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The Biggest Time Suck at the Office Might Be Your Computer (bloomberg.com)
Sharing personal anecdotes and recent studies, a new report on Bloomberg blames outdated computers, decade-old operating systems and ageing equipments for being one of the biggest hurdles that prevents people from doing actual work in their offices. From the article: Slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, a survey of 6,000 European workers said. Half of U.K. employees said creaking computers were "restrictive and limiting," and 38 percent said modern technology would make them more motivated, according to the survey, commissioned by electronics company Sharp. Scott's (a 25-year-old researcher who works at an insurance firm) PC runs the relatively up-to-date Windows 8 operating system, but his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously, slowing him down. Others are in a worse spot. One in every eight business laptops and desktops worldwide still run Windows XP, which was introduced in 2001. [...] Some businesses can't help using old hardware or operating systems, because they use specialized software that also hasn't been brought up-to-date.
Biggest time suck? There has to be 101 better ways to word that.
Well, vendors have done their job. They always find a way to make hardware seem old. Seriously, if you're running a newer laptop and can't handle multiple spreadsheets, the problem isn't the hardware. Nor is it the operating system, for that matter. No, it's the simple fact that it's easier to lean on increased compute capacity to shorten the software release cycle.
If only I had known how slow XP made my system back in 2001, when it was new!
Slashdot, HackADay, etc...
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The cost of a new high-end PC over a three-year lifetime is trivial compared to a typical office-worker salary. The cost of a decent chair over its 10-20 year lifetime is even smaller. Yet somehow companies refuse to spend 1% of a salary on something that will make people 5% more efficient.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
>> his computer sometimes struggles to handle large spreadsheets and multiple documents open simultaneously
Hi "MsMash" and welcome to SlashDot! We are a thriving community of developers and IT folks who do interesting things like "compile code", "simulate load" and "troubleshoot." Having to deal with a computer too slow to handle a bunch of crappy Office documents isn't something we really ever face, since our challenges are greater than those faced by the poor schlubs (like this imaginary office worker) we mock.
Do you have any stories that might interest us instead?
It is Brittany with her lush cleavage that rises and falls with every breath she takes after walking down the hall....
Janitor at the Ba Da Bing is a job? Your dad sells pork, right?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In a recent ticket I got, one of our finance guys complained that our computers (Haswell i7, 8GB RAM with an SSD) were too slow and that he needed a better one. The finance director of course immediately signed off on the purchase request before even asking me for a price. I couldn't quite believe that complaint and had him show me what wasn't fast enough, and was treated to a horrible mess of a XLSX with a million rows, two hundred columns, and vlookups and pivot tables everywhere.
Out of pure curiosity I let that run on a 64 bit Excel on an empty terminal server with 128GB of RAM and of course it ran like crap on there too. I never tried deciphering the spaghetti code of that spreadsheet, but I'm almost certain that if it had been developed in a real programming language, it would've stepped down the O(n) complexity by a couple levels and made the whole calculation run in seconds.
Never believe anybody who says his computer is too slow because of a spreadsheet.
Sure, if we're talking about an office of programmers, this might all hold true, but most businesses in this world manufacture white tube socks. They manufacture white tube socks the same way today as they did thirty years ago. If my 486DX250 hadn't gone missing in 1998, it would still be adequate for the manufacturing of white tube socks.
There are many employees who feel demoralized because they manufacture white tube socks. And if you show them new, shiny, expensive things, then they'll feel better about themselves. . .for a few days. Life is like a mop; it gets full of dirt and crud and hairballs and stuff. Sometimes, people just want a new mop because they don't want to clean the old mop -- even though their job is to clean.
As for the lovely comment of spending 1% of a salary to improve 5% productivity, that presumes a whole lot of crap, like a) the 5% won't dwindle a week later; b) there's 5% more work that could be done; and c) that same employee won't ask for six more 1%'s because they really can't stick with a set of tools that work.
