"How Your Company Can Maximize Employee Efficiency and Job Performance - Part 2"

Complete Transcript of
Anthony Crea – Diskeeper Interview
on Let’s Talk Computers
July 14 2007
Host Alan Ashendorf

Alan:  Today on Let’s Talk Computers, we will continue our conversation on how companies can enhance employee efficiency and job performance. Our guest today is Anthony Crea, Spokesperson for Diskeeper Corporation. Welcome back to Let’s Talk Computers, Anthony.

Anthony:  Thank you, Alan. It’s nice to talk to you again.

Alan:  The last time we were talking about all sorts of things that companies can and should do to increase employee productivity – like changing out keyboards, mice, and especially monitors; but, what about things inside of a computer – like putting more memory in their computer system? As it comes from the factory, in most cases, it is just enough to run the operating system, but not to run the programs and everything else efficiently. Putting memory into a computer is a no-brainer, is it?

Anthony:  Yes, it’s a no-brainer. Is there a cost to it? Yes, there’s a cost to it. But, I think that when you just look at that initial bottom line, you are making a mistake. I can understand why companies do it, but if they really did an analysis and overview, they would see that the increase in productivity would far outweigh any cost to increase memory and things like that.

Alan:  You get a computer, whether it’s for the home or especially if it’s for the office – it’s been supplied to you and it’s got one big hard drive on it. That is not the best way of having a computer set up, where you just have one drive and everything is thrown on that drive, is it?

Anthony:  You’re setting yourself up for danger. The home user and the small office user, (more often than not these days) does not have a server in their systems. Even for a small office, I’ve found that they don’t have a separate server where they have back ups where they can store their items. They are stuck and they have these single-drive desktops. Where you don’t have an IT person, you forget that the best way to handle that is to create these separate drives or partitions on your desktop. You will then insure at least some safety in your operation.

Alan:  You can’t set up partitions on your computer, because at work, you may not be allowed to do that. But, if you set up a folder – let’s call it Data – and let’s put all of our data that we work with under that folder name.

My Documents is so over used and it’s in the wrong place; it’s on the C drive, but if you have a separate folder that’s called Data and then you put all your spreadsheets under there and you put your documents under there – It’s a whole lot easier to back that one folder up than it is to back that whole machine up, isn’t it?

Anthony:  Oh, absolutely. And it’s unnecessary. It’s almost silly to go ahead and back up your whole machine. It doesn’t make any logical sense to back up everything.

Alan:  So many times, you start to back up your computer and you may not have the resources to back something up because, “Oh, I’ve to back up this 200-Gig C drive and I don’t have any place to put this 200-Gig C drive.” But, when you really look at it, most of what you’re backing up is programs and operating systems and programs and operating systems are something that you can always get back.

However, with the operating system, you can just re-load it again from a CD or DVD and with the programs, the worst possible case, you re-install those. It’s the data that is so important that if you lose 10k worth of data that may be two weeks of typing!

Anthony:  It’s an interesting thing. Once again, you don’t realize how important something is until you can’t find it or you’ve lost it, or it disappears for some reason. That’s the sad part and it’s such an easy thing to fix.

Alan:  A lot of companies have their own IT department; they automatically do backups for each of the users. But, there a number of SOHO companies that each person is required to do their own backups, because it may be a stand-alone computer and backups are very important to user satisfaction. Because, there is nothing worse for a user than to lose something that they’ve been working on all week long and now they have to re-type it in again – and backups are easy to do.

Anthony:  It’s a simple thing to do. Most people don’t realize that they need it or how important it is until they lose something.

Alan:  I may get myself in trouble for this, but everybody who works for a company should get one of these USB flash drives and just basically plug it into the back of their computer, it does have a USB connector and they haven’t locked it out. Then they can just back up their critical data, (the stuff that they have been working with), spreadsheets, documents, and PowerPoint files – anything that they do not want to type in over again.

Because, you lose it on the network or you lose it on the hard drive – it doesn’t make any difference who is responsible for losing it, it’s you that’s going to have to be responsible for putting it back again, aren’t you?

Anthony:  You’re right. That is somewhat of a can of worms when you’re talking about those USB drives - unless you can find a way to encrypt them and make sure that they are safe and secure. More and more companies now are doing that.

Alan:  More of these USB flash drives have their own built-in software where it has a partition built-in that is like a vault or is secure or has some kind of encryption. Or, they could get a USB external hard drive and set in the back of their computer and back up all their data. These are things that companies should be doing, but companies don’t always do.

Anthony:  Yeah they forget, or they are so busy being in the business of whatever their business is that they forget that a small amount of time which is put on these minor things could make a would of difference. It increases the bottom-line as a net result.

