Quote:
Originally Posted by Rathji
a RAM upgrade can easily extend the life of computer for a couple years. It can make an old system not feel old for a while. However, if you both are used a far more powerful desktop, then your laptop will feel old and slow and like sclitheroe said you won't be satisfied with a minor upgrade.
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I agree, and RAM has been cheap enough that throwing 2 gigs into ANY old XP machine is the first thing I do.
I’m finding though, that even that doesn’t have the impact it used to. Putting an end to heavy swapping always helps, but its not the night and day difference overall that is used to be, from a perception/human usability standpoint.
The biggest thing, I think, is that users have evolved and their requirements have become more complex.
I routinely replace client machines that are “too slow” even though they are perfectly functional, and have enough RAM. The difference though, is that office workers have evolved in the five years since the machines were introduced too. They have five years worth of email in Outlook, they have a desktop indexer program running to find their stuff, Word, Excel, Skype, MSN messenger, a browser with half a dozen tabs open, a PDF or two open, maybe a VPN connection to the overseas office with an RDP session, and all these things are legitimate business uses and need to be going concurrently. An older P4 is just slightly slow enough, even with sufficient RAM, that under this kind of load it lags just a little, and that little bit of lag is enough to distract/frustrate the user, and then productivity goes down.
I used to think you could focus on the machine, and whether its running right or not, but ultimately, if its lagging on the user, its not acceptable, if you expect that user to be truly productive. That said, for a lot of other uses, like point of sale, or a simple single browser session, that slow machine is fine, because the lag doesn’t crop up, or doesn’t impact the person, but for a busy office staffer, its not.