I have a car, a sportscar, it's 8 years old. Do I want a new car? Hell no! Does my car have a back-up camera, heated seats, gps, fantastic speakers, well-retractive seat belts? It has none of those. But none of those are a part of a car. Those are weird luxuries and dumb conveniences that may be nice but they aren't a part of a car. Instead, it has all of the wonders of a great sportscar. I'm not going to throw out the great car for a new car just because the new car has more gizmos. Because guess what. . .the new car doesn't have the limited slip differential. Those new gizmos are all nice, and they are nice added value, but you need to have something to add it to.
I do have/run/operate a small business. It's a web-programming business. My desk is a solid wood gorgeous desk, now 15 years old. My main workstation is 9 years old -- spec'd properly in the first place, it's faster than most reasonably-priced new machines. Abuse it, and it'll be garbage in ten minutes.
Take care of your tools, whatever they may be, and not only will they last, but you'll be so much happier with them than you ever would with a new replacement.
The biggest time sink at my job is the system that exports CSV files to use in Excel. If you don't select your data and copy into a new Excel spreadsheet, updating the calculations on a 70MB file takes 90 minutes. That's not a problem on a clean Excel spreadsheet.
If it works for McClaren's F1 Team it's good enough for you!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
500+ users
150+ machines.
Not one of them is slow enough to discourage a user (doesn't stop them trying to claim that).
Windows 8.1. 8Gb, SSD. EVERYWHERE. Everything you could want to do, office-wise, will fly. We have no power usage and EVERYONE has the same exact source image for their machine. Even IT.
The biggest restriction is really that we *only* have Gigabit to the desktop. Plenty of oomph on the switches, more than enough backbone, massive internet line, servers and storage sitting mostly idle, but sometimes the gigabit is a bottleneck (e.g. 1Gb profile takes 8 seconds to download!).
But turn the PC on, within 30 seconds you are at the logo-wallpaper of the logon screen. Type in your username/password, if it "knows" you (i.e. it's your computer or you logged in there recently), if gets to desktop in 10-20 seconds. If it doesn't know you, it's profile download and (possibly) GPO setup etc. which can take a minute or two admittedly. Applications launch and then work. You can open EVERYTHING on the image at once (I know, I've done it) and it still works just fine.
Last time someone claimed something was slow (after re-images and all sorts), we took the machine apart on their desk, "changed" the hard drive for the exact same drive through some sleight of hand, re-imaged it again. They still - months later - keep telling me how much faster it now is (than the previous re-image of an identical image on the exact same hardware? Really?).
It's all in their head. In the same way time slows when you are bored and speeds up when you're in a hurry, they perceive it differently when they're desperate to get something important done, but nobody's ever demonstrated an unreasonable logon, program startup, or response time.
After years of doing IT and actually collecting metrics on this (perflog etc.), I just take it in my stride now.
The irony: The IT Office machines - including my own - are their rejects from last year, that were deemed "slow". I put the exact same image back on them, put the IT software GPOs on (so they actually have MORE junk than a normal machine), and have been using them for 3 years now.
Eating your own dogfood kinda throws out all the crazy performance theories. And if it's bad enough to bug them for even ten minutes, I assure you it will bug me more using it for EVERYTHING every single day of my working life.
... Electronics manufacturers diagnose that poor office performance is caused by lack of up-to-date electronic hardware!
In other news, Oracle announces that lack of database software costs the USA $671 billion a year. [Disclosure: I made that up].
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
It looks like Windows 7 is going to become the next Windows OS that will not die, replacing Windows XP as Microsoft's most problematic legacy OS. Windows 7 is less than 3 years away from it's end of support date at this point, and people are still doing new deployments of it every day.
No wonder Microsoft is trying to block Windows updates on new AMD Ryzen and Intel Kaby Lake PC's.... they're trying to force organizations to upgrade to Windows 10 sooner than later to avoid having even more unpatched systems to deal with 2 1/2 years from now.
