When I go to work, I usually hug around my notebook. As there are severe budget cuts, it happens that one of the most technologically saavy personnel (that happens to be me) in the department has not been given a computer (not if you consider Pentium 133 as a computer) to me based on the fact that I have a rather state of the art notebook.
Anyway, since I have my own notebooks, I'm usually spared the monstrosity of using public computers around my university. Anyway, it happened that today, I decided not to grab along my computer since I thought it would be a good idea to stop hauling along a few kilograms of extra baggage for only a few minutes of usage, I decided to use one of the public computers that were allocated in the public teacher's lounge around my university.
Today I had the chance to use it. I was booting up the machine, and reading the newspaper on the latest news and happening around the world. It happened that multiple minutes later, the computer still have finished booting. So after going through the main headlines, editorial, sports news and later the comics, the computer suddenly finally booted to the first screen, and what I saw was a complete mess.
First of all, there were 3 chat clients that were open and logged on - MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. In all the cases, someone forgot they were using a public computer and stayed logged on. Though I felt it might be a good idea to play pranks with them, I decided due to my own rather "sunny disposition" to log off them all. A few other strange applications such as weather and temperature report were on. I wonder why anyone would bother with such app when we are in an air conditioned room? So I closed that also along with the useless Microsoft Office Toolbar that is dormant on the computer.
Just as I done that, I thought I was ready to fire up the browser and head out to my favorite online news site. The problem happened that the harddisk trashed too much and nothing happened. If you notice the harddisk trashing alot just to boot an app, we can know that the computer has low specs and needed to dump the memory contents to the harddisk many times just to run a certain app. Now with no apps open there is something awfully wrong with the computer. It just hit me that the background used in this computer was a dynamic background! In other words, somebody liked animated backgrounds so they installed a background - which is essentially a flash animation - which pulled alot of resources from the computer! Gah, so I had to change the background from that fancy animated background into a blank screen to conserve more resources.
Finally after that, the browser finally appeared and I could finally fire out the websites I've intially planned to go to. The whole process? That took close to 20 minutes...
Good grief, now I know why I don't want anyone to touch my computers. The reason is just to spare me the headache like this example of struggling with a public computer just to get the browser fired up and ready to go.
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