BOFH: So you want to have your computer switched out for something faster? It's time to learn from the master BOFH logo telephone with devil's horns "It's just … so slow," my user complains. "Slow, or comparatively slow?" I ask. "What do you mean?" "Slow's when your machine is just slow, whereas COMPARATIVELY slow is when it's slow in comparison to other people's machines – or your fancy new home machine." "I don't have a new home …
If i believe that thing was not thrown put merely pushed over the edge, the velocity should be something across building height/window height from place of impact multiplied with the usual acceleration of 9.81m/sec if i remember correctly. Any effects from air resistance should be negligible.
If its faster then the starting velocity has been "augmented".
I once had to repair the machine of my brother in law, he's reasonably tech savvy, but he had not remembered to delete his browsing history and such. I made a backup of his stuff, but forgot to delete it afterwards. Quite some time later I found myself looking for old videos that I had saved, so I did a search on AVI files and landed on the stuff he had been watching. Turns out he has a certain kink that I did NOT expect (nothing horrible). I laughed my ass off and proceeded to delete the stuff. Small hint, he'll only get more attracted to my sister as they age XD
I'm not going to hold it against him, I won't even mention it, but I thought it was absolutely hilarious.
As the owner of several Mercedes over the years I have to dispute that point. Mercedes drivers tend to buy the car from a reliability and functional point of view. Mercedes Drivers, without exception are polite and courteous, allowing other drivers to exit sideways, always merging in turn etc.
Now those BMW drivers deserve everything that's coming to them.
The older lady or gentleman, who has reached sufficient gravitas may well be an OK Mercedes driver. I notice that our local "wealthy" suburbs are infested with young women who seem to enjoy driving their shiny new low-end Mercedes saloons aggressively, and without skill. Yes, I’m an old fart, I have had a Mercedes, but these days prefer to drive a bog-standard 7.5 Golf - Now I’ve thought about it, it’s my 4th Golf in 40+ years; and I probably have a soft spot for them, as the first was also my first new car (a 1.5 LS with the original "proper" steel bumpers). Yes younger drivers of BMWs and Audis can be even worse.
Once in a while you need to avoid an overflow in the carmic variables. The universe might disintegrate if the evilness factor of any BOFH suddenly flips into the negative.
Why that carmic variable is not unsigned, remains a mystery, but bad coding is inherent everywhere in this universe.
Although in this case, i believe the carry flag might carry some carpet roll somewhere remote....
I heard/suspected manufacturers can cause computers to slow to a crawl as a function of their age since purchased. I have an inkling this can be done by your own computer building an artificially intelligent dossier on you based on its faithfully relentless surveillance of everything you do online.
For example, the PC never stops grinding the hard drive back and forth, all day and all night, even if nobody’s been on it for weeks (like for example you leave it running while you nip away to Hawaii for a soak, you come back, and it’s still crunching away). What the hell is the goddamn thing up to all the time?! is what I’d like to know.
the PC never stops grinding the hard drive back and forth, all day and all night
Peer-to-peer distributed RAID array with lots of hee-haw pr0nz, movies and warez... the reason why it's so busy is that it's constantly rebuilding itself as it finds other hosts to infect and take over as a P2P RAID, and rebuilding as other peers get removed/deleted...
No, the slowdown is simply that the processor leaks Hertz. It starts off with billions of them, so you don't notice a few at first, but over time more and more escape and you end up with a processor that only has as many Hertz as your old 486DX2 (still 66 million, but not the billions that it started with)
Of course Intel aren't interested in putting better seals in place to keep them in - people keep insisting on buying new rather than simply refilling their old processors.
I heard/suspected manufacturers can cause computers to slow to a crawl as a function of their age since purchased.
We kept hold of a bunch of Core 2 Duo boxes until recently. As midlife upgrades they acquired a Quadro card for multiple monitors, were stuffed full of RAM and acquired an SSD to replace the HDD.
