Workers Will Smash Their PCs To Get an Upgrade 533
An anonymous reader writes "One in four office workers reckon that the best way to get a new work computer is to smash up the one they have — either that or to take it down to the junk shop themselves. Some 40 per cent of office workers complain that their aging workplace PC hurts their productivity and many are tempted to resort to extreme measures to get an upgrade, including taking a hammer to the aging beast on the desktop. Some ten per cent of UK workers said they'd even resort to buying new parts for their work devices themselves to perform their own upgrade; particularly those who work in smaller organizations."
You mean monitors? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how many people point to their monitor and call it their computer. I can imagine a lot of people smash up their monitor expecting that it will result in their getting a new computer.
What I'd really like to know is how many people do that; get a replacement monitor; and say, "Wow, this new computer is so much faster!"
It's Not The Hardware... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason most office workers are unproductive has nothing to do with their hardware.
Re:bean counters hate computer upgrades? (Score:5, Insightful)
we try to show business owners that 10 year old computers really are a problem, even when they still work.
If they still perform the task for which they were intended 10 years ago, why are they a problem?
The real problem isn't old computers, it's new software. New software comes out which doesn't really do anything better than your old software. But people you do business with upgraded, so now you have to upgrade your software to interoperate with them. But the new software runs more slowly, and now you need new hardware to do the same task you were doing just fine 6 months ago.
For a stand-alone application, there's nothing wrong with 10 year old computers. Or 20 year old computers, for that matter. DOS still works as well as it ever did.
Re:Spend money to save money... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Can I get a monitor with a display resolution larger than 1400x900?" "No." "But...but...I can't even see a page of schematics at a time, and the code I'm maintaining is a hundred thousand lines split in to dozens of files!" "The budget is tight, can't do it."
You're asking for the wrong reasons... With a bigger monitor you can show the new brand image more clearly, you can use the extra space to display the image of the new mission statement... You'll always be on track that way, you'll know the schematic you can't see clearly on the screen is driving customer satisfaction and global leadership and all that...
Re:What a bunch of dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Never underestimate the power of liquids (Score:5, Insightful)
Try working in most actual business environments.
The argument always goes back and forth like this:
IT Side - we have the following reasons that normal users shouldn't be installing programs themselves.
- Security risk of adware/malware/bundleware
- Number of incidents where machines have been compromised.
- Number of incidents where complaints of "my machine is slow" turn out to be the result of user filling drive up with crap
User side -
- "But it takes more than 5 minutes for them to come down and install (program X that's actually work related) for me." Nevermind that these installs happen maybe once per year and if they would bother SCHEDULING with us...
- "But I want to try out (program y) to see if we can use it in the business..."
- User happens to be the PHB's son or is fucking the PHB on the side.
Brain-dead PHB side-
- "My employees are complaining that you IT guys are getting in the way of their work! Fix it so they can install things!"
- One month later: "Megan's machine got infected again. Why the hell aren't you IT guys stopping this from happening? Do whatever it takes to stop this from happening again!"
- One more month later: "Megan's complaining you took away her install rights! I need her to be working as best as possible, give them back to her! She can't possibly cause problems with that!"
Now add in that you might be working in an EDUCATION environment - where every tenured faculty member is also a brain-dead PHB.
Just because they say it, doesn't mean they do it. (Score:4, Insightful)
All IT people have heard the joke, "Well, if I take a hammer to it..." But that doesn't mean they do it. From the article, the headline reads as though users are causing deliberate damage to their computers in order to receive an upgrade. Read the actual text however, and while users are saying that, there isn't anything presented to show there are widespread acts of vandalism happening. The only real takeaway from this article is that some UK offices are using significantly outdated equipment. The headline is just sensationalism. I hate to say it, but I think /. fell for this one.
Re:The Best Way (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow. What a horrible idea. Never, ever, donate money to your employer. And even if you take it with you when you quit, you have donated money to your employer.
As a manager, it is MY job to give you the tools to make you more productive. If I am not making the right trade-offs, then I am not doing my job. And if I am not doing my job, you shouldn't make me look good by donating from your own pocket.
Re:What a bunch of dummies (Score:4, Insightful)
Their "slow" computer is thousands of times faster and is available to them nearly all day! Only a poor worker blames his tools. Now if the computer just plain didn't work, that would be a different story...
Says the person who has never used a serious CAD or GIS application on non-cutting edge workstation.
Re:Same old bottleneck (Score:4, Insightful)
I installed Nt 4 on a 75 mHz desktop, thinking I might go MSCE or something. If something was reading the hard disk, I could watch every control get painted. Erase, draw the outline, put the letters on, do a checkbox. Start task manager to see what is taking up the CPU, 20 minutes for that to load. Then I see CPU usage is only about 50%. Why? Windows 98 on the same machine did not have the same problem, so it wasn't the hardware.
I wish I knew. I get the same thing on Vista with a dual-core 2.5 gHz processor. Outlook refuses to show me meeting info. It's not responding, then slowly responding, then paints the reminder window. Can't see the dial-in number, waiting for it to paint. Get 3 instant messages - are you joining? Yeah, paste me the number and i'll be right there.
