I've been spoiled by my PC

I mean, yes, if it's just hourly. If instead he has to do work that's based on getting results in a certain amount of time, it's making his productivity much worse, which means he has to work longer to compensate or look like he's not producing as much as he could.

It's easy to make that statement from the outside but more difficult, in some cases, to take that "not my problem" approach when you're actually dealing with expectations and deadlines.

[-]

Toirty@reddit

For me, the worst part of going from my PC to my work PC is the mouse lol I'm so used to having buttons on the mouse to give forward and back functionality for navigating file windows or web browsers. I constantly find myself trying to click them on the work mouse.

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lumbridge6@reddit

Tell me about it. My PC has ruined playing my PS5 for me. Granted it is basically just to play exclusives, but I sit playing it and just wish I was playing it on my PC instead. Kinda wish I didn't buy a PS5 now, the exclusives aren't really worth owning a console just for them

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Spiritual-Ad535@reddit

If your paid hourly just wait on the PC. My old work laptop took 20mins to turn off. The IT department always pushed updates in the morning so my laptop would login and update then require a restart. I would just go and get coffee. Supervisor then took months to get an upgrade. Not my job to save them money on wages.

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No-Organization4035@reddit

If I were you.
Option 1: Ask anyone in charge of this to fix or replace the slow and crashing computer
Option 2: Allow me bringing my own computer

Option 3: Stop waste time and find another job

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NumaSexyOw@reddit

Just remember the longer the loading time the less work you have to do.

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tybuzz@reddit

It likely has an HDD instead of a SSD. If you are allowed to, swapping it to a cheap SSD would likely significantly reduce load times at least.

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Grydian@reddit

There is no way they would let him do that. IT departments are very strict about outside tech being used with the pcs. Corporate espionage is a thing.

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Blindfire2@reddit

Yeah I started my new job a month and a half ago, I've shown them my certs, my Bachelors in CSCI, gave a detailed background showing I know a lot of what I'm doing and even said I'd willingly pay for anything I personally break, they still refused. I understand I'm still not qualified and they have to be very careful, but let me change the cores to be fucking unpacked PLEASE! These laptops they use could be so much faster if they just allowed me to even sniff the damn bios or have any control over windows, but they refuse to get off their assess to do it themselves and refuse to give access and we're all now stuck with the one machine for printing and labeling being Internet Explorer levels of slow...WHY IT WHY

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tybuzz@reddit

OP said " It's so bad I might actually spend my own money to bring my own.", so I assumed that was an option.. It would be unusual for most companies to allow though, unless its a small business.

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magius311@reddit

Mouse and keyboard only.

He could definitely ask for a better computer, though. There are demonstrable gains going from a HDD to an SSD.

Productivity alone.

It's likely the Optiplex even has an nvme slot.

We replace ours when we find them. Much easier and cheaper to reimage a PC with a cheap 256gb SSD than buy a new PC.

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cinyar@reddit

Mouse and keyboard only.

and even then depending on how strict the environment is. Some won't allow any USB device that didn't come from IT.

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Hannibal_Leto@reddit

Our company has USB ports locked to read only due to someone stealing corp data a decade or two ago. But the mice and keyboards don't need write access, so they work fine and are allowed.

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etrnlzphnx@reddit

Wait. How does this stop people from stealing corp data if they can still copy everything out?

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Hannibal_Leto@reddit

No no, they can't copy anything onto USB, only read USB connected device, like a thumb drive or micro USB card.

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cinyar@reddit

the keyboard could easily be hiding a keylogger or USB killer, no interaction with the host OS needed.

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DrNooo_TF2@reddit

I sure as hell wouldn't allow someone to put anything on the network, peripheral or not, unless it's been checked out by us.

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Key-Aardvark4383@reddit

I work in cyber security and the reason for this is there are now devices small enough to fit into a usb charger that can collect AND send data to hackers and data snatcher. I don't blame companies for being so strict in the IT world because of these new and improved data stealing devices..

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spezisbastardman@reddit

Yep. Super easy to slip an O.MG cable between a computer and nice usb-c keyboard. Then you can key log everything and run whatever ducky scripts you want.

[-]

RecognitionNo2900@reddit

You can add pcie to nvme

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felix1429@reddit

Allowing BYOD is a lot different than allowing employee modification of company owned devices. Other than peripherals, OP is going to be very unlikely to be able to make modifications to any of the internal components, especially without management or IT's approval.

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makineta@reddit

Yes but good IT departments will source & install a basic OS SSD for their workers if their work requires it. I realize that not all are good tho lol

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Any-Arm-7017@reddit

I second this, i used to work at my school libraries IT department and ALL hard drives need to be collected and wipes and then safely disposed of which was done by another department. No way would any business allow you to just take the HDD

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implicate@reddit

You're making a lot of assumptions in this post. He never even mentioned that the company had an IT dept. For all we know it could be a small operation that would be totally fine with him doing his own upgrades.

