Maybe you've seen the latest in the Apple TV ads featuring John Hodgman and Justin Long (“Hello, I’m a Mac” “And I’m a PC”). Normally these are pertinent and witty, but the latest one isn’t up to the standard required when you’re trying to occupy the moral high ground. Hodgman (PC) lumbers on stage looking like Richard Griffiths in a brown suit, bloated and burdened by the weight of “useless” trial software, and says it “…really slows me down”. This perpetuates a meme you’ll hear repeated everywhere, even by IT support people who really should know better: that too much ‘stuff’ on your hard disk makes your machine run slower. There’s no real relation between how full your hard disk is and the speed of your computer. Software that’s installed just lies around on disk until you run it. When it’s not running, it can’t affect your system speed, whether that system runs Mac OS X, Windows or Linux. The only things that might slow down your system without your wanting them to are pre...
An intermittent blog about technology at work and at home