Towards the end of the planned service life, one of them rolled over and died with a failed SSD. Since we had a spare, I rebuilt the thing from scratch as the pre rolled images for those boxes was long gone. Without any patches, you ought to see the speed of them compared to being fully patched.
Somebody with a suspicious mind would think that Microsoft deliberately fucks the performance of older PC's with patches that deliberately eat resources to make the latest version of Windows look comparatively better.
Which is complete bullshit, because as of today a Mac released in 2014 will run current macOS. If you only care about supported versions of macOS and not staying on the latest version, you're looking at a typical 10 year life cycle for Mac hardware, at which point it still has secondary market value.
It's about Safari and business-critical webshites such as those for reporting your hours spent wasted waiting for approval to proceed on those gazillion micro-projects that each took an order of magnitude less time to actually do than the time needed to report that time.
The current macOS may work on eight years old macs, but Safari from two versions back (because that version has been blessed by the IT overlords) won't work with those pages.
And in a somewhat similar case we need a truly antediluvial version of Intercrack Exploder to manage some pieces of hardware whose "write once, run anywhere" software clearly has a very unbroad view of "anywhere", namely "anywhere you have IE6 available to poke that hardware." Which caused some fun moments when Security ordered any IE version below 10 smitten, and the platform managers complied.
Which is complete bullshit because only last week I had to upgrade a 2014 iMac and could only get it up as far as 10.13. Which fixed about 80% of the websites that wouldn't work correctly but of those that still wouldn't most of them were for our corporate intranet. I may have exaggerated the life span in my first post but not that much!
My current desktop is a 2011 iMac that zips along fine; the only reason I might need to replace it is because it can't be upgraded past MacOS10.13 (High Sierra) and Apple stop supporting a MacOS version after three years (which sounds a short period but it is effectively nine years wrt the hardware).
Even that isn't really a problem as I'm quite happy with the software that I need. Dropped the Adobe suite because they stopped updating Lightroom and Photoshop on 10.13 (but Serif's Affinity app does all I need, for a fraction of the price). The biggest pain is Office365 as MS no longer update it on 10.13, but insists on daily reminders to update (with the occasional banner to update MacOS).
Safari isn't an issue for me. It works on >99% of the sites I visit (and, together with AdGuard, blocks the majority of clutter) - for the occasional one that I need more, I have a copy of Edge. And where that doesn't work, Firefox on my Ubuntu VM. I'd like to get a new iMac but the latest beast wouldn't do annoying my 10yo one can't. Most apps still start almost instantaneously. Writing a 50 minute video in iMovie would be quicker, but it's not something I have to watch over. Why scrap hardware that still works?
My 2014 MacBookPro runs Big Sur, so will get at least another two years of updates. If I had one big complaint about Apple it would be that their kit is too darn reliable. No Windows PC in my past ever lasted more than 5 years!
Indeed. I'm typing this on a X201s, which was manufactured only between March and July 2010, and only the battery has required replacing. The disk has been replaced too, but I could have stuck with the original (which still works) if I could bring myself to move rarely-used stuff to external storage a bit more often. And of course that bigger disk was SSD, so two birds with one stone. I've taken it on my daily commute for a bit over five years, so it hasn't been pampered.
And of course there's Linux installed, from the day I bought it, but that doesn't affect the longevity of the hardware, just the usability.
I've had it with MacOS as well, but the cycle is much slower. I have yet to find a reason, but a fresh install tends to zip along a lot better than a 2 year old one (Windows cycle times when I still ran that was more in the 6 month region). Shame it's such a lot of work, but at least an OS reinstall doesn't demand product keys and crud (although some non-App Store sourced app reinstalls do).
Swapping the HDD on our Mac mini many (many) moons ago I put the new one in an external caddy, did the "restore to disc" or whatever it's called and put the thing in the machine. Instant big speedup - more than could be expected given that both were spinning rust. I just assumed (as not familiar with Macs) that the OS had not done a "clone" but some kind of "copy" which had the side effect of defragmenting / consolidating.