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Fulghn@reddit

Depends on the company. Decades ago I brought in my own RAM to add to my work computer as the company was too cheap to provide computer that could handle large AutoCAD drawings.

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notworthdoing@reddit

I've never worked at a big company, but couldn't OP tell IT that he'll pay them to order an SSD for his computer? Their own supplier surely won't lead to espionage, and he could pretty easily argue that his productivity would increase if it's as bad as he says it is.

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Xaan83@reddit

couldn't OP tell IT that he'll pay them to order an SSD for his computer?

easily argue that his productivity would increase

So why would OP personally pay for an upgrade to a work PC? They can either uograde/provide a modern usable computer, or OP can just do their job at the productivity rate that the hardware allows. OP might be annoyed by the performance, but it's absolutely not their problem to be financially responsible for fixing the issue.

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Rerfect_Greed@reddit

I agree, it SHOULD work the way you believe, but because BoD's, CEO's and Shareholders view the cost to upgrade it as a luxury, which you can't afford when you're trying to make every dollar that's ever existed

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aggthemighty@reddit

You can count on Reddit to make everything about fucking CEOs and shareholders. Jesus

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FakeSchwarzenbach@reddit

It’s not that they’re making it about CEOs and shareholders, more that that is often the reality of hardware provision in corporate IT

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Middle-Effort7495@reddit

That still doesn't answer the question of why he should pay to do it. It's their problem. Long as I'm on the clock, if they want me to do it stupid slow, I'll do it stupid slow. There's a lot of bureaucratic waste that is baffling to me, but it's not my money.

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I_who_have_no_need@reddit

Kind of depends on corporate culture. If you can get your work and leave 15 minutes early every day, it adds up to nearly 50 hours of free time every year. I'd pay $100 for that.

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Narrheim@reddit

Good luck finishing 15 minutes early. It´s more likely you´ll get more work and be happy, when you´ll manage to finish it on time.

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Middle-Effort7495@reddit

I can leave 30 seconds after getting there, but need to clock out :/

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I_who_have_no_need@reddit

From what I see corporate culture hates paying overtime and will fire you without hesitation if they don't like what they get. Been a while (like 10 years) but have seen people bring their own hardware in some smaller firms although standard best practices have tightened considerably since.

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real_gooner@reddit

some people take pride in their work

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Xaan83@reddit

Exactly

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reddsteele@reddit

OP might be able to submit a purchase request through their management if it’s under a certain amount. I’ve submitted requests for a mouse, keyboard, wireless headset, etc. All granted without issue. As long as it’s within policy the company might cover it.

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RephRayne@reddit

Have you ever used a computer that was so bad that you wanted to punch it?
I'm guessing you haven't, so at least you've got that going for you.

[-]

Pugs-r-cool@reddit

Have you ever worked in a corporate environment? An employee shouldn’t shoulder the cost of an IT upgrade made by an employer.

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Terrible_Shelter_345@reddit

fuck man an HDD is so bad though in 2024 if thats actually real

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Taskr36@reddit

Don not EVER tell some rando on reddit to fuck with the hardware in a work computer. If some user at my job did that, I'd raise holy hell and he'd be out on his ass tomorrow. This isn't just about user's not being allowed to fuck with hardware, it's a MASSIVE security breach if a user removes a hard drive from a company PC.

It's scary how many people here just upvoted you for telling OP to do something that would get him fired.

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CrateDane@reddit

How would it get OP fired?

If you are allowed to

Of course, it's extremely unlikely OP would be allowed to, so the suggestion in itself isn't very useful.

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Taskr36@reddit

"How would it get OP fired?"

As I said, it's a massive security breach. There could be customer information on that PC. There would definitely be access to whatever accounts are used by the employee. Nobody who isn't IT should be removing hard drives, and any decent company has strict rules for how to deal with hard drives specifically to protect that information.

I've never worked anywhere that a common user would be "allowed to" swap a hard drive themselves, because random users wouldn't have access to the hard drive image, or the credentials to PXE boot and restore an image to a new drive. The poster made it seems like a hard drive is just something you swap like upgrading RAM, when there's far more to it than that.

Really, it's about security, which is a big deal in IT.

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CrateDane@reddit

As I said, it's a massive security breach.

Then it's up to the business to not say "go ahead" when asked.

Really, it's about security, which is a big deal in IT.

Not in any place where the employee would be outright given permission to do this.

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analytix_guru@reddit

This .. have IT do it. I built my parents a computer a number of years ago before the mini PCs got really good, popular and CHEAP. I had a HDD as the main drive, and the swapped in an SSD last year because she was complaining about performance and load times. After the cloning to the SSD and installation, it was like a brand new computer, very fast!

You can always spin this as affecting your overall productivity on a daily basis. That should do the trick.

