Alright, for those who don't know, I am (among many other things) 'The I.T. Guy' where I work. And Lo, it came to pass, that on one particular 25th of April in the Year Of Our Lord Two-Thousand-And-Six, that I found myself sitting between two identical computers. Two twins from Dell that have never been more than ten feet apart since their manufacture. Here are the stats for those who care of such things:

Hardware: Dell Optiplex GX100 666MHZ PIII 128MB Ram WinXP SP2 Blah Blah Blah
Software: Acrobat Reader 7, NAV 10, and MS Office Pro 97
Really these are simple Internet/E-Mail/Light Office Use machines. Same hardware, same software (or so I thought).

So I'm updating the antivirus and tossing another 128MB memory in each, when I notice a significant difference in speed between the two machines.

That's right. A Difference between two machines that are supposedly the same. What do you suppose the difference was? Any IT person could tell you, and although I knew it intuitively, I now have proof. The difference was User1 had not loaded any software, but User2 did.

iTunes
Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0
Yahoo Toolbar
Cubis Gold

That is all. But that is all it took for User2's computer to open the door for the Adware.180search spyware to crawl onboard and hose the works. The difference in performance is staggering - at least a fifty percent decrease in the speed of User2's computer for common tasks like startup and launching Outlook.

No, little freeware programs that run in the background *aren't* supposed to have any measurable impact on system performance. Sorry, I meant they aren't *supposed* to have any measurable impact. But they do.

Just realize that when your IT person walks away from the initial setup of your machine, IT IS NOT GOING TO GET FASTER. Like when you drove that 1978 GMC Gremlin off the showroom floor, that is the most power, speed, torque, acceleration, etc, you will get from it. Loading Windows onto the computer is like installing a ball hitch and pulling a trailer from the back of it. Every application you add is going to fill up that trailer and slow down the works (unless it removes other applications...) So if you load Weatherbug(shudder), and music software, and every gorram toolbar for Internet Explorer, you will soon end up pulling a trailerhome full of shit.

And then, when you complain to your IT person, "Goodness! I've been meaning to tell you! My computer is So Slow! Whatsoever could be wrong with it?" That IT person goes and blogs about how stupid you are.

Now you know.

Blog on,
-CZ

Labels: A Day In The Life, idiots, Technology