Wow This Computer is Really Running Slow Today!
August 27th, 2008I was patiently waiting on the phone, trying to make a service appointment with a company, when the receptionist came back on the phone and apologized for the delay. She fretted how her PC was taking forever to load the pages of their scheduling software, but finally managed, with further delays, to get me booked.
The other day, I was listening to a talk show on Sirius satellite radio, when an ad came on, extolling the virtues of a product that was guaranteed to “remove the sludge from your PC” and have it running in peak condition in short order. For a second, I almost thought I was listening a promotional spot about an oil additive for your car.
Of course, the “sludge” that announcer was talking about included corrupted registry files and other ills, such as adware, that conspire to bring even the most powerful Windows PC to its knees.
I can think back over the past few weeks, visiting banks and other PC-dependent companies and encountering the very same symptoms. An employee is trying to get some very simple work done, such as scheduling or processing a transaction, but the computer seems to have a mind of its own.
Now in some cases, such as a bank, slowdowns of this sort might be the result of congested network traffic. In that case, the source of the problem may lie in an entirely different location, at a server farm that manages the complicated financial manipulations in which banks traditionally engage during the normal course of business.
But when you’re visiting a small company, with at most a handful of PCs, and store traffic is slow, you don’t expect such issues to occur. None of the applications they typically use are CPU or RAM hogs, so even a basic PC ought to be able to handle the tasks smoothly.
I then think back to a visit I made to a client in a nearby city a couple of years ago. He had just received a PC, passed off to him by the spouse of a deceased relative. Running Windows XP, this particular computer, a Gateway, was no more than a year old, and was a mid-range model, with more than sufficient processing power and memory to support email and Web browsing. It should have been lightning quick, but even the most basic tasks seemed to take forever to complete. For just a second, my mind drifted back to my feeble attempts to run QuarkXPress on a Mac Classic way back in 1991.
Well, I ran some malware detection software on that PC, which supposedly cleaned out a number of infections involving spyware and other afflictions, but improvements were minor. No, I didn’t try one of those so-called “sludge removers,” though I grant that restoring the system might have set things right.
As that radio ad states, though, this appears to be a frighteningly normal situation in Windows land. A computer runs great out of the box, but after a year of regular use, it gradually slows down to a point where it may actually seem considerably slower than the model it replaced. Not good.
Yes, there are fixer-uppers out there that, if run periodically, will probably restore performance to reasonably normal levels. That’s what helps the companies who develop those utilities to stay in business and afford those visits to the gas pumps.
While I try to act cool and professional in those situations, I sometimes ask a local businessperson encountering such difficulties if they ever considered a Mac. Alas, that’s not such an easy choice. Bank processing software and many of the standard retail point-of-sale and general office management applications are strictly Windows based.
Even where there may be Mac equivalents, the bill of particulars can get fairly expensive. It’s not just the new Macs, but the software licenses, installation, and retraining. There may even be an extended downtime in order to transfer data from one platform to the other — and if they can’t do that, the migration simply isn’t worth the bother.
These are business sectors where the Mac frequently has little if any presence. They are also ripe for the picking, simply by building a laundry list of the troubles business owners and their system admins frequently confront and demonstrating how the Mac can solve them.
Alas, Apple doesn’t really do much in the way of direct promotion to many of these businesses. Do you even know, for example, of a bank run by Macs? I’m just asking.
Yes, Apple does have a great story to tell these companies. They even have areas on their Web site that cater strictly to businesses, offering compelling solutions that can address many needs, particularly for smaller companies. Some of these products are turnkey solutions. They can be easily installed and deployed without the need of having an IT department with the appropriate certification certificates.
I rather suspect that the growth of the iPhone as a business tool, and the increased market penetration of Macs in the enterprise will help this sad situation. But I don’t expect to stop hearing those complaints about slow PCs at the office anytime soon.
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Our local Bank of America has a few Mac 512s from the mid-80s running their communications software. It’s probably running a 3270 emulator or the like. As the lady at the bank said, if it isn’t broken, why fix it?
Would running Windows with Parallels or VMWare protect the Windows side of things and make it less susceptible to sludge?
I would think anything that slows the operating system would do that regardless.
Peace,
Gene
Agreed, but VMWare or Parallels can make it easier to recover from these slowdowns by resorting to a backup of the original install (since it’s all just contained in one file). I know, I know, Windows updates would complicate this slightly.
Most business PCs used for specific tasks just sit there and do those tasks, well, without much fuss. How many old mid-80s IBM PCs do you still see happily sitting in a corner somewhere with its green-on-black monitor displaying parts, inventory or the like? I just bought a small part for my car and just such a machine was used by the parts counter guy. Even the keyboard was 20+ years old.
I think that computers get gunked up when used on the internet by careless users. Clicking on pop-ups telling you that your PC is infected by malware is probably the best way to take a clean, uninfect PC and, surprise surprise, load it with malware.
I have an IBM ThinkPad as my writing machine and a MacBook as my primary computer. Both are on the internet everyday, and neither has any malware issues. I use the Windows firewall in Vista and the OS X firewall in Leopard, and nothing else. Both installs are approaching a year old, and neither has slowed down. The PC is faster than the Mac in some tasks, slower in others, but neither has slowed down with use. In fact, the PC is much faster than it used to be. Vista SP1 was a nice speed (and stability) boost, and like all recent Windows systems, the system has a simple though effective caching scheme that streamlines boot and makes your most-used applications launch faster. It boots in half the time it did when new. Further, both Vista and Leopard have powerful search programs built into their UI, and both REALLY slow down a new computer or fresh install for an hour or three while they thrash about the hard drive trying to index everything. Do a large file move or copy, and the systems both slow down again. Of course, once indexed, they speed right back up.
There are many things that I dislike about Windows, but I don’t think its fair to imply that a Windows machine on its own will bog down and crawl.
When I first started quickly reading this article, I assumed we were talking about Macs. My Ibook G4 is only a few years old and it seems a lot slower than it was only a few months ago. Accessing the Web or accessing files on the computer itself, both seem a lot slower than I remember. Itunes really seems slow to search for titles and import songs from cds. I think there are so many variables involved that it is hard to generalize about any computer.
It could be a number of things, as you suggest. It may be the result of an update you did. Did you, for example, install Leopard and maybe not add additional memory to give it a comfort level? More info is needed.
The Windows PC tends to slow down over time even for people who never updated anything, except, perhaps, for installing stuff that brought malware too.
Peace,
Gene
I have had one friend tell me that their two year old PC is so slow they are going to buy a new one.
Also I have seen a family friends Windows machine that they assumed was broken purely because of the malware that infested it; again reinstalling Windows; prevented them from skipping the machine and buying another one.
I wonder how many cases someone working in PC repair would see like this.
This is an example of how a defective product actually increases sales.
I would suggest checking for a virus’s and spyware again. Sometimes the first time around doesn’t get all of them. After that, see if you can clean up your hard disk. If those don’t help, it may be best to get some help.