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Retrowinger@reddit

Or not enough RAM. Had a work PC with only 4GB RAM and had to work with PHPStorm. Fun times until i convinced my boss to upgrade to 16GB RAM :D

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porcomaster@reddit

It will help, but not that much.

It's the first thing I do if I am working with old optiplexes it makes it work 1.5-3 times faster.

But again, its still 100x slow compared with new hardware.

Its like comparing a 2 min boot time againt 1 min, with OP booting in 6s.

Yeah its a really good improvement, but everything else will still crash ocasionally and be bad to work with.

That is working with 6 gen Intel or less.

I am sure that 7gen Intel are another entirely subject.

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Aggressive_Ask89144@reddit

I have an extra I-5 7600 Thinkcentre with 16 Gigs of Ram, Sata SSD, and Windows 11 and it works like a charm lol. Honestly, just as fast as my gaming rig and even outputs 120hz to the screen lmfao. I just use it as a server for my games and to tinker sometimes but I only paid 50 bucks for it.

PCs aren't really hard to optimize for at the least the user experience lol.

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porcomaster@reddit

7600 is 7 gen, they are good.

Try the same stuff with a 5gen.

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Aggressive_Ask89144@reddit

I mean, it depends on your board but you can find a 5930k for 50 bucks and they're still pretty respectable. Everything else is the expensive parts lol.

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porcomaster@reddit

I am talking about optiplex and enteriprises PCs.

They would never used a K version thou

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FreedFromTyranny@reddit

No way in hell would you be allowed to do that

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Miniteshi@reddit

My wife bought me a Xbox Series X for Xmas. It's prob had 24 hours of run time. My PC is only pretty much everyday. I enjoy it more, it's built by me, I don't have the heart to tell her.

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Naerven@reddit

That 8gb of ram and spinning rust HDD at work right there.

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No-Abbreviations1937@reddit

The amount of workstations that still only have 4gb ram is wild

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Foxy223344@reddit

2GB at the bank i was working in few months ago. The pc would occasionally make a fan noise that the entire floor can hear.

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Zenfold7@reddit

It's wild that modern basic productivity apps even use 8 GB of RAM nevermind run like crap if you don't have 16. I remember the days when programmers had to use tricks to make their programs use as little RAM as possible.

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Fickle_Goose_5563@reddit

Not even my school computers use 8gb. They’re at least using 16gb

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Medical-Bid6249@reddit

Lmao I feel this after getting a 7900xt and a 5900x not much else gonna impress me except am5 shit and 4090s lol

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krichard-21@reddit

I retired from a job as a software dev manager. Every single dev on my team had a MUCH better home machine.

Work provided "useful" machines... But nothing like the gaming machines these guys had at home...

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tPRoC@reddit

wouldn't they just be giving you VM's?

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krichard-21@reddit

The last year I worked, they were just rolling out VMs.

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tPRoC@reddit

I can guarantee you that IT has a better understanding of the necessary infrastructure than the devs.

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krichard-21@reddit

Sorry, but based on what? BTW, devs are also IT. You know that, right?

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tPRoC@reddit

BTW, devs are also IT

Only if they are devops, otherwise IT and software development are quite different.

I should add, I was responsible for capacity planning for a web site with 500k active users. Unless there was a spike in usage or any noticeable issues. We met quarterly to review analytics.

How is this relevant? Are you saying you had to make your website scalable? Or were you actually managing the servers and infrastructure?

By now, all of that has moved to a cloud.

Again, how is this relevant?

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krichard-21@reddit

Seriously?

The term IT is all encompassing. Network, server support, software, security, ad nauseam.

Capacity planning isn't relevant to infrastructure? I provided a credible reference to my background.

Migrating to Cloud infrastructure resets all of the norms. Surely you know that. Cloud processing is a very, very different approach.

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tPRoC@reddit

The term IT is all encompassing. Network, server support, software, security, ad nauseam.

Nobody actually uses it like this though except for people who don't work with computers and think software development and IT are all the same thing.

Capacity planning isn't relevant to infrastructure? I provided a credible reference to my background.

Writing scalable code is way different than managing and operating network/system infrastructure. I would never trust a developer to configure a server or switch.

Migrating to Cloud infrastructure resets all of the norms. Surely you know that. Cloud processing is a very, very different approach.

Yes it changes things but not in a way that would be relevant here, unless you think cloud doesn't require sysadmins or something?

BTW, you ignored my request for your credentials.

I'm not interested in measuring dicks with you dude

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krichard-21@reddit

Great. This all stems from your assertion devs don't know what they need for machines. And I don't need you dick either.

Your ego isn't lacking.

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tPRoC@reddit

This all stems from your assertion devs don't know what they need for machines.

You literally were just whining about how you think IT knows less than "seasoned developers"

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krichard-21@reddit

Actually you insisted devs don't know what they need.

"I can guarantee you that IT has a better understanding of the actual necessary infrastructure than the devs."

FYI, I disagree.

