That one’s not so bad… a lot of it depends on habit, which may have been formed on a much smaller monitor.
I’m one of those folks- I had a 15" monitor for years at the house, and then a 17 for a long time, and just recently got a widescreen 23 flat panel, so until recently, I’d had to put it on full-screen to see a reasonable amount of stuff on the screen at once, or to see it as it’s actually shown without f-ed up wrapping or having to scroll around a bunch.
At least I know how to use Alt-Tab and Ctrl-Tab to get around between my full screen windows.
What annoys me is people who have no concept of available memory or processor capacity, and then install a dozen dumb-ass toolbars and utilities, and then bitch that their computer is slow. (more common than you think, esp. if you work in IT and you see a lot of computers)
My dad was complaining that his computer was running to slow. He had AOL, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, QuickBooks and OpenOffice (Calc) all running. When I explained to him WHY his computer was running slow, his reply was “Well, it shouldn’t matter”
All I could say was “You’re right, it shouldn’t…but it does”
Why SHOULD that matter? That’s only 5 programs! And unless he was downloading via AOL while doing a different file transfer via AIM chat while videoconferencing on Yahoo Messenger, resynchronizing and rebuilding the vendor database in QuickBooks, and recalculating all cells on an 8000 x 8000 cell worksheet in OpenOffice, what’s wrong with having 5 applications open and running? I assume he’s got more than 128 MB of RAM, right?
The last time I did one of those “how many apps can you run at one time before your system becomes unresponsive”, it was early 2006; I had 512 MB of RAM to play with at the time. I did indeed manage to bring the box to its knees (it could scarcely manage to draw a menu) but I did manage to get more than 5 apps going before it got to that point.
See, this is why I go through the trouble to teach the public classes on Wikipedia. “This is what it’s for. This is what it isn’t for. This is how you can track down the actual good references in it - you know, the ones that aren’t online.” I don’t get many students, though, and the ones I get are older. Kids think they know everything.
The problem is that people just don’t stop to ponder “best tool for the job.” Teaching “never use Wikipedia” is every bit as stupid as teaching “always use Wikipedia.” The Mac/Windows OS wars bother me for the same reason (or the vi/emacs wars or Microsoft Office/OpenOffice or FireFox/Internet Explorer or…). Some tasks are better done with one tool and some are better done with another.
My professors always encouraged us to use Wikipedia… for the references at the bottom of the page. Wikipedia is a great starting point for research for that very reason. It kills me that there is the mindset out there that Wikipedia is WRONG. It’s like any other tool… know your resources. Let’s be practical, most of Wikipedia is accurate, but just as you shouldn’t necessarily rely on a “friend of a friend told me…” so should you not rely on Wikipedia to be the final source of knowledge.
In my (and his) defense. I said running slow, I didn’t say it became unresponsive or had to be rebooted. I was just trying to make the point that he doesn’t understand that you can’t open everything you want and expect the computer to run as if only one program was open.
Also, I should add that we have a HUGE QB file (or so we’ve been told by our accounts) which isn’t local to his computer which means a lot of network traffic. Also, he probably had WinTV open to monitor the security cameras in the store. Also, I couldn’t tell you the last time he ran AdAware.
