The Un-review Software

This week I am going to talk about the lack of software in the weekly software review.  That’s right – the lack of it! You may be sitting there wondering which software item I am going to talk about, promote, or diss in some way shape or form, but instead of that, I actually want to talk about the general trending of software, hardware, and system resources.  Why?  Because we demand a lot from our computers these days.  Think about it – we want our computers to do many things from surfing the internet, to designing graphics, office functions, building websites, and yes, processing ever-increasing image file sizes.  At what point do we say we are asking enough of our computers?

Lately my main desktop computer had been getting slower and slower and slower, and it seemed no matter what I did whether it was beefing up the RAM, adding a faster hard drive, processor, or the like, and even re-installing the OS every 6 months – it was just getting pathetic.  At one point, I clocked abut 5 minutes for Firefox to start – on a fresh boot!  The culprit?  I am asking my computer to do too much.  I finally said enough is enough – and am re-purposing the computers in the house.  We have a grand total of five computers and each has a unique function:  from Office to web, to image processing, and podcasting.  And that’s just it – each computer has a task.  Yet I have not been disciplined about asking the computer to only perform its assigned task.  I revert to the one desktop and the one laptop.  The end result:  the systems s……l……o……w…… d……o……w……n…….

With a grand total of 78 programs at last count, it’s no wonder my cmputer was screaming “Mercy!”.  So, enough is enough.  I vowed to make each computer perform only one set of tasks, as explained above.  The end result:  removing about 50 applications from the main computer.  It took the better part of an evening (4 or 5 hours) but at the end, the computer is now screamingly fast again – and Firefox loads in seconds, not minutes.  The reason – purposing your computer for a specific software function.

So, instead of looking at adding new software all the time to your computers, you may want to take a look at the computer itself – is it doing the job you want, or are you asking too much?  Think about purposing your resources more efficiently.  Do you really need that HP 3600 printer driver on there from 4 years ago?  What about that trial version of Elements you downloaded a few months ago?  And the 4 instances of Tweetdeck you have there?  Really?  Clean out your software and watch your computer performance increase a notch or two as a result.  It’s just like us humans – we can get more done when we’re asked to do less all the time!  We’re faster, more productive, and yes, more focused on the task at hand.

So, check that installed software list and try cleaning things out from time to time – your computer will thank you!

Happy shooting and we’ll see you back here again tomorrow!

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