PC backup, antivirus, update scans, hard drive maintenance - any prolonged disk activity brings the computer to a halt. It's not just me - yesterday we had a chief architect say "Id bring that up but my backup just started" and everyone said "oh, yeah we know."
Simple version: my notebook is slower than my previous XP one, and I just tolerate it until we get the OK to move to Windows 7, and hope it's slightly faster because the processor is faster. It won't be, because it will have a 4 million GB drive at 5400 RPM.
With Windows NT, storage has always been the bottleneck. At least until you throw enough memory at it that it can hold all your apps plus an ample disk cache. Backup, antivirus, etc. tasks use a lot of non-cached data, and there goes your advantage.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Fighting for PC user rights (Score:5, Insightful)
Here let's flip that around a bit, just as another example.
IT Side - we made up the following reasons that normal users shouldn't be installing programs themselves.
- Microsoft gave us a document that says we should configure it like this so we did just that.
- We are too lazy or overworked or underpaid to think too hard about our user's needs
- We never bothered to ask what user's requirements were, we just assumed it.
- IT person happens to be PHB's son or fucking PHB on the side.
User side -
- I have to be able to do work that my boss has required me to do which is core to the business making money!
- I need to be able to test certain situations in order to come up with a new means to be more productive and save the company money!
- Arbitrary restrictions are stifling users for the sake of making IT look good.
Brain-dead PHB of IT side-
- "We have a policy and we stick too it and we can't change it."
- One month later: "We have a policy and we stick to it and we can't change it."
- One more month later: PHB is out of the office playing golf with someone while you fume over missing yet another deadline.
Now add in that you might be working in a software development environment, where every IT rep treats you like an office temp and tries to give you access to MS office and internet explorer and nothing else and does absolutely nothing to understand how your own company's software works nor tries to understand what it takes to create, test, and support said software when your own customers have admin rights to their own machine and, funny, you don't, so you can't possibly figure out what their problem is!
This is just a counter example to your stereotype. People in general are idiots, sometimes they are in IT, sometimes they are in the user base, and sometimes it's both. You can't paint one side with a broad brush and completely blame things like this on them.
Re:Never underestimate the power of liquids (Score:4, Insightful)
that's the real trick, if Windows had and enforced proper user/system separation then companies could lock down the systems that would limit that crap. Windows and it's applications assume you have full admin rights all the time. UAC while bad was a good step MSFT should have just pressed harder program developers to code properly, and forced all XP programs into a hard lock down mode.
Are you from 1999? Software developers stopped assuming users have admin access a few years after XP hit the scene. It's only rare medical of scientific control software that's written that stupidly anymore. And guess what? There is specialty scientific software for Linux out there that assumes you're root.
And windows is easy to segregate admin access on desktops either manually or via GPO. You can even list admin users additively or destructively(replacing the current list, preventing admins from adding someone else as an admin).
Re:Never underestimate the power of liquids (Score:4, Insightful)
It has had for nearly twenty years. Fifteen if you only want to start counting from NT4. The problem isn't the lack of OS capability.
Apparently it is. Just look at the negative commentary in Slashdot about UAC, from people who should know better.
Re:Organizations think PCs are like furniture (Score:2, Insightful)
(full disk virus scans in the middle of the workday
We tried scheduling them in the middle of the night, but some fuckwits kept turning the machine off and then turning off the surge strip so that Wake-On-Lan couldn't call the machine back online at 2AM when we had the scans scheduled so as not to impact the users - and they KEPT doing it even after the 5th time they were told not to. So we had to go with plan B and scan during the day.
password changes every 30 days
Actually where I am, it's 90. And the blame there lies with some PHB who wrote the legislation/regulations at government levels.
Think before you blame IT for "coming up with" things like this.
emails older than 90 days are deleted
Where the hell do you work? We have the opposite problem, nobody deletes anything, ever. Storage gets to be a bitch. But don't dare even trying to clean out 20 year old files that haven't been referenced in 15 years, "we might need them sometime."
no personal flashdrives
After the 500th time some fucktard got a worm with a traveling USB loader package on their home machine and brought in a flashdrive to infect the network.
Or after the 5th time someone walked out on their last day with a ton of company documents and handed them over to a rival company...
This isn't an IT decision. This is a decision made by the lawyers to limit liability.
firewall monitoring
You like worms, do you?
180-day new software approval processes
Given the number of exploits in software like Adobe Acrobat?
requiring a "code" to use the color printer
Talk to the bean counters in accounting, who ran the numbers on cost per page on color versus monochrome and came up with that policy, not us.
The end result: Frustration, annoyance, anger... like road-rage; we feel that the computer, (like a slow guy blocking the fast lane) is holding us up, and keeping us from accomplishing our goals, and that leads to "keyboard rage." If people are breaking their machines to get upgrades, that's a sure-sign that the organization is failing to provide a suitable IT environment.
The end result: IT has been given the screaming fit from the PHB over and over again to make things "secure." Then IT gets a screaming fit from assholes like you who think you know everything that's going on.
Is it any wonder we see what you DON'T see above and consider you a bloody fucking moron for not paying attention? Fuck, half this stuff isn't even our decision.