Point possibly proven a few years later when I swapped to a smaller SSD - the restore process worked just fine on the mismatched discs - a simple clone would have complained about lack of space.
Over time the machine slowed down though and even though it's very rarely used these days, I'm tempted to do the restore thing again, just to see if that speeds it up.
In Linux-land I've discovered that running "fstrim" manually has an effect, despite it supposedly being auto enabled these days, and on my BTRFS discs it's amazing the difference made by the btrfs balance command on an SSD that is three years old and had never run that command. Not just a small but appreciable speedup (particularly at boot) but also quite a lot of extra free space!
And there's me thinking that XP was the last OS I'd need to run "mydefrag" on, on a regular basis...
M.
3 years O_O, my OS drive which has been cloned (Norton Ghost and Acronis freebies, from mechanical 512 bytes to mechanical 4k, to numerous SSD's to lots of m.2 which I currently use) and had numerous windows upgrades performed hasn't been formatted since Windows 2000 (Windows 95/98 and ME yes a reinstall was pretty much a requirement). Didn't even reinstall after my last cpu and motherboard swap to a i5 6600k and I'm not going to reinstall when I get around to replacing them again.
What on earth does everyone install that I don't, I even use AV which is guaranteed to slow everything down (Eset Nod32) and have the Epic bloatstore installed?
Funny you should mention...I have a Latitude E4400 Core2 Duo laptop with (max) 4GB RAM, given to me as a castoff from work. I installed a 500G SSD and Linux Mint 20. It is my personal travel machine, and runs quite well. I like the small profile and (relatively) light weight.
Quite often, I find that repurposed Windows machines perform even better as Linux machines. And my company is on a 3 year replacement cycle, meaning that old Windows machines are always looking for new homes.
Yes, I found Linux very helpful too in repurposing older machines.
That said, after 3 years you do end up with some items that might as well be termed consumables such as mice and keyboards. Even if you shake 3 years' worth of accumulated breadcrumbs out of a keyboard it's IMHO still quite suspect from a health perspective. Mice have gotten better, though, since they dropped the round fluff collector in the middle which allowed us to get away with telling users we were going to clean their balls :).
Even if you shake 3 years' worth of accumulated breadcrumbs out of a keyboard it's IMHO still quite suspect from a health perspective.
It'll play havoc with the foils that form the contact matrix though, but I care extremely little about that type of keyboard. It's either buckling spring or Cherry Blue.
Fuming red nitric acid works even better on contaminated keyboards, but is not that easy to come by.
Last company I worked for tried to stretch laptops (& anything else) to 7 years as field machines for Agricultural & Heavy Equipment repair techs.
On a personal note, I have replaced aged machines with a better spec one if I liked the user, given suitable genuine reason to do so when they logged a ticket that strangely required a rebuild\replacement & I had a machine already to go.
The desktop I'm typing on now started life as a Win 95 machine, upgraded to Win 98SP, Win 7, and finally to Win 10. When I download programs, pdfs, music, photos, videos, whatever, I transfer it to a 1.5 TB external drive.
Runs fine, fast, though not as fast as my gaming machine, but good enough to do whatever I need (even video editing).
I run CCleaner once a week, defrag after that. No buildup of trackers or cookies to slow me down.
Indeed. I'm writing this on an ex-works Latitude E5550, tricked out with 2T of spinny rust, 16GB of memory, and Mint 20; it's the machine I use for heavy lifting and suits me fine.
I've just ordered a couple of Latitude 7480s, again ex works, for sofa surfing for me and the missus. It's a bit of a bugger when a 4G machine, even running linux, runs out of memory after a few days of browsing. So these are 8G/500GB SSD; mine might end up with something more spacious.
And my company is on a 3 year replacement cycle, meaning that old Windows machines are always looking for new homes.
