The Need for Speed

If computers get faster and faster every year, why do we seem to spend more and more time waiting for them to do things?

The problem is software. People have an insatiable need for more and more features - bells and whistles. Software companies are driven to add more and more features, more and more cool things. Each new software application, or each new version of the same application tends to get bigger and bigger, and bloated with more features the slow down the computer.

For example, web browsers! When the web first started the first web browser, Mosaic, was fairly simple, it could display text and pictures and it didn't require a lot of computer power to do that. Over time people have added other multimedia such as videos (i.e. You Tube) and scripts. These take up more and more computer power. Now that there are tabbed browsers it is common to have many tabs open, and these may all be running scripts or playing media. Increasingly more and more web sites use scripts and media to add the cool factor, or get people's attention (i.e. advertising). When I start up my web browser now, it puts an awful load on my computer slowing it down. All those tabs, media and scripts cause the browser to use more and more threads and processes - so you need a computer that can run a lot of threads and processes at one time.

Another thing people tend to do, especially me, is have lots of applications running and windows open. The more windows you have open, the more memory is used and the more load there is on the computer. The more software you install the more chance there is that the software starts up automatically at boot time, so whenever you reboot your computer it can take longer to finish booting. My current computer takes about 15 to 20 minutes to actually finish booting. Sure I can login a minute after booting, but everything runs incredibly slow until it's finished booting. Finally, a sad fact about Microsoft Windows is that for some reason we seem to always have to be rebooting it.

The bottom line is when the computer gets too slow it becomes more frustrating to use it. The only way to reduce the frustration is to get a faster more powerful computer. In my case my home computer is for my own personal enjoyment - that's the worst time to be frustrated.