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puttjatt@reddit

honestly I would just clone the hdd to a ssd. they won't know anything and you can get your work done faster. simple

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QuenHen2219@reddit

Ya we had customers when DELL was still shipping business laptops a couple years ago still using the mechanical drives. It is a fucking nightmare to use. our MSP got alot of business and constant tickets about slower performance issues, but in reality there was absolutely nothing we could do. Mechanical drives should legit be banned as main system drives in all newer laptops. If you ship your laptop for business you cannot label it business ready with a spinning drive. Early iterations of Win 10 struggled on mechanical drives, today Win 11 is virtually unusable on a mechanical drive

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blackbalt89@reddit

It's the same thing at my job too, our PCs are literally from 2013. Boss doesn't see a problem.

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BinaryJay@reddit

Huh. You can get a $100 Mini PC that is much faster than you describe.

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Ribbons0121R121@reddit

dont know you missed it till its gone

my workplaces cnc also runs on an equally crap dell tower, said they just throw pcs out when they get full and buy a new flash drive every time they load a program on it

that+abyssmal amounts of sawdust in the air is just

[-]

SilentLoudener@reddit

My work PC is a laptop with no dgpu & a very, very old intel cpu. Think about how I feel 😭

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S31Ender@reddit

Computers are still build with HDD in 2024? Holy crap!

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hwertz10@reddit

(Just to others replying, I think OP was talking about bringing in a better keyboard and mouse, not bringing in their own parts and shoving them into the PC. To be honest, I found the Dell keyboards and mice serviceable.. I mean it's trash compared to my IBM Model M keyboard I use myself, but I found it slightly above average among the keyboards companies shovel in with their computers. That was years ago though so I can't say they haven't switches to cheaper/flimsier keyboards.)

1) I do think they still sell Optiplexes with an option of like 4GB RAM, and perhaps even "All E-Core" like quad-core setups (those Atom-based cores are fine for keeping background tasks ticking over, but their crap for actually running anything on.) Of course, refurbished/used Optiplexes just turn up seemingly indefinitely, so you might be using a 10 or 15 year old machine, which obviously wouldn't help.

2) If they set it up like they used to here at the University, they would put the most bloated, horrible antivirus and etc. on there possible. By the time they put their "standard" software on them, I think it cut the performance by 50-75% if not more. It was truly horrible. They would take a system that'd boot in like a minute (this was many years ago so spinning rust for sure), and by the time they got it all bloated up it'd take well over 5 minutes. It was totally absurd.

Welp, my condolences! I guess just take comfort that you are essentially being paid to sit and watch an hour glass spin! It's tough when you take pride in your work and want to do the best job possible... but it's apparent the business itself doesn't care that much or they would provide better computers (or put more RAM in them, or debloat the software install, or whatever.)

Oh... one last note... I guess you should see if OTHERS computers are that bad. There's always the small chance the fan has seized and it's thermal throttling all day or something, and that it's really not supposed to run so crappy. My guess is that's not the case at all, but while it's spending 10 minutes rebooting I guess you can just quickly check if someone else's computer runs that bad.

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RisingDeadMan0@reddit

Lmao, I started working it was a idk 16" monitor. Someone left so I got a 22" still not Full HD monitor, but it was a TN panel.

But I did persuade my boss to swap the HDDs to SSDs, that was nice. Boot time was so much faster and excel stopped hanging, even on a 3rd gen i5

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0815Username@reddit

My Laptop isn't even weak, r7 4800hs and 1650ti, with now 24gb 3200MT/s ddr4, but the difference to my PC ist still stunning. I press on an app icon and it's there instantly. It's so snappy and fast.

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Nidhogg1701@reddit

How much memory do you have? Probably onmly 16gb? It departments do a one size fits all scheme when buying for corporate. Anything Office related on a machine I always put 32gb in them. Offtice is a resource hog and I bet you are doing a lot of disk swapping in Excel. Optiplex comes with crappy HDD and even crappier SSDs. I expect the processor is on the low end also. I took my GFs old oOptiplex and refurbished for her mom. Upgraded to an I7 processor, Sabrent 1TB ssd and 32gb memory. Works great for her and cleared out my parts box.

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cyrkie@reddit

Be happy kiddo. At least you are working locally.

I have pretty good laptop at work but our client requires theirs own environment and we have to use remote connection to virtual clients. Everything thing is slow and any problem with our vpn break connection to vdi. Reconnecting takes everytime 15 min

Use Citrix for some time and you will appreciate your local pc.

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Deexeh@reddit

It's more telling of your employer in how they're willing to give it's employee's poor tools to try and do a job. Like being a full time delivery driver and the company giving you a 3 wheeled car that you have to pedal, or broken tools as a mechanic.

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Crypt0Nihilist@reddit

Don't quietly accept it, make a case for a computer that's up to the task based on efficiency and quality of life. If it's your primary tool should expect something that doesn't creak under the strain.

