Power User

Fellow tech people: Do you use this solely as a derisive term for the client who has to have Office 2000 on his 486 with 16 megs, or a 1 GigaHertz processor and 256 Meg RAM to get his Email at 9600 baud?
Or is it a valid term for a knowledgable user who needs the best equipment?

I use this term like “Power Mom,” a semi-derisive term used to describe somebody whose reach exceeds his grasp. For the true overachiever, I reserve the term “Power Loser.”

Trying to figure out if you’ve been insulted, carny? :smiley:

Nope. I insult people with it, but Mrs. Plant’s previous employer’s techies called her that. Family is worse to work for, but she knows to run scandisk and defrag.

no, i use this as a derisive term for a luser that messes with settings he shouldn’t to get more performance out of his pc at work. Asshole. We just issued a 1GHz PC with oodles of memory and hard drive space to a secretary because she said that her pc was not up to the things she needs to do, and she showed us what she meant. She was right, so we gave her a new machine and issued her perfectly good but slower one to the receptionist so she could do email on it. All we had to do is move the data.

Mr Power user however has to tweak his computer until it crashes every time he prints and we have to reformat the damn thing.

I swear if i find crash guard or first aid on one more PC I am gonna lodge the installation disks into the most delicate orifice i can find on the user that insalled them.

One effective way to deal with Power Users is to switch OS on them. We switched the high muck a muck from a Mac to windows 95 to window NT. I think the next step for him is 2000 and then Red Hat. They like having new stuff and it takes them a while to truly hose the new OS.

I used NT client for only a short time before our provider changed his\it’s mind (their salesman lied, their tech guy help me re-install Win 95) but I thought you could protect NT from the user rather well.

NT is much more difficult to destroy than 95 of Mac OS. It has lasted longer than the other OSs.

But where there is a power user there is a way.

I too use the term in a derogatory fashion. I particularly blames magazines that keep printing articles like “10 ways to speed up your PC” and then give tips like “change your registry settings to point to cache by blah blah blah”. And then you ask the person what they did and invariably get the answer “nothing, it worked fine this morning”.

They always lie.
One actually told me “I never touch my computer”.
It just holds your desk down, right?

I’ve never heard it used as an insult. I usually call people who can’t leave their computers alone and have to have someone else clean up the mess “Idiots”.

I’m a “Power User” because I know what I’m doing, and can clean up the crashes if I goof. :smiley: