Don’t assume they know
A friend asked me about getting on the internet again. She’d moved, and hadn’t been connected at home for a while.
Not thinking, I’d given her an old modem a while ago (she’d had ISDN at her old place, and just regular phone line at her new place, so I knew she didn’t have a modem that would work).
Now she was talking about broadband connections, and if nothing else worked, she’d use the regular modem.
And I said, wait a minute!
You can’t bring your old computer online now! It’s got 16 MB RAM and 166 MHz AMD processor, you may be able to download mail with it, but I’m not even sure the latest browser would run on it, and your old browser would only throw up javascript errors on just about every page you’d visit!
So we talked a while, and I was berating Windows 95 compared to newer versions of Windows. And then she said: Oh, but we upgraded it to Windows 2000, so then it’s OK!
I burst out laughing. I know, not cool, but I couldn’t help myself. The thought of Windows 2000 on such an old machine had me in stitches, and her satisfied tone when she told me was a hoot too. She very nearly got offended with me. And I’m sure she would have been, if I hadn’t been genuinely trying to help her.
I guess the morale is: Don’t assume regular users know what they’re doing. They’ll gladly make a mess of their computers, thinking they’re improving them.
June 12th, 2006 at 10:19 am
glad I’m not friends with you!
June 14th, 2006 at 1:36 pm
Amusing story
Until about a year ago I was still running Win98. Worked fine most of the time but when I visited some sites with heavy flash applications it gave up on me and I had to turn the whole thing of. Then stare right into the blue screen of death for a while and hope for the best.
XP never crasches and that’s a good thing. Was thinking of installing Linux on my old machine because it doesn’t need much. A pentium III 450 Mhz processor would be just fine.
June 22nd, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Don’t assume YOU know, either.
Old computers can mostly still do all the things they could before, they just get a /little/ slower when you add the bloat of newer operating systems.
I’m a software developer, so I have needs for testing on many types of systems. I keep one 300MHz Pentium-2 running Windows 95 … I’m using it RIGHT NOW. Yeah, it’s terribly slow *compared to* anything purchased last year, but it’s still completely functional. For someone who didn’t have the choice of a better computer, it’s not bad at all.
If your friend is someone who can afford to throw money at a new computer, that’s great, but if her old computer is still capable of making her think it is adequate, then when she does replace it, she should donate it to a deserving student or someone else who can’t afford more.
Yes, one could do a lot better for a little money. But it would still be a waste to simply junk a working box.
June 23rd, 2006 at 2:05 pm
Just before I purchased my Thinkpad, I was running XP Pro on a Fujitsu laptop running at 233Mhz. I did have 192MB’s of RAM, however. It was excrutiatingly slow, but it ran.
June 23rd, 2006 at 3:06 pm
To bob,
I had a 300 MHz as well. It wasn’t fast, but it was completely usable for web browsing. My computer ran win98 and had 196 MB RAM, and a recent windows install.
That’s VERY different from a 166 MHz equivalent AMD with only 16 MB RAM and (when I saw it last) win95. The computer was mostly used for Office type programs, had animated windows icons, and was excruciatingly slow. It was excruciatingly slow even when it was 6 months old. It needed more RAM, but because the RAM was (my computer parts supplier told me) proprietary IBM Aptiva RAM and way too expensive for what you got, it was never upgraded.