upgrade

The computer I use at work is a laptop that was shat from the arsehole of an IBM factory back in 2009, give or take a couple years. It worked okay when I was hired at the DOT but has been getting noticeably slower over the last year or two. My muscle memory even started to accommodate this: I’ve been double-clicking more slowly, and I tend to lift the tips of my fingers off the key tops after hitting “enter,” to give the computer enough time to do whatever I just commanded it to do.

As much as the management has been cutting costs, and they have been cutting relentlessly*, they somehow found the money to upgrade to Windows 10. In our office, I volunteered to be the guinea pig who tested all our applications in a Windows 10 environment to make sure they all worked, and I also became an “early adopter,” so my computer has been running Windows 10 for the past four weeks while the rest of my coworkers have continued to use Windows 7.

When I came in on the Monday morning after Windows 10 was installed on my machine, I noticed almost right away that it was noticeably slower than it usually was, but the drama of learning to navigate to all my programs and applications pushed that problem to the back of my mind for about a week. After I was settled in, though, the agony of how much slower my computer had become using Windows 10 was no less than excruciating. “I feel like I want to get out and PUSH!” I complained to a coworker, and thereafter I complained to everybody who would listen, not least of which my supervisor, who echoed my complaints to the IT people who might be able to do something about it.

They finally did something about it last week. One of the techs from IT tried some software magic first, defragging my hard drive and doing some other hocus-pocus, which I’m sure helped to a slight degree, but not enough to make a difference that meant much to me: I was still watching the spinning blue wheel of agony every time I clicked on anything, so I kept complaining. Finally, a tech stopped by my desk with a memory chip, because one of the things she noticed while she was digging around in my computer’s brains was that it had half the RAM of other computers in my office.

The change in my laptop’s performance after that was amazing! Applications actually appeared on the screen immediately after I clicked on icons! Functions were executed the moment I hit “enter!” I rarely if ever saw the spinning blue wheel again! Note to self: Complaining can pay off, big time!

There was one curious development that came to light during all this: When the tech came by to chip my laptop, I asked her a question about one application in particular. She couldn’t answer it right then, but took my question back to her office to research an answer. Turned out that application wasn’t supposed to be usable on my computer after the Windows 10 upgrade. “But we use that application almost every day,” I pointed out, “and I know our office isn’t the only one. What were you going to do for offices that can’t function without that application?” The official answer: Those offices weren’t going to get the Windows 10 upgrade.

Well, sure. I suppose that would work.

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*Ask me about my ID lanyard.