive, a fast processor and the maximum memory a computer could hold. He was only using Microsoft Office, a web browser and Microsoft Outlook. The processing power he needed was minimal as all the spreadsheets he was doing were simple addition and subtraction. The same with all of the other things - Access databases that were just data stores and not even multi- user.
Imagine my surprise when he rang me and complained it was going too slow for him. He was middle management and as such did not have heavy computing requirements, and should not have had the top end machine he was using, but I thought there might have been something wrong with it.
So I went to his office and asked him to show me what was wrong.
So he sat down and turned on the computer, and after it booted (really fast) he started opening programs and minimising them to the task bar. He started with Outlook, then two Excel spreadsheets and some Word documents. Then two (2) separate Access databases and finally he tried to open a web site.
By this time the hard drive light was a solid red as the computer swapped all of this to the hard drive so it could open Internet explorer.
I said "I can see what is wrong, it is swapping memory to the hard drive. Just close a few of those programs (Access is using a lot of memory) and it will be faster"
He replied, "No, I'll tell you what is wrong - I don't have a Pentium. You only gave me a Celeron and they are too slow."
I tried to tell him that I could see the computer thrashing the hard drive and that the Celeron chip had nothing to do with it and that a Celeron was a Pentium, but he was having none of it. He complained at me for months. I stopped answering his phone calls. Finally I complained to his Boss and he got told to load less programs and the phone calls stopped.
This user had a top end computer. It had a large hard drive, a fast processor and the maximum memory a computer could hold. He was only using Microsoft Office, a web browser and Microsoft Outlook. The processing power he needed was minimal as all the spreadsheets he was doing were simple addition and subtraction. The same with all of the other things - Access databases that were just data stores and not even multi- user.
Imagine my surprise when he rang me and complained it was going too slow for him. He was middle management and as such did not have heavy computing requirements, and should not have had the top end machine he was using, but I thought there might have been something wrong with it.
So I went to his office and asked him to show me what was wrong.
So he sat down and turned on the computer, and after it booted (really fast) he started opening programs and minimising them to the task bar. He started with Outlook, then two Excel spreadsheets and some Word documents. Then two (2) separate Access databases and finally he tried to open a web site.
By this time the hard drive light was a solid red as the computer swapped all of this to the hard drive so it could open Internet explorer.
I said "I can see what is wrong, it is swapping memory to the hard drive. Just close a few of those programs (Access is using a lot of memory) and it will be faster"
He replied, "No, I'll tell you what is wrong - I don't have a Pentium. You only gave me a Celeron and they are too slow."
I tried to tell him that I could see the computer thrashing the hard drive and that the Celeron chip had nothing to do with it and that a Celeron was a Pentium, but he was having none of it. He complained at me for months. I stopped answering his phone calls. Finally I complained to his Boss and he got told to load less programs and the phone calls stopped.
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