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Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective Crossing the Windows pain threshold
Our Blogs Open Sauce - A GNU perspective Crossing the Windows pain threshold | Crossing the Windows pain threshold |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 05 October 2007 | |
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Page 1 of 2 This kid is a typical teenager and has all the usual habits which computer users of his age do - listening to music, watching movies and playing games. For each of these activities, the PC is the first port of call. Hence when said PC stops working - and more so when it happens during the holidays - fixing it becomes a matter of urgency. But in this endeavour, he is handicapped to some extent - because he has to approach me through his parents. Three years ago, his father, a close friend of mine, brought over the existing family PC, a Pentium 4 with a fairly decent amount of memory, which was running at the speed that ants manage when drowning in treacle. It took a fair bit of doing to get things back to what passes for normal on a Windows XP box - there was enough spyware and adware on that box to consume four hours of my time. Mind you, at that time all they had at home was a dial-up internet connection. The man and his family had put up with that level of performance for some time as they did not wish to bother me. And while they were aware that something was probably wrong, their pain threshold was fairly high - they thought computers were meant to behave that way. I don't really blame them. A lot of Windows users have very low expectations of fairly high-end hardware. After applying the triple R antigen - for the uninitiated, that's reboot, reformat and reinstall - the box went back and was used for a year and a half. But thereafter, my friend realised that computers could work somewhat more efficiently than his spyware-infested box. And he started entertaining thoughts of getting a new box and also improving the internet connectivity at home. He asked me to build him a new box in August last year and I obliged. Both father and son often used to glance curiously at my own workstation whenever they visited so I was able to tell them a bit about the operating system which I use. I never asked them to even consider using Linux. |
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