Find out what is causing Excel to crash. I'd guess it's probably insufficient memory, so there's an instant argument for an upgrade - rework.

Also, consider whether Excel is the best tool for the job. Perhaps a data analysis program which is more clever with memory management might be better. I like KNIME, it's open source and seriously powerful.

You can't expect things to start instantly from a work computer, that suggests resources which few office users will need and is therefore a waste of money, but you shouldn't be waiting for more than a couple of seconds.

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hornirl@reddit

What's the company work-from-home policy like? gif

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SpaceRocketLaunch@reddit

It's not you it's them!

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Chucklexx@reddit

So everybody that needs a PC in your company is wasting a lot of time just waiting for the pc and apps to start. Maybe you could document your personal waiting time and multiply it by the number of pcs plus the wasted amount of productivity. Talk to your boss and show him how much money it costs him every weak, compared to a bunch of new ssds

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Livid-Feeling-6484@reddit

Complain to your manager or IT about it and/or ask what your allowed to do to make it faster. If your paid by the hour and don't have to be in a rush like customer service or something go take a break while it boots up if anyone complains your productivity is low at least you told them how much of a POS your work PC is.

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TheAtomoh@reddit

I would say it's a mix of a dying HDD + tier S swamp gooch blocking the vents.

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Neo_tm@reddit

Definitely a HDD issue.

HDD are too old for today's software and if you need to be productive, you should at least have a SSD or best a NVME m.2.

If your company want you to be productive, you should tell them that the HDD is slowing you down hugely and getting a better ssd can be 10 times faster.

But if you are in a big company, they will think that if they change for you, they must change for all, and if there is 100 pc, the cost will be multiplied by 100, and often the only thing they see is the cost and they don't think one second about the benefits and the gain it can provide.

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God0fMagic@reddit

I've worked in a small company where even new employees would get top of the line new PCs. It's crazy how big corporations won't spent 0.0001% of their profits to equip their employees properly.

They already spend 50k-100k per year on a person's salary. Surely they can afford a one time payment of 1000-2000 to considerably boost productivity.

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H_Holy_Mack_H@reddit

Do one video of your pc booting up and opening apps...then the same of the one in work, and send to the responsible person or better send to almost everyone slightly related with that. Maybe...maybe they will do something...if they don't, and ask to do this urgently, send them the email again

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Immediate_Nature7787@reddit

they come with minimal amount of ram

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CreatureofNight93@reddit

I'm here wondering why the PCs at my work has something like AMD Software Adrenaline installed on them, since we have zero software requiring something like that.

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Barefoot_Mtn_Boy@reddit

Used to be 'thee' reason that (back in the old days🙇‍♂️) people wouldn't buy a PC for home use! They got so frustrated at work by s-l-o-w tech, lockups, freezing, etc..

I'd hear things like "NO, thank you! I get enough 'computer' at work, I don't need that $ĥ!7 at my home!!" Of course, that all changed when 'junior' needs one for school..

There's not much you, as an employee, can do about it, 'cause they've got their IT nerd who's scared to death of losing his job if you cause a security breach, so the Dell Optiplex gets hobbled by verification loops caused by programming calls, to make sure everything is legit, and he doesn't mind having you call him over to work his magic fingers, and get you unstuck. He'll probably ask you what you did to get it stuck, get you unstuck, and wonder off to really fix it on the main software in the mainframe so that it doesn't happen again.

Then, when they have to break down and get one for school purposes, low and behold! It WORKS! Then, "Why doesn't the one at work do this???" Wait..? EXCEL runs faster on mine?? WTH?

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AngryGungan@reddit

I had this and eventually started to bring my own laptop and worked from there. Worked out pretty well as I would also have all my own data/music available during slow hours.

Make sure your boss is okay with it incase they don't want corporate data leave their own machines.

Asking if you can bring your own stuff opens up a possible friendly dialog to upgrade your current workstation as well.

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Produce-Used@reddit

be glad your office teaches u to be patient in life with everything unlike your failed parents

[-]

FakeSchwarzenbach@reddit

I feel your pain OP. We’ve just had a mandatory 3d/week return to office.

And the worst part of it is that I am now forced to use my company provided laptop where I’ve previously been spoiled by using my gaming pc at home.

I’ve been trying to explain that 8gb of ram might be enough on paper, but when you’ve got large spreadsheets, multiple browser tabs, teams meetings all going on, it starts to creak at the seams a bit.

[-]

Narrheim@reddit

Take it from the other side. You get an SSD, and then what? You finish your work early and go home? Nope, you will be flooded with extra work and you might even end up having hard time finishing it all in your working time.

Learn to save your work regularly instead.

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SnooDucks3047@reddit

Why u complaining here? Go to your boss and tell him that

[-]

Heyitsfye69@reddit

At home I have 128GB ram I utilize about 30% without using any VMs and ram munchers, at work my pc has 8gb ram. I tried to compile once on android studio the screen went light blue then the PC turned off 😅.