The previous work laptops followed that schedule but the current one is well past five, closing in on six years now. Not that I mind, its performance is still acceptable though the battery is rather geriatric but I don't have to use it away from the mains and it manages to stay hibernating for the length of my commute (which was half a minute the past 18 months and didn't necessitate moving that laptop anyway). And this model can still sit on a port replicator, so no faffing with cables. Colleagues report the current replacements working okay-ish using USB-C and a dock, driving an auxiliary monitor. Or two. Or none at all, depending on the phase of the moon, the urgency with which you need that extra screen space and several other un-parametrisable factors. The laptop's two native screen outputs are reported to work okay, except that one is still VGA and thus won't play with my 4x2 DVI KVM switch.
The retplaced laptops are taken in and returned to the leasing company. I wouldn't be interested anyway since they aren't ThinkPads.
"And my company is on a 3 year replacement cycle, meaning that old Windows machines are always looking for new homes."
Wow! They must have money to burn or some very demanding needs. I've not dealt with a customer in many years still on a 3 year replacement cycle. They all went to 4 and then 5 years quite some while ago. They'd probably go longer now, except the failure rates start rising past 5 years.
(On the other hand, with COVID and WFH, the failure rate has shot up anyway, what with pets, kids, drinks and food near expensive computers!)
"I run most of my laptop fleet on a 3 year cycle because they are with retail or sales people. Which means I get back a laptop with a cracked screen, keyboard missing 2-5 keys and at least one USB port non operational."
Equipment really gets beat up "on the road." Laptops get perched on counters, window ledges, car roofs...whatever it might take to close a sale. I've gotten some impressively destroyed laptops, and learned that to a good salesperson, anything can be a business expense.
That's a tough support role. You have my respect.
"Somebody with a suspicious mind would think that Microsoft deliberately fucks the performance of older PC's with patches that deliberately eat resources to make the latest version of Windows look comparatively better."
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence" surely applies here.
Then again, Microsoft is not at all adverse to malice so maybe its both.
Working in a centrally employed teaching service we were victims of this more than once. (Not just computers btw).
At one point, many years ago when we were moving towards using computers instead of typewriters,, we made the case for some decent computers,networked because we were working collaboratively, hot-desked ( we were out in schools most of the week and with centralised storage ( we were producing reports and assessments that needed secure saving and backups).
Instead of some nice Windows 95 PCs and a server, with Office software, they sent us a bunch of obsolete Unix green screen machines that didn't have mice or a recognised Office suite. They were of course a discard from the higher ups. And were totally unusable.
Another time we pointed out that we had a waiting area for parents who had come in to visit our new on-site unit and needed somewhere for them to sit. Apparently the higher-ups thought that the public only deserved some faded and worn out sofas that were no longer good enough for the Director;s Office. ( I have no idea why the Director of Education would have needed this stuff).
Reminds me of the time when my mother's nursery (yup, a local authority-run honest-to-goodness Nursery School with a (teaching) head, a qualified teacher, two qualified Nursery Nurses, its own cook and part-time secretary) was really beginning to make good use of their shiny BBC Master computer, colour Cub monitor and Concept Keyboard.
They thought it would be good for the children to be able to print out their work for display.
Local authority insisted that a nursery school would have no use for a colour printer and that their bog standard 9-pin dot matrix (a Mannesman Tally I think, could be wrong) would be ideal.
So instead the PTA did a bit of fund raising and managed to buy a four-colour 24-pin (Oki?) dot matrix, which worked with the software they used. Local Authority wouldn't even (as I remember it) supply replacement ribbons.
M.
NHS IT bod...
Same here, CQC get the cash, skim off their cut, buy flash computers and furniture then diviy up the remainder.
Had a contractor that went to work for them. Need a new PC because yours playing up? Don't bother fixing it - get a new one from the pile!
We ended up using a lot of their offcasts - some where better than the kit we were using....
So shes the one pottering along at 19 MPH causing traffic hold ups.
