Separation Anxiety with Your IT Gear
Separation anxiety propagates in many fields and all too often we see it in IT as well. It comes about for two main reasons – familiarity with the existing situation and resistance to change. Too often we see someone putting up a situation that is well past its use by date but they keep on keeping on and only to their own detriment. Sound familiar?
Things change and in the field of IT the rate of this change is incredible. Operating systems like Windows XP and Windows Vista were designed a decade ago and already they struggle with modern software and security. There is now a considerable amount of software that does not install on an older operating system like Windows XP and this situation is only going to get worse.
Computers are very personal devices and many users customise them with different background pictures, different desktop themes, special colours, different fonts, different sounds, icons in particular places and folders setup in particular and sometime peculiar ways. This brings about a sense of familiarity or the “better the devil you know” scenario and has many cringing at the thought of a new device.
The other big reason for not changing is exactly that – a resistance to change. Any new device will be different to the old and there will be an associated learning curve. To some this learning curve will be fun but to others it is simply scary. Microsoft certainly did their corporate best to scare or alienate people with their infamous change to the Windows 8 active tiles and other radical changes to the previously ‘familiar’ start menu.
There is sometimes no better communication forum that the bush telegraph or urban myth and the changes made to Windows 8 now has a lot of uninformed people propagating false information that Windows 7 is the last good operating system. Windows 10 has now been out for near 12 months and it is simply brilliant. Despite what your neighbours nephew says about it – Windows 10 when professionally installed or at least when freshly installed is easily Microsoft’s best yet.
Even if you are not in the market for a new computer, we are encouraging everyone with Windows 7 or Windows 8 to upgrade to Windows 10 while it is still a free upgrade, before the cut-off date of July 29 this year. We also hear a lot of people saying how Windows 10 ruined their computer – because it was running fine with Windows 7 or 8 previously. Again this is not because there is anything wrong with 10 – it is simply that the upgrade was not done correctly.
Another interesting barrier to replacing an aging PC which I have heard numerous times is “computers are changing so fast that when you buy one off the shelf, it is obsolete by the time you get it home’. Mind you, these words are most often spoken by someone that has a computer which is already well over 5 years old. Is there any truth here? Certainly some of the chain store computers may have been sitting in storage for a long time so it is a case of buyer beware.
From our point of view – the desktops, laptops and servers that we sell always have the very latest generation Intel processors and Kingston Ram. These are not components that are in any form obsolete and if you compare them to hardware from even just 2 years ago there is a light year of difference. We also see a number of people hold off on a new PC because they heard on some science show that there is a “new technology” on the way.
Again these people are often putting up with a slow or failing PC waiting for that next latest invention to be available in the marketplace. Letting you in on a little secret, I can promise that there will always be a new invention coming to the marketplace soon. However, if this new invention will double computer speed or halve their size then this will be publicised even more than the Kardashian’s.
Future Byte Me topics can be emailed to [email protected] and Bruce is contactable at Kerr Solutions, 205 Musgrave Street or on 49 222 400.
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