[-]

thebundok@reddit

Depends on the industry, but you may be forbidden from introducing anything personal into the workspace.

I work in a military adjacent industry, and everything is virtualized with thin clients. But each thin client is allocated the bare "minimum military requirement", which means 5+ minutes to boot up and load into Outlook. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

So I feel you. Especially coming from my custom 13900k and 4090.

[-]

Super_Sample862@reddit

I assume u get paid by the our and not by targets or something.. just chill telaxe. Ur paied

[-]

RudyRoughknight@reddit

It's funny cuz this is what computers were like about 30 years ago. Yes, they were very slow (extremely slow by today's standards). Even a smartphone is capable of being much, much faster than those PCs I had to use for schoolwork.

[-]

Dizzy-South9352@reddit

you can give it a little nudge while its writing/reading data. it could bork the ancient HDD thats inside and you might get a refreshed new one with an SSD in it. but I wouldnt worry, since its their time they are wasting. sometimes its good to have an old computer at work. that way you can pretend that you are working hard on the slower days more easily.

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No_Leather_3676@reddit

Nothing to do with the hardware. It will be perfectly capable of running windows and excel faster than you can use them. It will be the company security software or it hasn’t been reimaged for years, with dozens of users clogging it up. I’ve seen PCs that also haven’t had a restart for almost a year in some cases and users complain that it’s slow 😂

[-]

Logical_Strain_6165@reddit

I've got a Lenovo Legion with a 3060 for my work laptop which is silly as I do nothing demanding.

However my screens are nowhere near as good as home where I've got a 34 and 27. My colleagues have a 34 but I'm new and there's no budget. I've been allowed to cobble together 4 x. 24s but that's not as good as it sounds.

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TheRealBummelz@reddit

Its work dude - it doesn’t need to be fast. It needs to pay you.

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Pericombobulator@reddit

We use cloud computing. It is shit compared with running on local hardware. Everything is like wading through treacle. Big spreadsheets can take seconds to calculate.

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xenzor@reddit

If it's a big Corp it's likely not the PCs fault fully but all the agents. Antivirus, data loss prevention, software monitoring packages etc.

They can consume a good percentage of the resources out the box just to meet compliance. Essential though.

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ZjY5MjFk@reddit

I worked at a big corp. They gave all us laptops, but all had bottom of the barrel HDDs (5400 rpm or something)

They needed certain requirement meet, but it was awful and stupid.

They had some utility software that did "full disk encryption" that loaded before windows. Then windows had it's own full disk encryption. Then they had anti virus, and spyware scanners and file system indexers and other security software that verified no files changed (by scanning every single fucking file contentiously and getting a check sum). On top of all the normal windows stuff (windows defender, file indexer, etc). The admins also had things like "full disk check" and "full defrag" auto scheduled on login.

There was so much garbage on there, just pounding that poor crappy HDD.

Soon as you booted it up that poor hard drive would grind away at 100% the entire time. One time I left it running overnight and it was still grinding away in the morning. Usually the LED for HDD blinks when file is read/write, but this was a contentious light.

--

IT Guys: "I don't know why we're getting all these reports of HDD failing. It's a very high failure rate, must be something you guys are doing"

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alvarkresh@reddit

IT Guys: "I don't know why we're getting all these reports of HDD failing. It's a very high failure rate, must be something you guys are doing"

That has to be maliciously wilful ignorance. There is no way they're unaware of the load the corporate bloatware package is putting on the hard drives.

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tPRoC@reddit

Story is probably made up, or it's the result of a bunch of nonsense requirements from non-technical upper management that had been accumulated over the years and it's not IT's fault at all which is usually the case with shit like this.

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dulun18@reddit

computer at most non-movie/game offices are dell optiplex

some still use HDD while most are on the cheap 256GB dram less NVME.. once 50% full it will be slower than an HDD

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KarIPilkington@reddit

This is an interesting thing I've noticed over the years. It used to be that your work had better equipment than most people had at home, not because the work kit was particularly good but because top of the range home tech wasn't as widely used or accessible to the average worker. Nowadays people have 1gb connections with the latest smartphones/tablets/custom built PCs that do everything in under a second, it's kind of raised the stakes a bit in terms of what a company needs to offer.

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jamesholden@reddit

put a ticket in with IT about machine responsiveness and then email your boss about a budget for better monitor, mentioning a preference for oled. ask about bringing your own keyboard/mouse.

you could have a shitbox that they will decom, or at least upgrade.

your ssd could be worn out, your fan could be clogged with dust, they might have more ram for you.. blah blah blah.

as someone that's been on the other side:

I want your machine to run right. if you send me a older machine I'll usually send back the best one in my pile of spares, or even a new one.

