[John Rogers]

The earlier post about home computers and security got me thinking about how do we figure our computer speed has dropped off or we need to get a newer and faster one?
This does not include folks who just have to get the newest or fastest or ?????. Here's an example:
Back in the early 1990s I was staff information systems officer at COMNAVAIRPAC at NAS North Island. One part (big part) was getting a Lan installed for the whole staff figuring about 700 computers total. The tech contractors I has were with SAIC and several were ex service computer or electronics folks with great knowledge. Their plan I got had several parts: first upgrade ALL desktop computers to the new 386 32 bit machines from the older Zenith 286 tan boxes. Second was to expand the LAN to everyone, a department at a time using fiber optics. Third was to start an hourly training class daily at lunch time to cover these new Windows based machines and all they could do.

A couple of the first to get a new PC and to be connected were the two older ladies who were the watchers of what all the civilians did to make sure we followed federal rules and regulations. They had a bunch or big, dusty, hard to read federal rules and at times would take them hours to find an answer! So, I gave them two new 386 machines both also having an external CD-ROM reader since they had just started getting CFR manuals on CD-ROMs. After a couple days of training, they were really happy of how nice and fast this was now!

Well about 6 or 7 weeks later I got a call from one saying her looking for a certain rule was super slow so several of us went upstairs and after investigating found they both had solitaire, shopping websites, emails open and had eaten up all the memory as remember a megabyte or two was all that could be used. So, some additional training enlightened them on how to keep just one or two apps active so they could also do real work if needed. Darn....reading manuals from CD-ROM just got faster!!!!

This happens more that I realized as later in 2010 I was the Oracle DBA for an aircraft maintenance software company and got sent to Connecticut as the company users of the software were complaining about slowness, lost connections and even the "blue screen of death" and our support fellow couldn't help them. First computer I looked at, the manager had 12 apps running and his hard drive was going nuts trying to manage swapping in and out what he was trying to do. After some instructions and hands-on showing of how to manage his apps....darn if things didn't speed right up! So I enjoyed some lobster and a snow storm before I came back to sunny CA.

If anyone has observed something like this besides me, let us know and this happens even today with me and my 24 core Intel CPU.
John Rogers the oldracer