High tech stresses
Interesting story in the BBC News today about computer stresses 'Keep cool' over computer hassles. A couple of highlights from the article:
Computer users need to stem the stress their machines cause them before it damages health, according to a survey. Nine out of 10 are regularly annoyed by slow, crashing machines, while time wasted fixing problems makes it worse, say security experts Symantec. Information overload is the top irritant, and a quarter say computers are just not worth the hassle.
More than a third of men and women will resort to extreme behaviour when confronted with computer frustration, such as violence, swearing, shouting and desperately slamming random buttons. Encouragingly, 40% will try to find a practical solution to fix niggles, including asking someone else to help.
A recent Health and Safety Executive (HSE) survey of 700 managers said £1.24 billion a year was lost because of stress-related sickness and lost productivity.
The top five irritants are:
- Slow performance and system crashes
- Spam, scams, and too much e-mail
- Pop-up ads
- Viruses
- Lost or deleted files
Three of those I have tools or software to fix. Norton Anti Virus guards my laptop and McAfee scans most of my email before I ever download it thank to Postini, who also weed out a good deal of spam. The rest of the spam is caught by Mailwasher. To eliminate pop-ups, I use the Mozilla browser. I would be using Firebird, but it takes exception to the Get Fuzzy page and refuses to display the cartoon, and crashes a lot. It only happens on my laptop, so I guess it's just a bizarre quirk of my system, like it refusing to go to the Java site. For the rest, I have only three words: backup, CD backup, and backup. Anyone know how Mac OS X is for system crashes and slow running?