Doesn't exactly help things.
Way to channel Michael Richards from UHF!
My car still uses a steering wheel and pedals, which were introduced in the 1800's. It would seem to me that RETRAINING all your workers to learn a new OS every 5-7 years would be much more expensive in terms of productivity than just leaving things alone.
It sucks and its always ringing.
This is the reason we upgraded ALL our workstations (about 200-250 workstations between two sites) to SSD's about two years back. We calculated the time it takes for a system to boot, assuming once a day, time lost while they get coffee / etc waiting for it to boot, and time during the day spent waiting for things to load. The ROI for us on these purchases was less than a year with time lost taken into account. Let alone moral/frustration issues.
We also have done away with ordering bare minimal system. Everything we order has the latest generation i5 Quad Core or better (i7 Quad Cores or Xeons) for users that do CAD work. Back in 2009-2011 during the downturn, that his us hard, we had to buy a lot of lower end systems to replace dead hardware, and we felt the effects of it for years with users being frustrated.
The biggest time suck at my office is definitely the presence of excessive and mindless multi-taskers who burden both their computers and colleagues with their totally unnecessary and unbearably scatterbrain BS.
A spreadsheet so large and complex that a PC running Windows 8 (or even XP) is a time sink because it slows down during data entry? Really. Hey you fucking little kid - go do that shit by hand like we did before spreadsheets. I'll show you what a time sink is.
The real time sink? Slashdot. Reddit. Facebook. Any of a thousand sites with content that is infinitely more interesting than entering data into a spreadsheet. That's your god damned time sink.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
It's generally easier to get higher-end hardware than to make software vendors make their stuff more efficient.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Windows 8 dual UI does slow people down
Or the lot of them, all 6000, are just a bunch of your run-of-the-mill OFFICE MOANERS who have time to participate in surveys. Their shitty computers load survey pages so fast you see. Must be a virus or something.
Wait, 6000? I thought there are 500.000.000 people in Europe? So 6000 MOANERS makes a decent sample-size now, does it?
I have never EVER had issues with workplace machines, only a few times when office laptops were stolen overnight, promptly replaced by new laptops and ONCE when the multi-core CPU and RAM far-outclassed the ageing HDDs inside new thinkstations. And that was only getting on some peoples nerves when booting up in the morning! 1 minute and 28 seconds WASTED!!! EVERY DAY!!! And even then IT support picked up on the fact rather quickly and proceeded to do performance monitoring and ask us to time boot ups etc. Don't know what happened afterwards as I left but I presume they bought a cardboard box of SSDs soon after...
MOANERS.
When a company doesn't care if you have the tools to do your job properly, they obviously aren't worried about how productive you're being. Given that, why should you sweat it?
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Over the years I've gone from putting my own PC together (and the driver conflicts and the like) to just buying an off the shelf PC like your average schmoe. I've got both iOS and android tablets at home,and win10. The biggest time sink for me is hands down, Win10. Both my office laptop and home PC run it. I dread the super tuesday updates. At first Win10 would reset all my program preferences, but that has settled down. Most of all, it's the boot process that takes 5 minutes and then the user login that takes an additional 8 minutes. My tablets on the other hand can reboot in 60 seconds or less. Windows is simply bloated.
Maybe it's time I mentioned again that IBM mainframe I came across about 25 years ago. The users were complaining about slow response time, but a waiver was issued because they were in Australia and the mainframe was in London.
Oh, didn't I say? The slow response time was 2 seconds. Normally it would have had to be under half a second.
