> Is that your final and definitive answer on "education on the Internet"? <
You seem to be looking for a definitive, good-to-the-end-of-the-world answer. I don't claim to have one. With education, there are lots of things that come into play. As my projects usually have an education element to them (train the users!), I am at least vaugely familiar with what is available and what works well. Simple mechanical things tend to work well. More complex operations, particularly situations where a workflow is involved or where "offline" analysis is part of the process are a lot harder to convey without a real instructor. I could go on, but that's getting off topic.
I'll state it again. AT THIS POINT IN TIME, I generally see no compelling reason to upgrade most PCs in the organizations I have worked with. As new things come along, reasons may develop. In all liklihood they will. But I am no longer running into many people who are willing to spend the money on an upgrade that may never justify itself, or may itself be obsolete by the time the "next big thing" comes along.
Due to Microsoft's new licensing rules, organizations will have to move to XP relatively quickly. That will force upgrades in some organizations that have been able to hold on until now running Pentium 200s and the like. Most organizations I've worked with are MOSTLY OK for the upgrade on current hardware.
My selection of applications is hardly eclectic. IE, a browser that uses very little CPU. Outlook, which is mostly slowed down by data access issues. The Microsoft Office applications, which in normal use don't chew up many cycles. (Excel can, when used by a particularly saavy user with complex calculations to run on large sets of numbers and for those people I usually suggest a faster machine.) An ERP (SAP at my latest job) client, which again, is a client that is mostly concerned with displaying stuff and not doing much in the way of "heavy" calculations. A few small databases that -- again -- are disk limited, not really processor limited. I have a couple of database reporting/analysis tools. These also can be fairly processor intensive in the hands of a super user, but most users will generate relatively simple queries. These are generally limited by network and database capabilities, not by their processor speeds.
Since I'm the IT guy, I also have some programming languages installed on my machine, but even VB (the only thing I really use much myself) doesn't take a whole lot to run for my purposes.
You're right, my machine isn't really taxed very much. Most machines in most user's hands aren't particularly taxed. (More to the point, the processor isn't really heavily used, the disks and the network often are.)
What do you believe that the typical worker in the typical company is doing with their computer all day?
mg |
