Three customers this week with the same symptoms and Microsoft AND Google are the cause. Microsoft has some “necessary” updates they are pushing out and seem to not be recognizing customer settings regarding when updating or downloading for updates is preferred; so, the systems appear to come to a crawl with regard to anything internet-based and marginally performing systems come to a crawl regardless of what the user wants. On top of that, some clients using Google services are having some serious performance/lag issues even just picking up email (this goes back 10 days or so).
I confess that I initially took this quite lightly with a “they will fix it soon attitude” and like the Windows issue with printers and the spooler service soon was not forthcoming soon at all. However, these problems do point out some issues with how we use our computers currently. Far too often machines are fired up, used for a few minutes, and then shut down preventing important updates from loading let alone installing. Far too many of us rely on cloud and other types of internet-based services and interfaces and various “forces” prevent good service.
With more folks trying to work online, young folk doing school online, and businesses switching to cloud-based services, the demand on internet access continues to skyrocket causing bottlenecks, lag, and in some cases service blackouts. On top of this, service providers are having to greatly enhance security measures causing even more apparent outages.
So, a few of my hot topics.
1. Do not store important documents of any kind in emails. If it is important, save it to a hard drive, thumb drive, or other local to you storage. Even putting it on your desktop is a better solution than leaving it in your email.
2. If you set your computer to do updates at night or want it to do updates AND maintenance at night, it has to be left on at night. If you turn it off (close the lid) when you are done, it will do updates and maintenance while you are trying to use it and that goes badly.
3. Anything important to you needs to be stored in multiple places and in multiple ways (no, email is a bad idea). Services exist to do this behind the scenes but most use internet bandwidth to accomplish the redundancy so scheduling for after midnight and leaving the computer on gains even more importance.
4. A slow-running computer isn’t just annoying, it is also a really good hint that something is going wrong. It can be the aging of a storage device to failing memory devices to service errors (backup stuck, updates failing, updates, or maintenance running during prime time) to malware or other unintended apps running. Take heed and get it looked into.