Can you imagine having to restart your car engine several times a trip?

What about a temperamental freezer that lets your meat rack defrost for no apparent reason?

Well, I guess we wouldn’t accept that…

So why are we so tolerant of our PCs?

With one billion estimated PCs across the globe, you would expect the PC experience to be top notch or at least as reliable as the other equipment a modern person depends upon.

Despite the 21^st century shiny exterior packaging with 3D in-store display units, colorful animated boxes and every metallic shade of aluminum you can imagine, unfortunately in some ways the PCs’ interior performance is somewhere back in the past, struggling to keep up with the modern mass-market exterior. The average PC still causes endless frustration for its users. Yet, somehow, most of us are just taking it.

The truth is, a simple comparison to the other parts of our daily lives reveals a sharp discrepancy when it comes to our tolerance levels. What people tolerate from their PCs would never fly with their home entertainment system, or even their $9.99 no-name kettle.

So why do we accept such low standards for our PCs, and tolerate these constant work disruptions?

You may simply answer “Get a Mac!” Well, although Macs are generally perceived as being more reliable than PCs, they are not free from problems (some Mac users are in denial on this point)… But in any case, this whole Mac vs. PC debate is an interesting subject on its own, so let’s leave it for a separate blog post…

Right now we’re exploring why the masses are so tolerant of their PCs. Here are some possible explanations:

The PC love-hate relationship

One possible explanation is that it’s the only friend we know. Our PCs help us do a whole lot more than we can with our human limitations – brains, fingers and even pocket calculators. So while PCs aren’t perfect, we’re willing to accept quite a whole lot of slack for lack of a better alternative. A kind of love-hate relationship. But then again, even though I really appreciate the keys on this keyboard and can’t really type without them… I wouldn’t put up with the Ddddddd just repeating itself over and over again for no apparent reason – so I guess that theory is limited.

It’s us, not them

Another explanation is presuming it’s us, not them. PCs were historically intended for tech- guys who, we all presume, can fix every problem their PCs present. The rest of us professionals and regular people may presume that it’s our computer literacy limitations causing these problems, and the systems admin guy, if there is one, will eventually sort it out.

But then again, most people don’t have the first clue how their fax machine actually sends images to a piece of paper on the other side of the world, yet they still expect it to arrive…  And even with very tech-smart people at our disposal, we all know they don’t always succeed in relieving an aching user from his PC pains as heralded by the dreaded ‘sorry, not much more we can do here – we’re gonna have to format the PC’. So that theory is also kinda holey.

We’ve all been trained well

A third possibility could be that we’ve simply been trained to have low expectations from our PCs and the software they run. From the first Microsoft Windows operating system, we were trained to accept certain fundamental principles; one being that your PC will always have bugs, delays, and crashes. Even though some aspects of the problem have been improved over the past few years, we still see frustration bundled with the experience of using a PC, and that’s just the way we’ve always known it to be… sad, but apparently true.

These are some of our theories trying to answer the absurd phenomenon whereby most of us are way more tolerant of our PCs than we would be of any other more complex or more simple devices we rely upon. We are still intrigued by this and as you can see don’t have a clear answer (nor do we know if there is one).

So why do you think we’re all so tolerant of our PCs?

Roee

Soluto is right now in closed Alpha with early adopters, and we’re seeking additional testers to install Soluto on one or more PCs. If you’re a PC Pro, you’re curious to see what applications are causing your PC Frustrations, and you’re willing to share your feedback on functionality, features and user experience, apply to join our Alpha here.

Let’s talk about PC frustration.

You all probably know what I’m talking about—you buy a brand-new computer, and within a few months it starts slowing down, applications freeze on you and the boot becomes incredibly long. It’s as if your PC is corroding.

We call this PC frustration.

Well, computers aren’t meant to frustrate. Quite the opposite – they’re  supposed to make us more efficient.

My name is Tomer Dvir, and I co-founded  Soluto together with Ishay Green to make PCs work the way they should. We decided it’s time to dig deep, search wide and really solve this problem.

After a long period of research, benchmarking, and endless trial and error, we’re ready to share with you our surprising journey revealing why PCs have become so frustrating, and what we can all do about it.

Our research: it’s not what you think

We started by exploring the sources of this frustration and first turned to the obvious suspects. The most frequently cited causes for slow PCs are bugs, viruses, spyware and bloated registries. But after analyzing dozens of PCs we realized that these, in-fact, are not the cause for most of the frustration.

It’s not bugs–most software vendors release fairly clean software–it’s in their interest to do so. As for viruses and spyware – they’ve already been taken care of pretty well by the various anti-virus and anti-spyware applications. And it’s certainly not registries slowing down our PCs. This may have been true in older Windows versions (e.g. Windows 95), but in the more modern versions (XP, Vista, 7) bloated registries no longer cause significant delays. When measuring PC performance before and after cleaning the registry we saw little or no improvement.

“It’s the applications, stupid”

After months of extensive testing we realized that the #1 reason our PCs are slow and unreliable is that legitimate software is hogging our PCs’ resources for no apparent reason.

Each application takes up the PC’s resources (CPU, memory, I/O) for its own needs, whenever it sees fit – at your expense.

Examples:

1. Why do certain applications perform heavy analysis or indexing during my boot and significantly slow it down, when they could just as well wait for idle time?
2. Why should two applications decide to execute a heavy I/O operation at the same time, making my PC unresponsive?
3. Why should my anti-virus software start some invisible scanning process exactly when I’m writing a document, causing my word processor to freeze?
4. Why do almost 100 (!) processes run during my boot? Which of them take excessive boot time? Which of them can I safely remove?

We could go on for hours, and in upcoming blog posts we will share many specific cases in more detail, with practical advice for PC users.

The more we dug into this the more we realized that many software and hardware vendors are way too liberal about hogging our PCs’ resources.

Why is that? How do they allow themselves to treat our PCs that way?  Because they can get away with it.

Any vendor can run various processes in the background or apply self-serving default settings and there’s almost no way to know which one is really slowing down your PC. Even the PC experts are limited to various complicated tools they use with trial and error to try and find which needle in the applications haystack is causing the problems.

“Sunlight is the best disinfectant”

So, how do we solve the problem?

We figure out exactly which software is hogging your PCs’ resources,  expose it in a clear way, and leverage community wisdom to recommend the best solution.

We believe users are smart enough to open applications when they need them. We think users deserve to know what’s going on inside their computers. After all, it’s our computers, not the vendors’.

Anyway, that’s enough for our first post. Soluto is currently in closed alpha with hundreds of users testing and giving us valuable feedback. Every day we’re discovering amazing stuff. We’ll share our insights and discoveries in the following posts.  Stay tuned!

Tomer