On a related note used to drive down a country lane that had become surrounded by houses on the fringe of our new estate, bordered by some council houses leading to the small seaside town I lived in.
I was rather surprised at going above the speed limit a fraction to be overtaken by a "Red Astra" at 60+mph by a granny.
There's a TV commercial where an aging red VW Golf (ISTR a II or III) is put up for sale on a car trading site. "Only driven by Old Granny on Sundays" and the ad shows said Golf, clearly well-maintained, from various angles, as they do.
Flashback to Granny dressed up in her Sunday's best, getting in the car and absolutely hooning the living shit out of it. I think the punchline of the commercial was something like "It's okay, Golfs can handle old grannies."
There's a probably apocryphal tale of some young fellow purchasing a lotus and registering it as his granny's, to make the insurance affordable.
Certainly, she said, but it'll have to live here so I can drive it.
No worries, until he came to use it one weekend and she pointed out that it could be a little tail-happy if you hit the roundabout at the bottom of town at more than sixty...
...but told in a much more entertaining way than I ever could.
Back in the days of MS-DOS based PCs, computers were capital equipment and were made to last as long as possible, despite the huge advances going on back then in CPU speed/capability and RAM/HDD capacities. When users wanted newer, faster PCs, I always told them to never go off to make a cup of tea or chat with co-workers while waiting for the single tasking PC to finish it's job. Just sit there, looking bored and keeping a record of the time spent waiting for the big spreadsheet to recalculate or the database report to complete. Then match that up with their hourly rate and take it to the boss, clearly demonstrating that their time was more valuable than sitting around waiting for an old, slow PC to do it's work. The sweet spot seemed to be a 12 month payback on the cost of providing a new PC that got the job done without having to wait for it to grind it's gears.
This is out of date now, because we are not allowed to smoke in the office, but I think it is quite funny.
My colleague wrote most of the firmware for the electronic kit we designed. He would write a bit of code, then run the compiler, and automatically pick up his baccy to roll a smoke. He would puff away on that until the compiler finished, then put the fag down in the ash tray, and do some testing. Before long, the ash tray was lined with part-smoked roll-ups. This looked like quite a health issue. The obvious solution was to buy a faster computer, because then my mate would not have time to roll a smoke.
More seriously, even though CPUs are mostly idle in desktop computing, latency in responding to user input to do some heavy computing can affect work flow. Those few seconds waiting for a result are dead time. Longer dead time might not be so much of a problem, because you can switch to another useful task, such as taking the piss out of Americans on Slashdot. I can't write a decent rant in only seconds.
I work in a 4-person 3D CAD (Colouring And Drawing) office.
Nvidia has this month EOL'd our graphics cards (Quadro K2200) which were installed in our Dell PCs at great expense.
We got the bean counters to authorise a huge performance upgrade to A4000 cards, but they require extra power cables.
Guess what our 2018 Optiplex 7050 workstations don't have?
Now the bean counters are dragging their feet over replacing 4 complete PCs, which would cost around twice as much as the 4 graphics cards alone.
I once worked (as a dev) for a startup in the late mid-90's. It was a pretty small startup (30 people or so) and I worked closely with Sales. One time he and I were returning from a sales meeting with a potential customer and after just going through the airport, I commented to him that he shouldn't be so rough on his treatment of his laptop while going through security. He said, "If I did't throw it around so much, it wouldn't need to be replaced every year with a newer one.", smiling. It was his way of getting a yearly upgrade. He was the top Salesman in the company so no one really challanged him on this. After the 2nd round of VC funding that saw my stock options diluted 6-to-1 (the first round had diluted them 3-to-1), I had left the company. Eventually the company was dissolved and the IP was sold off to another company.
"He was the top Salesman in the company so no one really challanged him on this"
He was probably the type of salesman that people buy from to get him out of their office and make a note to never deal with the company again
A lot of "top salesmen" are like this. What you actually need are "steady salesmen"
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