My home computer runs much faster than this!

Tech Tip of the Day: That pesky computer of yours in the office is so SLOW! You can only run 12 excel sheets, 43 tabs in internet explorer, iTunes, and our main database application on it at once. My home computer runs so much faster!

People tend to discount the fact that your work PC has a much higher utilization footprint than your standard home computer used primarily for internet use and keeping track of your pictures. Your work PC generally is running:

• an enterprise antivirus with real time scanning on all newly created or modified files
• disk encryption constantly encrypting and decrypting your hard drive
• your office's messaging application
• database connections going across the network
• whatever other applications and connections you have to network resources

All of these take a much larger toll on your computer's resources than your home antivirus does. Also, unless you have a specialized job that requires a beefy computer for graphical media, design applications, or the like...your PC's hardware isn't top of the line.

Computers for business use use components that are made for lower power consumption, that create less heat, and generally are very much in the mid range when it comes to speed. The business gets computers that they can use reliably for a few years at an acceptable cost. As you move into higher end computers the prices go up at a more rapid pace. Your company is buying 200 of these...you bought one for your house, you could afford to splurge a little for the extra RAM, bigger hard drive, faster processor, larger display, etc.