We pay you $80K a year and you come up with THAT?!

[EricKei]

500?! How is that comp even RUNNING?!

I really wish I knew. Intel and AMD would pay for the nose for that info, I'm sure >_>

The scary thing is, he doesn't have appreciable slowdown aside from the occasional slow-to-open window and the usual drop in sped you get for leaving Windows open for a few days and never restarting. I mean, his CPU usage is absurd and his free RAM is practically nonexistent -- I don't even wanna about how much thrashing his hard drive must be doing to keep up with that (I upped his swapfile size and made it permanent years ago)...

[notalwaysright]

I know someone who doesn't understand what tabs are, so he has everything set to open a separate window... He'll just open and open windows until the computer runs so slow he reboots and starts over.

[crazylegs]

I'm guessing the whole 'keep tabs/windows to a minimum' thing is there for a couple of reasons. The first is that it's free to implement and the second is that it gives lower management a way to be 'proactive' in managing it when it inevitably ends in failure by bullying staff to have fewer and fewer windows/tabs.

[MoonCat]

I'm guessing the whole 'keep tabs/windows to a minimum' thing is there for a couple of reasons

It's the "go-to" for when you're in the habit of blaming staff for everything that goes wrong.

This is not to say that users don't screw up. I'm not even in IT and I've seen what a mess some people can make of their computers. But it's not helpful to tell someone who's genuinely having a problem that it's because "you have too many windows open" or "you clicked twice instead of once." Sometimes the answer is more complicated than that.

[Geek King]

[...] "you clicked twice instead of once." Sometimes the answer is more complicated than that.

Ug, I have users who do this, though. If its not opening fast enough, double click it again. Windows really slows to a crawl when it is trying to open four copies of Outlook. It would be more, but at that point Windows has stopped paying attention to the clicks while jumping all those memory locations around.

Its almost funny to hear on phone support, though.

Me: All right, let's open up Outlook.

Phone: Okay! <click! click! click! clicky-click! clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick clickclick>

[CrazedClerkthe2nd]

The running fewer windows thing might almost be realistic except for the fact our computers tend to come to a screeching halt even when there's fewer than FIVE windows open.

[Sapphire Silk]

GK - That's nothing. A friend of mine is of the type that prefers to keep Firefox tabs open for easy reference, rather than bookmark and close them when they're not going to be accessed anytime soon

I have a friend who does this. She'll have 30+ tabs open in one window at any given time. You can't even tell what she has open because you can't read the titles on the tabs.

So I really don't see the point. I'll open about 8 at most; if I need to go back to something I'll go into the History to find the link and reopen it.

[EricKei]

I actually made a couple of attempts to get him to ease up on the tabs -- he said that he "needed" them all open at once. No idea why, as I know quite well it wasn't for anything work-related. I think he simply preferred it that way. I gave up on that lost cause pretty quickly. He HATED having to reboot, too.

[Seshat]

In corporate's defense, this is often because IT often can't (or doesn't bother to) quantify the benefits, ROI, or savings of those cures.

My guess would be 'doesn't know how to'. I know that I had no idea that sort of issue even existed, when I left university: I'm inherently/by nature a PURE geek. I was much, much more interested in understanding how logic gates work than the stuff they tried to teach us about getting on with coworkers or management.

A good IT manager/CTO is someone who can gradually train the 'young Seshats' of the world, and also interface between them and management. Get the 'young Seshat' to do the technical research, and specify the kinds of numbers she should calculate (that will quantify benefits, ROI, savings etc); and then rewrite her technically-focussed report into the management-focussed one that the suits understand.

[wolfie]

Checkmark's issue is probably an overloaded server, though.

This overloaded server's hauling too much freight
For racing into Cairo with an 8088

Sorry, but the pun was too tempting. Cookies for reference (and yes, I know it's another Egyptian city - or rather a city by the same name as an Egyptian city - in the original, but since Cairo was the code name for what later became Windows 95, I figured it made more sense). No YouTube links please - my machine can't run them.

[gremcint]

500?! How is that comp even RUNNING?!

running? I don't think that computer is running, I don't even think it's crawling, it's probably sliding along on it's stomach doing about an inch an hour.

[mjr]

Here's one that recently happened at my workplace.

I just KNOW some highly paid individual or group of individuals (through meetings) came up with this.

I'm part of a team working on a project for a large foreign electronics company that sounds an awful lot like "pony".

Anyway, you know how sometimes they come up with project names?

The name they came up with? Bonsai.

No, I'm not kidding.

Now, I'm just a software guy, but I could have come up with a better name than that.

And it makes me think of this scene from a classic 1980's movie a few of you may have seen...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYRvg0j5Xic

[Ophbalance]

My favorite shortened name for a deployed site was ECOSUQZU. Someone at the head office is still bound be laughing over that one. However, I get having multiple tabs open. For instance, browsing forums like this. I'll hit the "show new posts" link and just open a tab for ones I want to read. When I'm finished reading the content of the forum posting, I close it and move on. I find it to be far easier than reading, clicking back, reading, clicking back, reading, etc.