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
Okay,this article is a mess and it's missing some key factors and some VERY misleading information. The biggest, that people need a crazy amount of RAM to run basic operating systems. In my experience speed problems are not because you don't have the latest operating system. Contrary to popular belief, the newest operating system (especially Windows 8/10) actually CREATE slowdowns. Those "live" tiles, the windows store monitors, the data collection scanning/transmitting to ms your private data all take more Memory resources. Windows XP in fact consumes less memory but it's 64-bit version is virtual unusable because of lack of proper drivers for hardware. Windows 7 can be tweaked in a few ways. Take off those fancy graphical theme/effects that alone helps.I find disabling SuperFetch makes a significant difference. On a Windows 8 Mini computer (by Asus) I was able to improve performance significantly by disabling and uninstalling all the tile features (which is a pain in the arse), as well as Superfetch) made a difference. See these articles:
http://www.techregar.com/maste...
http://www.windowsbleu.com/201...
IT Professional often do NOT have the latest OS (except for testing) because we as professionals know of the memory consumption as well as privacy/OS control issues surrounding windows 8/10. So they will opt for Windows 7 pro (64-bit), a Mac or Linux variant (usually CentOS, Debian, or Scientific Linux..Linux Mint is for consumer use and it excels there).
Most people use computers for 4 things: Internet, Word Processing, Multimedia and gaming). The first 3 don't require that much memory unless you are creating a media server. If you are a gamer then you truly need the memory of the games. No way around that. And the latest games may not run as well as Windows 7 (but every game I've seen doesn't require Windows 8 or 10). But those systems are typically 1k to 2k USD to build. If you are an professional artist or musician or developer you may need more. I find 16 GB is a real blessing if you need to run Virtual machines or do a lot of Java development.
A few other things to improve Windows performance: There are services that truly have no business being there. The Update services that people seem to keep putting into systems are creepy. For example Mozilla Firefox actually installs an update service. Why would you even need a service running for a browser update? The browser gives you update alerts when it's running? Google has a updating service which you mess up the programs if you remove it. Adobe is one of the WORST offenders as they keep installing crap to try to push you to use their "cloud" services. The Adobe updater background applications can be disabled or removed. (they are sometimes preinstalled on laptops). Oh, And let's not forget Antiviruses. Some a great with memory, others are memory hogs. Symantec products are wasteful in resources in every respect. The best memory effecient antiviruses I've seen are Eset, BitDefender (not the free edition...sorry), and F-Secure. While I like Gdata it's a memory hog, no question. The most common reasons for PC slow downs are malware running on most people's PC without knowing it. For that I suggest a regular scan with Malware Bytes and Search & Destroy. I personally prefer the "classic" one without any of the automatic stuff but some may prefer the newer one. IT Professionals use these tools and a regular basis as they know no tool finds everything. Here are links to both:
https://www.safer-networking.o...
https://www.safer-networking.o...
and Malwarebytes:
https://www.malwarebytes.com/m...
There are free versions but some should
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
And not powerpoint presentations or pointless meetings with people who you're not sure why were invited (and oftentimes that includes yourself)?
What about status updates to management who require them in powerpoint which is just an export of all the dashboards you specifically made for them so they could refresh them 10x a day instead of asking for status on a 20 person concall every week?
Certainly the author does not work at Microsoft.
Today hardware is far faster then even a few years ago, so why is it slower for the users? A: Developers think the extra power is to accommodate more layers of program code? But if you are running an earlier OS like AmigaDOS (AROS)... it flys faster than my three finger typing, on current hardware.
So let me guess, the NSA uses current hardware but programs in assembly... How else might they process all the spying they do?
McAfee slows and jams up lots of stuff at our org.
The cyber security team has used very aggressive McAfee settings. The security manager gets awards for security, but there is no anti-award for jamming productivity to counter. Thus, his incentive is to crank McAfee to 11. Productivity is somebody else's problem.
For example, McAfee is set to On Access scanning on every desktop and server, meaning it scans almost every file accessed. Java "compressed" files, such as JAR's take forever to de-compress and scan, often more than 2 minutes. Thus, anything that uses Java as its engine is almost useless.
One can request such files be white-listed on a case-by-case basis, but the security team is too bogged down to get to them in a timely manner, and they often use a narrow interpretation "to be safe" such that they miss some files, requiring multiple rounds of requests to get such apps use-able.
