Computers and Technology

Computers these days are much quicker than they were a few years ago and yet they are essentially doing the same thing unless you are heavily into digital content creation or computer aided design.

So why is it that no matter how powerful a computer you buy, you still need to buy a new one every few years?

An essential part of computer ownership is for the most part totally ignored by many people, sometimes through laziness, but as is more often the case a lack of understanding about how a computers actually work.

The result of lack of maintenance is of course a slow computer and as the computer gets slower and slower over months and years the decision is made to ditch the old and buy a new one often quite unnecessarily.

Do the computer vendors and system builders do anything to help avoid unnecessary computer purchases? I guess that is a stupid question to ask because at the end of the day the last thing they want to do is to lose sales. Also when was the last time you purchased a computer and found a proper computer maintenance guide enclosed?

The key areas you will need to maintain to keep your computer running at peak efficiency are of course the hard disk, the system registry and also regular scans for viruses and one final thing guaranteed to slow down your internet experience spyware. Maintain these areas and your Pc will remain nice and quick for many years to come.

Also if you bought your computer at a budget price you may even find that there is simply not enough physical memory in the computer which is another reason it will run slowly.

Most people are just totally unaware of the importance of the right amount of physical memory in their systems, and naturally assume that because it is new there will be sufficient memory, this is a big mistake. Unfortunately due to human nature if a competent computer salesperson where to give you good advice and suggest you spend more for a better system a majority of consumers would look at this as a sales ploy and buy elsewhere.

The salesperson will learn from their mistakes very quickly and will also learn that giving best advice will often lose them a sale so they often say nothing to discourage your initial choice but in fact are more inclined to endorse it as this is the quickest way to a sale.

Now the problem here is unless you actually know what to do to maintain your system or are aware about memory requirements you'll be blissfully unaware of what is happening to your computer and at the point of major slow down many people call in a family friend that may know a bit about computers, but in my experience they invariably leave a computer worse than they found it.

The next course of action is then to call in the local computer repair man who will be able to fix your system (sometimes for several hundred dollars or more than half the cost of a new one), but again this is often totally unnecessary with a little education about computer maintenance.

If you want to save money by avoiding the need to purchase a new computer make sure you have carried out some basic system maintenance on your computer before making the decision to purchase a new one.