Things have a way of happening in waves — or is it just that we become more sensitive to patterns when we see an event? Have you ever bought a new car and then noticed how many like it you see on the freeway? A few days before you bought your new car the same model would simply blend into the flow of traffic. Now they really stick out.
The same phenomenon seems to happen with my clients. This week I have had three cases of complaints about slow computer boots accompanied with seemingly slow operations. In each case the system indicated that just setting at idle it was using nearly all the installed DRAM. Further snooping showed that in all three cases a whole bunch of applications were trying to be helpful by loading themselves at boot time and sitting around in the background shooting the breeze with the other idle apps while the operator simply wanted to check email. So is this representative of new phenomena, or was it simply a fluctuation in things that come over the transom?
It is one thing when applications demand part of your resources, and you only have 64 or 128 meg of DRAM. But when you are short of resources, and you have 512 meg to 1 gig, even Vista shouldn’t be that greedy.
Along with the slow boot issues, the same clients also report interesting things happen when the booting seems to be done. They get strange warning messages about DLLs not being resolved and things like that. Even the reliable little Iconoid sometimes shakes it head and says that it does not know what is happening.
One client asked me a good question. “Why do we have to boot?” Think about it. With gigs of flashdrive memory easily available, why can’t the OS simply be resident or something similar? Trying to answer the question is like trying to defend our invasion of Iraq. If you believe in the President’s program and philosophy, then defending the invasion and occupation is obvious and trivial. But if you don’t support him, then trying to explain how we got to where we are becomes much more complicated. Similarly, if you are a strong supporter of Windows then explaining the boot process is simple, but if you use Windows primarily because it is used by everyone else, then the explanation becomes more complicated. [BTW, slow booting is not simply a feature of Windows. My Linux machine takes its time waking up too, but for somewhat different reasons.]
In the crunch, my client doesn’t really care about niceties of Windows or alternatives. She simply wants to turn on her machine in the morning and not have to endure a meditation moment while the HD makes noises. To her, “Why do we have to boot?” has different implications than it might have to you. Suggesting that she not shut down her computer when she is not actively using it is a copout, but maybe it is the best copout.
In each case I tried to clean up the startup process in a way that would not bother normal usage. In the process, I also deleted many useless desktop shortcuts. Then, just to be sure, I defragmented their HDs. My clients seem to all forget to do anything at all about defragmenting. I don’t blame them for that. Casual users should not have to worry about such things. I file the nuisance of defragmenting in the same folder as “Why do we have to boot?” Of course, their computers could be programmed to defragment automatically on a scheduled basis, but that is another story.
Click here to read about my new tutorial on helping seniors. The new version has grown considerably over the original. It has more topics and anecdotes, and fewer typos. While you’re at it, check out my expanded tutorial on decision theory.
[tags]defrag, defragment, boot, RAM[/tags]