Have you beaten your Computer up today?

From time to time we ask our SPAMfighter community some interesting questions about computer usage, the Internet, computer security, spam and other stuff we find interesting. Yes, our team does consist of a couple people with fancy degrees in behavioural sciences and such, but we’re not all nerdy programmers.

Anyway, this time we asked our Dutch SPAMfighter users some questions about their computer usage. We received approximately 7.300 survey completions (thank you very much for participating!) One of the questions was quite simple: “Which of the following bothers you about using your Computer?“. Since a lot of us spend at least 3-4 hours a day in front of a computer we thought the question would give us interesting results.  Here they are:

• Boot time 47%
• Spam 39%
• Slow websites 25%
• Spyware / malware 24%
• Problems with hardware, printers etc. 6%
• Too many ads on the Internet 33%
• Computer crashes 10%

Delving deeper into the numbers, we found it curious that men seem to be more impatient than women [EDITOR – I’m not surprised]. Some 48% of our respondents are annoyed with their computer’s boot times and slow websites are a nuisance to 25%. These issues bother our female participants by 42% and 27% respectively.

However, we found that women are more annoyed with internet ads. A whooping 36% of female survey participants think that the internet has too many ads, compared to 31% of our male participants. Now that is something to consider for companies marketing themselves on the Internet.

Now how do people react to these annoyances? Here is where the data gets even more interesting: 28% have actually felt aggression towards their computer due to these annoyances. 64% blame their slow pc as the main source of aggression and this is consistent among the sexes!

Anyway, fear not and fight those destructive tendencies! Here are a few quick tips for speeding up your PC that might save it from a serious beating:

1. Remove unwanted software that you do not use. Look especially for software that runs during your PC’s boot sequence (the programs that load as soon as Windows starts) and therefore affects your boot time.

2. Run a disk defragmentation once a month or so.

3. Run a Registry clean once a month or so to fix a slow pc. It might help your boot time considerably.

4. Choose an antivirus with low system usage. Slow antivirus software can adversely affect your computer’s performance.

5. Install a spam filter and save time from sorting your inbox

In closing, after these nifty tips and obviously shameless relevant promotion of our products, we would like to ask you to share your stories of slow pc rage. Have you ever let your aggression get the better of you and gone agro on your trusty computer? Slaying by floor drop or anything else as appropriate?  Let us know in the comments!