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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 From the article: Slow, outdated computers and intermittent internet connections demoralize workers, a survey of 6,000 European workers said.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.
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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.
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>> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What a concept. We've eighty-seven thousand versions of microsoft office later. Does anyone's book report need anything newer than wordperfect? And if you thought that was dating myself, wordstar? It's black text on white page. Textart became useless when tractor-feed paper was gone -- you can't do banners on pre-cut paper. Count the number of office workers who use anything more than bold, italics, underline, a bulleted list, and maybe a numbered list. Even pivot tables have been around for decades now.
You need the latest hardware to run the latest software. But you don't need the latest software to do the latest business -- because the latest business, most of the time, is nothing new.
Windows 8 dual UI does slow people down
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.
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
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.
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.
Sorry it is bloat, I don't care how crappy your laptop is if it can't run a spreadsheet or two well. Excel 2.0 was released in 1987 that is 30 years ago, the speed even your cheapest computer is well over 1000 times faster (I am being very conservative here, and excluding multi core) they had what memory measured in kilobytes not Gigabytes, and yet people still have problems running a few spreadsheets.
The biggest is Fighting Windows and MS's 'we know better than you' attitude.
Add on top of that the local Admins restrictions and you get a virtual straight jacket.
That hits productivity hard.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
the NSA uses current hardware but programs in assembly
The NSA uses high end FPGAs.
Have gnu, will travel.
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.