11 February, 2012
We have just finished a huge week here at the shop with all of the technicians fully booked. Amongst this on Thursday a good long term customer rang at lunchtime with viruses on the PC we sold him only 3 months ago. All the techs were busy so I volunteered to work on this one myself as the customer needed it urgently to finalise some invoicing. It had a virus which had taken over and disabled the normal virus scanner. This same virus was pretending to be a virus scanner itself and would start running as soon as the PC was started – saying that it was finding hundreds of infected files it was then asking for credit card details to get rid of the problems.
This is a hoax and will only lead to credit card fraud and further PC issues. I rarely get the chance to work on PC’s myself these days, however this week I had also spent most of Tuesday afternoon onsite working on 5 older office PC’s that were running slow on a network. Here I was figuring that the rest of Thursday afternoon was also going to be absorbed by this virus job, but I couldn’t believe how fast this PC was to respond to commands and complete scans. Only a bit more than an hour after he had dropped it off I was calling the customer back to report that it was fixed and ready to be picked up.
Thinking about this and looking at the specs of the PC it was easy to understand why. It was an Intel i7-2600 with 8GB of ram and Windows 7 Professional 64Bit. This thing was a rocket and simply because of its speed it had just saved its owner a couple of hundred dollars in labour. Reflecting back on the 4 year old plus, PC’s that I had been working on earlier in the week I would have to say that not only are they slowing their users down every minute of every day but also costing around 5 to 10 times more in servicing compared to newer units.
Looking closer, if you go to the following web site to look at your existing computers CPU power rating (www.cpubenchmark.net ) I see that the old office PC’s had a power rating of around 400 and the Intel i7-2600 has a power rating of 8911 (around 22 times quicker). A base 6 cylinder Holden Commodore from 1985 had a power rating of 106kW, at 190kW today – 27 years later this has still not quite doubled. With computer CPU’s going from an average of 400 only 5 years ago to an average of 6000 today they are almost doubling in power each year. These power increases equate to an incredible difference in use and feel of a computer.
So as far as CPU power developments go; three or four years in the IT industry is a long time. Software manufacturers are taking advantage of this fact and are constantly adding features and complexity to their software – which normally only runs well (fast) on modern PC’s. If your PC is much more than 3 years old then it will not only be wasting your time but any servicing will also cost you more. Kerr Solutions is at 128 Musgrave Street & is contactable on 49 222 400.
