Excerpt from "Make Peace With Your "PC"
Popular Personal Computing Myths
Myth #6 – Today’s Computing Environments Are Robust And Difficult To Break
This myth, an extension and elaboration of the previous one, has to do with the false belief that the computer’s operating environment can be treated in a casual and liberal fashion, being robust and powerful enough to take anything that the user throws at it. This is a difficult area to make understood, so I’ll use an example.
Let’s say you went to the local office superstore and bought the very best computer system they had to offer. Then you filled a second shopping cart with software programs of every description – games, business applications, system utilities, and reference tools -- and when you got home, you proceeded to load this entire shopping cart’s worth of programs onto the computer, one by one.
No problem, right? After all, you bought the best, most powerful computer you could find, and there’s nothing unusual about those software programs, because they’re all brand new. Just pop those disks one by one into the computer like you would play videotapes on your VCR, right?
Wrong.
Even though your new computer easily exceeds the minimum system requirements for any given program, by the time you got about halfway through installing all your programs, your brand new, powerful, state-of-the-art computer system would have already stopped working, brought to its knees by the sheer volume of software programs you attempted to load, the lack of available system resources, unexpected software conflicts, and the cumbersome, bloated complexity of the resulting Windows environment. You’d have such a mess on your hands that you’d have to restore the computer to the way it was when you first brought it home (if you could), and rethink your ill-fated “more is more” software strategy.
Why? Well, first, because the computer system does not have infinite resources, it can not swallow up all those programs and keep on running, any more than you could go to an all-you-can eat smorgasbord in Las Vegas and stuff yourself to the gills, without soon feeling very ill indeed and becoming immobile or worse.
Paradoxically, most new computers sold today have far more hard drive space than they need (that is not a problem, by the way), and far less random access memory (RAM) than they need (that is a problem). This happens because megabytes of hard disk space are much less expensive than megabytes of RAM.
Older computers are different; depending on the vintage, they often have less hard drive space, less processor speed and power, and less RAM (“The Holy Trinity” of PC Performance, you might say; see illustration on page 55) than they need.
In other words, older computers are often completely unable to handle today’s computing environments with alacrity, and should be recycled or turned into high-tech lawn ornaments at the earliest opportunity.
With both new and old machines, RAM shortages are particularly common; most machines that come into my shop need more; but the amount of resistance customers put up towards the necessity of acquiring more RAM is remarkable. To complain that a system runs poorly, to be shown that the system “simply” needs more RAM, and then to fight against the idea of adopting the solution…well, that’s a very peculiar and self-defeating kind of behavior, to my way of thinking. No wonder people have so much trouble with their PCs!
“Buy the RAM or stop complaining,” would be this guru’s advice.
Also, many programs simply do not coexist and interoperate successfully with other programs, because it is an impossible, near-infinite task for software companies to test their product with every possible combination of other programs. Thus, when you have a small handful of programs installed on your PC, the chances are good that everything will work together smoothly. But when you attempt to install too many programs (beyond the small suite of programs that most computers come with), your odds will drop considerably, and the likelihood of conflicts and compatibility problems will increase exponentially.
In my own office, I have a high-end custom-built PC devoted to desktop publishing and document printing tasks, as well as other business management tasks such as scanning and charge card processing. This system, although very expensive and generously endowed with resources such as hard drive space, RAM, and processor speed, has (by my reckoning) reached saturation point. It simply can’t take on any additional computing tasks, and still deliver like a champ.
So, rather than continue to add programs to this machine and risk bogging it down, I built another machine and divided my necessary office functions between two systems. This “division of labor” prevented either machine from being weighed down by too many functions; too many software programs and peripheral gadgets competing for the same resources; too much work.
To achieve this balance (which works quite well, by the way), I simply used an intuitive sense of “how much was too much” for each machine. Notice, I did not let the cost of the second machine sway my thinking. I limited each machine to a small, manageable number of crucial computing tasks. When divvying up the work, I treated each system like a trusted ally or associate; I did not behave like a cruel slave master, whipping and beating the poor machines until they fell to their knees.
I have been rewarded for my benevolent wisdom with strong performance, reliable service over extended periods of time, and virtually no computing problems, ever.
The challenge of “computer resource management/allocation” is naturally compounded when the machine under discussion is not a state-of-the-art powerhouse, but a three-year old, near-obsolete consumer computing appliance with the bare amount of memory, processor, and hard drive needed to perform the simplest of tasks. At some point, a computer can easily become like “the old woman who lived in the shoe, who had so many children she didn’t know what to do.”
I’ll talk more about system resources, and how users can make the most of what they have, later in this book. For now, however, I want readers to recognize that computers are not unstoppable ultra-powerful computing behemoths, but finite, fragile, sensitive, and limited computing instruments that must be well-equipped, and well-suited to, the tasks they are asked to perform. A simple computing environment with a relatively small number of installed programs (and concomitant assigned program tasks) that does not overtax available system resources is a sure way to make peace with your PC.