Tuesday, November 27, 2007

The Pleasures of Speed

My home computer has been just craaaawwwwling along in recent weeks. So frustrating -- waiting from 30 seconds to 2 or more minutes for just about anything to load (online or from the hard drive), and taking at least five minutes to be ready for action after booting up or coming out of standby status. We have a lot of fairly large games on it, and it's an aging system, and I have DSL, not cable, so I figured there wasn't much that could be done.

However, I recently noticed that my Desktop Weather program had been frozen for a couple of days and that things were running sloooowwwwer than ever. It finally occurred to me that this was a program that initializes upon start-up and regularly tries to refresh itself. Hmm, I murmured to myself, I wonder what would happen if I uninstalled it? And while I'm at it, how about if I change the settings on my security software so that updating itself is not the first thing that happens every time the computer wakes up?

OMG, as they say. What an amazing difference. I feel I've been reborn. I can start up the computer, open the program I want, and away I go -- no drumming of fingers, impatient tapping of toes, or going down the hall to do something else for two minutes. Not what most people mean when they talk about the pleasures of speed, but it's how I'm defining it this week!

2 comments:

Mary S. said...

Penny: This is an interesting idea. I do not have a weather program, but I have McAfee security software, or as it is sometimes called around here, that @$%#@#$ McAfee! I'm going to adjust its settings right now.

Mary

Unknown said...

We had McAfee on the computer at the other house, and @$%#@#$ was about right! Carl Henry recommended Zone Alarm to us at the office, and I use it both at home and at work now. I've been quite happy with it except for the fact that it hogs the system when checking for updates.

Good luck!