McAfee's scan logs don't give enough info to be useful for up-front white-listing. Most users stopped bothering and just avoid using Java-based apps, paying for the more expensive alternatives. They blame Java instead of McAfee because they don't know the difference. (Arguably it could be said that large compressed libraries are a bad idea on Java's part. I hope they rid that feature. Or McAfee could make its scanners more Java-friendly.)
On a more general level, performance consultants have looked at our slow systems and concluded we should get PC's with SSD's instead of disks. But there's (allegedly) no budget for that, so even new PC's are disk-based and McAfee and On Access scanning gradually eats them up over time as typical Windows time-bloat piles up. Thus, we go through PC's faster, and in the end DON'T save money by using disks (productivity aside).
And lately they install more security doo-dads from other companies. They don't talk much about them to keep them stealthy. Those just add slugs on top of snails.
We joke we don't get hacked because our slow systems make the hackers fall asleep waiting for response. Security through Snoozativity.
I guess I shouldn't entirely blame the fastidious security manager because breaches could cause real havoc at our org. But, resources are not allocated to deal with the downsides of such fastidious cyber security. That's the top boss's fault.
Table-ized A.I.
... a new report * on Bloomberg blames outdated computers, decade-old operating systems and ageing equipments for being one of the biggest hurdles that prevents people from doing actual work in their offices.
* sponsored by Microsoft and Intel
Never mind time suck, I spend my entire day, every day, sitting in front of a computer! Please, take it away, so I can get something done!
Wait, I'm a programmer, that might not work so well.
I can get really frustrated with other drivers in a matter of seconds, but in reality I always get where I'm going a minute or two later. Then I can get pulled into an hour long BS meeting but hey, I'm getting paid to sit here so... sure, the computer can frustrate me for a few seconds here and there. But I doubt it's really a big time sink, even if I got the ultra-extreme top of the line model. That said, I have some issues with the servers/SAN...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I work at a help desk for a hospital and Physician's office network in Cincinnati, Ohio. Technology, as a boat anchor stopping people in their tracks, is especially bad in healthcare. The network here behaves like two cans and a string, especially since they piled on it with thin clients that have n internal storage and zero clients that are really just dumb terminals. Also, many full-fledged PCs are really showing their age. On top of that, most people who have to use the computers are intimidated by them, especially when dealing with Epic, an electronic medical records software that is obscenely complicated and unwieldy, but has somehow become the industry standard. There are also other software packages that complicate tasks that used to be simple. Even people like janitors and cooks who need supervisors to dial the help desk for them are expected to use the computers to due tasks like check their now paperless pay stubs, and sign off on performance reviews. It seems computers have been simply thrown at problems they are not the right tool to solve, and created problems that did not previously exist. This is at a system that some magazine named the most wired in the region, or maybe it was the most wired in the industry. This distinction does not seem award worthy from my perspective.
The Uncoveror: It's the real news.
Nonsense! Virtualize that crap and run everything else on shiny new hardware. I'm sure there are still brain-dead banking applications that require ActiveX controls to run in MS-IE 5.5 or 6.x but that shouldn't stop everything else in the world from progressing.
The Biggest Time Suck at the Office Might Be Your Computer!
Now would you kindly excuse me as I have to check a few Facebook post on my smartphone. This is important.
.... but I run Linux.
The user who is having trouble with multiple open documents probably doesn't have a computer that is too slow overall. What the user has is a computer with insufficient RAM to handle the workload. That gets worse over time; although the memory demands of Microsoft's operating systems has been pretty stable since Vista, the applications keep getting bigger. (Web browsers in particular consume more and more RAM because the web pages keep getting more complex.)
Installing more RAM in that computer would likely make it much faster at handling all those documents. Some older systems have already hit their RAM ceiling, but many have not and it's usually not a costly upgrade. It is true that many companies never upgrade existing computers, in which case they won't be considering that option.