It’s been long known that outdated computer equipment could have direct consequences for productivity, by slowing the workers down to the speed of their machinery. But a new survey concludes that it also has effects on morale in offices, causing not just unhappiness, but also more issues with things like eye fatigue, headaches and RSI.
(Hey boss, can I have a new PC?)
Old PCs cause sick leave? Yep, you screw me, I screw you.
Or maybe rather than the PC it’s the software, a
slow goat-track network, or the dills who send email
attachments for the most trivial of purposes?
The average person would just blame ‘the computer’ and wouldn’t
differentiate between software, hardware or network.
For managers on contracts, if part of their pay was inversely
proportional to megabytes emailed multiplied to the average number of
recipients, then maybe all would be happier (though possibly
more ignorant)?
Has any company actually tried ‘demand management’ as an
alternative to hardware upgrades?
Though having said that, having done my own replacement
earlier this week and enjoying more stable operation, yes,
I am happier 😉
I’ve never had a brand new PC and I’ve always been happy with them. They were all “hand me downs” that my dad had, including a 200mhz pentium, followed by a 275mhz pentium II then finally when my father died I took his dual 466mhz celeron PC. So some of those would have been getting onto 5+ years when I gave them up and I still use the 200mhz pentium and PII as servers (lost the dual celeron when its dodgy faulty power supply unit failed). At worst, if things were getting bad I found that beefing them up with RAM made a huge difference.
But okay I was running Linux, it isn’t known for being resource hungry (even then it was a struggle to run X11 on the 200mhz pentium when it had 32meg of RAM and especially with apps like Netscape, etc) and with the other possible exception being Open Office/Star Office (which didn’t really run at all on 32 meg of RAM and when attempted it took five minutes to start up). Though I think the same is possibly true of Windows in that as long as it’s beefed up with RAM it runs alright. Only thing is that unlike a real operating system (such as Linux and Mac OS X for instance), it tends need reinstalling every so often. Also on some older hardware, you may be better off sticking to Windows 2000.
That all said, this 1Ghz iBook G4 is the first brand new computer I’ve ever had and it was nice getting a brand new computer. Especially one so shiny and stylish.