The holiday season is hours away and over the next month there is little we can do to ignore the marketing blitz that comes every year. Every television commercial will seem to feature an elf pitching the biggest sale ever or reindeer endorsing a particular airline for your traveling needs. We have bought into the insanity so much that there are now shoppers who leave the comfort of their homes late in the evening on Thanksgiving just to stand in a long line so that the minute the clock strikes midnight they will have the right to enter a store and buy something.
Nobody is saying you have to abandon the holiday cheer and stop buying presents, simply do it smarter. One of the great advantages of living in the technological age is that it affords us certain conveniences that can really save us time and money while also allowing us to retain peace of mind.
Every year we hear about a near riot at one of these midnight madness sales or an ugly confrontation that took place between customers at a department store. Every year we circle parking lots like vultures, looking for a spot just so we can go spend money. Every year we spend hours away from our family and friends just to find them a present to show how much we appreciate them. By the time the season comes to an end many of these shoppers are in need of intense therapy or a long vacation, often times both.
Then there are those who opt for the convenience of our day, online shopping. The ability to sit at home, browse the Internet for the gifts on their list, click a few buttons and have it all done in an afternoon. No riots in the living room, no circling of the sofa waiting for a family member to get up, no hours away from family and friends. And when it’s all over there is a great chance that you saved enough money to take that same vacation with your mind intact.
As with everything, there is a catch. The convenience of online shopping is contingent upon your computer’s ability to operate in an acceptable manner. While many people accept the seasonal frustrations that go with shopping at malls and stand-alone stores because it goes with the territory, the same can’t be said for those using their computer to shop. Patience is not always a virtue attributed to the online shopper and when their computer begins to slow a mental meltdown is almost sure to follow.
It’s understandable, we want our computer to speed things up and be reliable and when we have to deal with pages loading slowly or lost files it appears as if the end of the world is ending.
What’s important for the online shopper to remember is that their computer needs to be healthy if they want the conveniences that it affords. Computers are like people in that if they are not healthy they can’t perform at their highest level. Fortunately you don’t need to have your computer on your healthcare policy to keep it in working condition.
A slow computer is almost always caused by fragmentation, a computer disease that attacks the manner in which your files are saved and stored on the hard drive. Because a hard drive is designed to maximize space each time a file is created and saved it is placed directly after the last file that was saved, with no space in between the two. When one of those files is recalled, modified and resaved it no longer fits into the same space it originally occupied so the hard drive is forced to cut the excess information and store it in the next available spot, this is now a fragmented file.
It may sound harmless enough but because there is no limit to how many times a file can be fragmented your hard drive could be littered with hundreds if not thousands of pieces of a single file and recalling that file requires all of those pieces being gathered, a timely process to say the least. It’s not only timely but taxing as well as your hard drive is forced to work to get those pieces together.
That slowdown your computer is dealing with doesn’t just affect the amount of time you wait to get a saved file; it affects the speed of every action you take on your computer. For the online shopper this includes browsing the Internet, loading pages of a website, trying to purchase an item, etc. When these computer performance issues arise the scene can get ugly, usually involving a couple whacks to the keyboard and possibly a few choice words that sensitive ears were never meant to hear.
Fragmentation is a progressive computer disease, meaning the longer you go without treating it the worse it will get until eventually it crashes, wiping out everything that you have saved on your hard drive.
To avoid such a scenario is simple, install defragmentation software. By installing defragmentation software your fragmented files will not only be pieced back together and saved in one spot, it will also prevent fragmentation from returning. Defrag software like Diskeeper 2010 restores the health of a computer, enabling it to perform at its peak level and maintain its reliability.
If you are one of those shoppers who will be looking to steer clear of the chaotic holiday rush on the roads and malls now would be a great time to install defragmentation software on your computer to ensure your online shopping goes as smoothly as possible.
