PC users wasting more than 5 days
a year on slow computers
Nothing can be more frustrating than having a slow computer, especially when work needs to be done. But just how bad is it? According to a recent study by SanDisk, users lose about five days a year from it, The Telegraph reported.
The company surveyed more than 8,000 PC owners about how much time they felt they lost from a computer that was working slowly. Italians had it the worst, losing nearly a week every year because of a slow PC. People in the United Kingdom were somewhere in the middle, wasting five and a half days, while the United States was the lowest, coming in a 4.9 days per year.
Delays that users most frequently noted were because of file uploads or downloads and applications that were slow loading.
“It’s high time PC users in the UK started getting back the time they are losing to slow computers,” SanDisk’s senior product market manager Stefan Kratzer stated. “PC users in the UK are spending too much time waiting for computers and would quite understandably like to get more time back to do the things they enjoy.”
Also according to the survey, one in five users in the U.K. were found to have tossed or hit their device out of frustration due to slow loading times while 30 percent of respondents lost sleep over it.
Solid state drives: Can they speed up old computers?
Solid state drives offer more storage at a faster rate than mechanical hard drives. But just how effective can they be? PC World’s Jon L. Jacobi tested older computers with an SSD and found the technology can be effective in speeding up a computer.
Jacobi tested solid state drives against the legacy hardware in a laptop, Macbook and a desktop. In all three, the SSD improved the system’s speed score by 50 percent or more. In the desktop, it improved the boot time from a long 63 seconds to an impressive 23 seconds.
PC users should consider adding a solid state drive only on computers that were built in the last six or seven years to provide optimal return on the investment. Older systems will see some improvement, but not as significant gains as those achieved in Jacobi’s tests.
PC optimization software
Another way users can speed up their aging computers, no matter how old, is through performance software. System Mechanic from iolo technologies helps fix errors, crashes and freezes commonly associated with older computers and restores them to maximum speed and power. This patented technology automatically repairs, declutters, stabilizes and accelerates your PC with a set of proactive processes that attack slowdown. System Mechanic then intelligently adjusts processor, memory, hard disk and Internet settings to further increase your computer’s speed and performance.
