I am writing this on my own personal desktop computer. It
has a 3.60GHz AMD A8-5600K APU processor with an integrated ATi Radeon HD
graphics card; it has 7.47 GB of useable RAM, it runs on Windows 8, the latest
operating system from Microsoft. It’s not exactly HAL-9000 or Deep Thought, but
it’s relatively powerful and does everything I ask it to.
The potatoes they
provide the students at the college I attend, however, are complete piles of
arse. All of the computers at college are at least five years old, use
processors less powerful than those small electric motors primary school
children play with during those science lessons wherein they teach you about
basic circuitry, and whoever is in charge of setting them up should be shot.
Does this individual
know what ‘screen resolution’ is? Has this person ever heard or read those
words together in the same clause? The monitors these vegetables are given are
old 15’’ LCD jobs, which require a screen resolution of 1024x768, or else the
screen is impossible to use without acquiring a headache within the first
half-hour of usage. The resolution they’ve been given is closer to 640x480,
which makes the graphics look huge on the screen, which is really bloody
uncomfortable to use.
That’s not the worst part, either, the worst aspect of these
personal catastrophes is the sheer speed of them, or lack thereof.
Some of them have
Google’s very fast web browser, Chrome, installed on them, which is fine, until
you discover that the computer is making Google Chrome run slowly. Just how bad
does a computer have to be for Google Chrome, the fastest web browser there is,
to be slow to load?
I clicked on a link
that was on an email I’d subscribed online for, and the page took a full three
minutes to load. God forbid you try loading two tabs at the same time. You’ll
be there for hours, I know I was.
The main problem is that these computers were made on the
cheap, in bulk, in 2006, for educational establishments by an unknown company
called ‘Stone’, who are somehow associated with Microsoft.
These PCs were
designed to run on either Windows XP or Windows Vista, which was the latest OS
at the time, XP being a few years older, but the college computer people have
them running on Windows 7, which they just aren’t designed to do so they can
barely handle the job, and by “the job” I mean “any job”, take Microsoft
Publisher, for example; if you try opening a file that’s over a couple of
thousand kilobytes (which really isn’t a lot), it will take, as they say, the
piss.
The actual maintenance of the tower units (main computer
bits) leaves a lot to be desired. Most of them look as though they haven’t been
cleaned since they were purchased however many years ago that was, and I don’t
just mean the cases are a bit dusty, a computer with clean components runs much
better than a computer full of dust and spiders, dead or otherwise.
Quite a large number
of keyboards have keys missing, in one case I found some of the keys had been
rearranged to spell out a message I can’t repeat without disciplinary action.
If a key isn’t missing, it doesn’t work, and all the keyboards are inexplicably
required to have a safety warning on them, which warns you of the perils of
the, apparently terrifying, office keyboard. Just how much of a slack-jawed
invalid do you have to be to injure yourself using a QWERTY keyboard?
They’re probably
there so Americans can’t go on a suing spree when they deliberately break a
finger while using it claiming that they weren’t expecting it to be so robust,
as if they were expecting it to be made of nougat.
Despite all of this, at least whoever set them up using the
college-wide network made good use of the start menu.
Oh hang on, no they
didn’t, nine times out of ten you can’t get anything from the start menu and if
you can, it’s the wrong thing, because for some reason unbeknownst to people
with common sense, someone’s made it so everything has to be accessed by the
desktop. Now, that seems fine when you don’t yet have anything running because
you’ve just logged in, but once you’ve opened Word or Internet Explorer, you
have to minimise everything before you can open any other program you might
need. This is silly and time consuming if you have a lot of windows open. Which
I do. All the time. As does everyone. I’ve never seen any person work on a
computer in college with less than three windows open at any one time.
Imagine trying to run a game on one of those atrocities. My
pride and joy does a pretty good job of running the latest releases, provided I
don’t set all the graphics to ‘very high’. To run the latest releases on ‘very
high’ settings and still have a playable fps rate I’d need a nuclear reactor,
which I can’t afford just now.
If I tried running
Tomb Raider III, released in 1998, on a college computer, I imagine it would
take several weeks to load, and have a frame rate of about 4 fph (that’s frames
per hour), in spite of the game being at least seven years older than the
computers themselves.
My solution to this problem would be to ultimately employ
someone to look after the computers who actually knew what they were doing.
Maybe they should promote the technician in the media department for my film
studies course. He works with Macs all day, which are downright impossible to
work with so he’d make light work of some broken down old computers.
Maybe he’d even get them to work to the point where people
could actually use them for things. You know, important college things. Stuff
that matters.