If your boss pushed on the budget thing I would vouch that preferring a specific panel type, mount and kb/m is totally normal and should be accommodated before we get hit with some ADA shit.

ofcourse I quit IT and my machine is a i5-6500 with a gt1030 in a old dell case from 2002.

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Professional_Gur2469@reddit

Well you could use sunshine and moonlight to stream your desktop to that shitty pc, if it has ethernet of course.

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hudson12601@reddit

I feel that way when I troubleshoot end users devices at my job and they only have 32gb of ram mean while I have an Xeon w 192gb of ram. It’s painful.

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The_HawkAU@reddit

I’ve bought my own keyboard and mouse for over a decade now. It’s the thing I have to touch and use all day long and I don’t mind paying so I can have something nice. To be fair, I’ve replaced my mouse once and am still using the gen one Logitech MX Master, the keyboard lasted about 9 years and was only replaced recently.

Originally part of the attraction was wireless, these days wireless is standard, the dell mouse is OK, but the dell Bluetooth keyboard drives me crazy. Our work laptops are all SSD and 16GB RAM so relatively good, but the old 7th gen intel with 8GB RAM and SSD was starting to struggle with the modern SOE.

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texas_accountant_guy@reddit

I had this issue with a PC at my work years ago. Smaller company, so we had one IT guy. I told him the PC was slow, so I was going to upgrade the parts.

IT guy said just send in the receipts so I get reimbursed for parts.

Upgraded to a SSD, added a 2nd monitor and VESA mount, upgraded RAM, and added a discrete (cheap) GPU. Spend maybe $250 in total, for a much better experience at work.

It can be done, and it's worth it.

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Taskr36@reddit

Most companies would fire a user for removing a hard drive from a work PC. Frankly, I'm more than a little concerned about the competence of the IT guy you had at that workplace.

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texas_accountant_guy@reddit

"Most companies..."

That's a gross generalization without statistics to back it up. Maybe "most companies you've worked for" but not most companies, considering most companies are tiny sole proprietorships and partnerships that wouldn't know what a defined IT policy is if it bit them on the butt...

--

Frankly, I'm more than a little concerned about the competence of the IT guy you had at that workplace.

--

Frankly, I'm more than a little concerned about you being "concerned" over something you've got no clue about. Yes, in the 30-man company I was working at, as an upper-tier employee, who had assisted the IT guy on multiple projects in my spare time, and had my office two doors down from him... Yeah, he must have been real incompetent to let me clone my HDD over to an SSD and hand him the HDD once I was done.

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alvarkresh@reddit

Smaller businesses usually have looser operational controls because there's a higher level of trust among the employees and owner.

Not saying it's right, but it is explainable.

That said, that business should regularize their IT budgeting and processes so that in the future, upgrades can be handled centrally and inventoried accordingly.

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alvarkresh@reddit

I feel your pain.

For quite some time I had to use an i5 3570 or something of that sort with a hard drive. If you logged in too soon after a reboot it could take up to half an hour for the thing to chug through all the corporate bloatware it had to run just to get you to the Windows desktop, and so what I had to do was each day after work, initiate a restart of the computer and the next morning, it would be ready for me to log in and only (!) take about ten minutes to get me to the desktop, so coming in ~30 mins early and logging in and getting some tea would sort it.

Things didn't change much when I got moved to an i5 4570 (which still had a hard drive!) but when they finally moved to thin clients with VMs on a server, things finally got halfway decent.

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meyogy@reddit

Load times are get a coffee and chat about weekend time... do not upgrade your work computer until the complain about ur productivity

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Taskr36@reddit

Some of you people are destined to be failures in the workplace. By the time they complain about your productivity, you're already failing at your job. When there's a problem, you are supposed to address it. OP should open a ticket with IT, and let their boss know. Failure to do either of those tells the boss that the employee has no desire to be productive.

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_zir_@reddit

I would start looking for a new job.

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Taskr36@reddit

Start looking for a new job? It's like you people have never had jobs before. If your computer is problematic, you open a ticket with IT.

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Lazy_Plan_585@reddit

If you think the systems that private companies use are bad you should see the trash that's deployed in most government departments.

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Taskr36@reddit

And the government pays a hell of a lot more for it. I was horrified when I saw the receipts for the PCs my previous employer, a state agency, paid for shit. They were buying USB DVD drives, which almost nobody even needed, for over $60 EACH, while spending above retail prices for the computers and laptops themselves. Fast forward to my current employer, a private company, and we are spending 50%-60% of retail when ordering PCs and laptops.

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Taskr36@reddit

Open a help desk ticket. I can assure you, your IT department doesn't want you using a piece of garbage. Odds are that, because you're the new guy, someone pushed the oldest, most undesirable computer onto your desk. If you open a ticket with IT, they'll probably either upgrade or replace it, provided they have the budget and/or available equipment.

