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  • Unable to comprehend simple things

    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.

  • #2
    Yeesh. I can sort of understand it-- this was back before everything became computer-centric and people started getting slightly (and I'm being generous in saying that) more knowledgeable about computers-- and the guy clearly didn't get it, but yeesh, to keep ignoring the advice of the IT guy (who has their job because they know more about computers than you) is just dumb.

    This kind of slowdown is exactly why I try not to have too many windows/tabs/programs open at a time.
    PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

    There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

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    • #3
      I haaaaate when people start telling me what's wrong, and won't listen to any alternate ideas. Maybe some snippet they heard or read somewhere, and now they are absolutely convinced that it's the processor, or whatever. Some of my family does that, and I won't talk to them about computers any more. The last time someone was convinced that a tablet was way better because it was running Android, and I was like "oh, which version?" And they responded with "Android! That's the best. The others are running ice cream and it sucks, Android is better!" And I just couldn't. Not because I mind if people are unaware, that's not it. This person went on to say that the guy at the store tried to sell him "junk" because it was ice cream, but he knew better.

      Quoth Jay 2K Winger View Post
      This kind of slowdown is exactly why I try not to have too many windows/tabs/programs open at a time.
      I buy laptops with lots of memory. Generally low-end gaming type machines. I like having everything open at once, but I understand that it will slow things down, so it's not like I'm going to complain to anyone if it does. I have Firefox open with about 12 tabs, a Virtual Box instance running Fedora, IE (stupid education website will only open in it because of... Java, I think), The Sims 3, Adobe reader, and Word. I don't notice any slow down.
      Replace anger management with stupidity management.

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      • #4
        Pfff. That's nothing. Friend of mine habitually had his FF running with over five *hundred* tabs open at any given time (he had to install a special add-on to allow this without constant crashing). He asked me how to speed up his laptop, as, for some inexplicable reason, it was a tad slow...then again, he NEVER closed FF and never rebooted his system if he had the choice. He didn't wanna close any tabs because he NEEDED them all (no, not for business, mostly music-related and general surfing). I can't for the life of me imagine why his late-aughties-era, 1 or 2GB of RAM on an XP system would have bogged down from something like that
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        • #5
          Quoth notalwaysright View Post
          I buy laptops with lots of memory. Generally low-end gaming type machines. I like having everything open at once, but I understand that it will slow things down, so it's not like I'm going to complain to anyone if it does. I have Firefox open with about 12 tabs, a Virtual Box instance running Fedora, IE (stupid education website will only open in it because of... Java, I think), The Sims 3, Adobe reader, and Word. I don't notice any slow down.
          I have a laptop for web-surfing, and a laptop for gaming. Doesn't matter in any case, I still try to minimize how many tabs/windows/programs I have open. Because truth be told, I don't NEED that many open.
          PWNADE(TM) - Serve up a glass today! | PWNZER - An act of pwnage so awesome, it's like the victim got hit by a tank.

          There are only Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse because I choose to walk!

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          • #6
            Quoth EricKei View Post
            Pfff. That's nothing. Friend of mine habitually had his FF running with over five *hundred* tabs open at any given time
            I forgot to mention in my original post, but that user had *thousands* of email messages in Outlook. Of course Outlook took quite a while to start, and this was further evidence in his mind that the Celeron chip was slowing him down. I suggested to him that he should archive some of the older messages and he was incensed that I should even suggest such a thing.

            He told me that he needed all of those messages every day to do his job. I knew what his job was, and he did not need all of those messages. Other people doing a similar job in the same organisation did not need all of those messages, nor did they need all of those programs open.

            The same way, I know your friend would only use a small fraction of his open tabs every day. It is not possible for a normal human to concentrate on more than 3 things at once, or to swap from tab to tab that many times and retain the context. I would find another way to do it. But then I'm not an idiot.

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            • #7
              I have a coworker who has so many tabs open in Chrome that you can only see the favicon on each tab. I don't know how many tabs that is, since I haven't tried counting, but the window is maximized and the screen resolution is 1920x1080.

              I keep telling him if he really needs that many tabs (it is very easy to end up with a lot of tabs while researching for cases), switch to Firefox and make use of Tab Grouping. At least that way, he could reduce the number of tabs on screen at one time.
              Supporting the idiots charged with protecting your personal information.

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