gyoung
08-29-2001, 08:33 AM
Here's the funny story:
My brother-in-law was telling me that he was thinking of buying a new PC because his was running slow and he thought it was outdated. Keep in mind that he is very bright guy (in the second year of his cardiology fellowship). So I took a look at it. He had 22 apps running in the system tray! I went to look at the performance tab under My Computer and he had 31% resources free. His bootup time was over 4 minutes! You could hear the HD cranking away. This was a Gateway Pentium III 450Mhz PC with 96MB of RAM.
I went into the System Configurator and turned everything during startup off. The bootup time was now under 30 seconds and 94% of the resources were free. Everything was snappy and great. You should have seen the look on his face!
I went back into the System Configurator and turned on the few things that he needed (Virus, ZoneAlarm for his cable connection, Palm Syncing) and that was it!
The only thing that he does is email, browsing, and the occasional Office program. I recommended that he could get 128MB of RAM if he wanted to, though he really doesn't need it, but he could pick some up from Crucial for under $20. He was willing to buy an entirely new PC! I just saved him over $1500. Knowing him he would have gone top of the line!
Here's the revelation:
In terms of repeat buyers: If more people figured this out, the PC business would be in greater pain than it already is! For most people there is no reason to upgrade.
They just need someone who knows a little bit about PCs to take a look at finding tweaks or explaining to them how things work and what can slow them down. Most people don't know that the icons in the tray are running. He didn't know this, he thought that it was just a shortcut, but when I told him anything down in that tray is actually running and it is taking up RAM and system resources he just had a look on his face of "How was I supposed to know?"
No wonder the big manufacturers load all that **** on the PCs. It makes people think they are slower then they really are!
[This message has been edited by gyoung (edited 08-29-2001).]
My brother-in-law was telling me that he was thinking of buying a new PC because his was running slow and he thought it was outdated. Keep in mind that he is very bright guy (in the second year of his cardiology fellowship). So I took a look at it. He had 22 apps running in the system tray! I went to look at the performance tab under My Computer and he had 31% resources free. His bootup time was over 4 minutes! You could hear the HD cranking away. This was a Gateway Pentium III 450Mhz PC with 96MB of RAM.
I went into the System Configurator and turned everything during startup off. The bootup time was now under 30 seconds and 94% of the resources were free. Everything was snappy and great. You should have seen the look on his face!
I went back into the System Configurator and turned on the few things that he needed (Virus, ZoneAlarm for his cable connection, Palm Syncing) and that was it!
The only thing that he does is email, browsing, and the occasional Office program. I recommended that he could get 128MB of RAM if he wanted to, though he really doesn't need it, but he could pick some up from Crucial for under $20. He was willing to buy an entirely new PC! I just saved him over $1500. Knowing him he would have gone top of the line!
Here's the revelation:
In terms of repeat buyers: If more people figured this out, the PC business would be in greater pain than it already is! For most people there is no reason to upgrade.
They just need someone who knows a little bit about PCs to take a look at finding tweaks or explaining to them how things work and what can slow them down. Most people don't know that the icons in the tray are running. He didn't know this, he thought that it was just a shortcut, but when I told him anything down in that tray is actually running and it is taking up RAM and system resources he just had a look on his face of "How was I supposed to know?"
No wonder the big manufacturers load all that **** on the PCs. It makes people think they are slower then they really are!
[This message has been edited by gyoung (edited 08-29-2001).]