What model of Optiplex is it? I noticed at my own workplace that there were a lot of Optiplex 3060 PCs with HDDs in them. Why Dell made them that way is beyond me, as they have M.2 slots. Either way, it's a cheap upgrade to pot an NVMe in those, which is what I do whenever a user mentions their PC being too slow.

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burp110@reddit

Ouch. Someone spilled their drink on your pc.

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ArLOgpro@reddit

Ask your workplace to install an ssd if it doesn’t have one already

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russsl8@reddit

As an I.T. dude, you really should be opening a ticket about constant crashing and slowness with your work machine. Our company was on a "don't spend money kick" for a while, we were using older Dell Latitude 8th gen laptops. Ensuring the machines had an SSD and enough ram made sure there usually were no issues with stability. If someone had an issue with stability we'd take a look and find the cause. If no cause could be found in a short time we'd provide a replacement for them and continue investigation or straight reimage to put the laptop back into the pool of ready replacements.

For our older store based desktops (4th gen Intel... Yikes!) we'd install a second 4gb dimm and slap in an SSD. Machines were plenty fast for excel work and web based apps.

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polymonomial@reddit

My own pc has 64gb ram, my work pc has 8. lol half of the time of me working is just waiting

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f1t3p@reddit

.. are you paid hourly? ..what's the problem, exactly?

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Informal_Software_5@reddit

Boss: what's taking you so long? OP: you're fucking computer

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Any-Dog6953@reddit

I’m right there with you. Thankfully I can use my personal laptop for 99% of stuff other than checking my work email and LMS stuff.

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StandardOk42@reddit

my work PC is beefier than my personal PC

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moffetts9001@reddit

How successful you’d be at getting a new PC or an upgrade to your current one depends on a ton of factors, but, there’s no chance they would let you upgrade it and only a slightly higher chance they’d let you bring your own equipment. Talk to your manager and point out that this is impacting productivity; if they’re half decent at their job and they have an expectation that IT is willing to play ball, they can help you get a new system or an upgrade. Technically you can talk to IT directly, but most likely any upgrades would have to be approved by your manager anyway.

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loaba@reddit

Ask IT if there is a newer PC available.

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coolsam254@reddit

It's not only the inferior specs but if they have some anti virus software, that slows it down a bunch more than people realise. Also I think I read somewhere that bit locker is roughly a 10% performance hit to drives?

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Raaabbit_v2@reddit

Get paid more for less work. If they say why you're not doing your work, tell them to invest in better tech.

Not your fault... You can't lose.

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Elc1247@reddit

This just means that your company IT team/hired IT "solution" is either on a shoestring budget or being run by an incompetent clown.

The CPU/GPU isnt a huge deal, since anything relatively modern that isnt the lowest end parts is usually totally fine. The biggest problem is that your company PCs are not using SSDs for their storage.

For any half-competent IT team, they would have known to switch to SSDs more than 10 years ago, since downtime = lost wages = lost production = wasted money. The switch from HDDs to SSDs shaves minutes off of waiting times every day for every single user. Now think about how that translates to lost production. If they chop off 10 minutes of waiting around for a PC to load/boot every day, multiply that by the number of users... 10 minutes might not seem like much, but that is 1 hour of saved productivity time per 6 users every single day. The bigger the company, the more time saved for actual work to be done.

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AJ_BORDERCHUNT@reddit

I'm so thankful my work computer is a competent machine for what I need lol

11th gen i5 with 16gb of ram and an SSD. Not fancy, but it gets the job done

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XXXperiencedTurbater@reddit

This is why I use my personal pc for work shit, bc j work from home most of the time. I know it’s generally not a good idea but there’s just no way I’m gonna sit there hunched over the crappy laptop they gave me when I have an i7 9700k/2080ti w two 27” monitors sitting there.

A side benefit is that a lot of my word documents are on the pc instead of the share drive so if they ever fire me they are totally fkin boned as far as records go

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RipCurl69Reddit@reddit

Our company gets crates upon crates of Lenovo Thinkpads and I'm forever grateful that even us new starters get 16 gigs of RAM. I may hate the laptop formfactor for personal use but in a work environment they're not half bad. Touchscreen too!

Definitely see about contacting your IP dept and seeing if you can invest in some upgrades. They should hopefully see that better specs are crucial to your own job performance

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NonsensicalZilla@reddit

the standard 60 - 75hz monitors are the ones that bug me. It feels so slow.

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OGigachaod@reddit

LOL, If you expect gaming PC's in Businesses keep dreaming, they just heard about Display Port and 1080p.

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magius311@reddit

Ask your IT team for a drive upgrade. We do it for our employees. Everyone goes for it because it's noticeably faster and it's so cheap. Quick reimage and away they go.

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painefultruth76@reddit

I worked at a call center for an ISP, their provisioning system was written by phone operators who were script kiddies to get off the phone... had to install browser extensions in Firefox, because the systems would crash with more than two instances of firefox, and frequently had to look at 4 different screens on three different applications hosted on separate servers...