Alan:  And it makes a lot of difference from a user’s standpoint if they have a high-quality video card. If you’re looking at a resolution where the colors are washed out or you don’t really have high-quality colors on your monitor, your eyes get tired after awhile.

People like to enjoy their work environment. If their work environment has a really nice sized monitor if it has a nice video card they tend to want to do more. A lot of companies say, "Well, just use the equipment you’ve got; you’ll get used to it."

Anthony:  Yeah, and over time those companies tend to falter. They notice that their turnover rates are a little bit higher, as a result. When you’re not happy at work, you start to look for other work, elsewhere.

Alan:  Absolutely. It’s just little things that determine how they feel at the end of the day. Is their computer running fast enough or is their computer crashing on them all the time? All it takes is trying to their work and the computer crashes two or three times and they lose their work and it will not be the best feeling for a user, is it?

Anthony:  That’s a very nice way to say it. It’s a terrible feeling and whether you’re at home or at the office, to have that experience day after day after day, is a terrible thing.

Alan:  If people have to go the Internet, they like to have a fast connection. I don’t know of too many companies that actually do have dial-ups, anymore, but I do know a number of companies that have very slow Internet connections. And that makes a lot of difference.

Anthony:  All of these little things make a big difference. Imagine if you have your file folders – not your computer folders – but your regular file folders – and your cabinet was 30 yards away from your desk. Does that make any sense?

You want everything close by. You want to be able to access things in a quick and efficient manner. It’s the same thing with your computer experience.

Alan:  If your computer is not organized the right way – just going to the Internet can be a very slow process. Most people, when they click on a site – if it doesn’t load within 2 or 3 seconds, they are saying, “Let’s go somewhere else.” But they don’t realize that a web page is not actually a page.

We call it a web page, but it is a whole bunch of little, bitty files that go into making up a rendering of that page. We may have hundreds of little bit maps and GIF’s and JPEG’s that actually go together in order to make that. And they have to go somewhere, don’t they?

Anthony:  They’re stored, if you want to say, for the lack of a better word, and downloaded to your computer hard drive.

Alan:  So how can we make things like going to the Internet better? Every time we go to the Internet, we download tons and tons of files that we really don’t need, do we?

Anthony:  Most people who go to the Internet and they want to see their web page loaded and they want to read their information and then move on.

Alan:  Defragging computer systems help to organize so that the computer system itself can load files faster.

Anthony:  It’s an intelligent way to get those files and bits of information back into some kind of order, to make all this faster.

Imagine your kitchen silverware drawer, with forks and knives and spoons, without any kind of organization, where everything is just a mess in that drawer. And every time that you opened it, you had to rifle through or you had to find things and everything is in it, but you had to find it. Over time it would take longer and longer to find that information. And it’s just a mess. We don’t live that way. Why should our computers be that way?

Alan:  It makes a lot of difference. By having a fast computer, when you’re working on a spreadsheet or working on a word processor – especially if you’re working on a data base – if you have to go to access the records and the records are scattered all over the place, it takes time for just one record to populate on the screen. But by putting everything in one place so that it reads it as fast as possible, you are bypassing the slowest bottleneck on the computer, aren’t you?

Anthony:  You absolutely are. No one wants to wait and I can understand why they don’t. I also understand why they shouldn’t have to. We listen to our customers. We design software that I think speaks to all these issues.

Alan:  One of the things that I guess urks more users is how slow a computer boots to get to where they need to be in order to use their computer. They come in the morning and turn the computer on and they sit there and they wait and wait. Some of that is just needless, because it could be handled behind the scenes.

Anthony:  And that’s what we do at Diskeeper. We’ve gotten used to the way things are. We’ve become accustomed to those kinds of slow-downs.

Alan:  There are some kinds of files that you really can’t get to unless you’re out of the system, because Windows has them locked. How do you handle those?

Anthony:  We handle those by doing what we call our “Boot Time Defrag” – where we take care of that page or file if there’s a problem. We can adjust the size of the swap file. We can do those things intelligentl, so that you don’t run into those problems in the future.

In talking in an IT kind of way, when the system starts up, there are what we call our “boot files” or “paging files”. Before your system even finishes loading, we take care of those very important “system files”. We make sure that there is no fragmentation going on and we make sure that the size is enough that it can accommodate the loading of the entire operating system in a quick way.

Alan:  But we wait for the computer to boot. We wait for the computer to go and do its’ thing. We wait for computer to load its files. If we have a spreadsheet, it takes forever for it to get on the screen before we can even use it. And we wonder why? It’s the cost of using a computer. No, it isn’t.

Anthony:  That’s because every computer is different and because every user is different. But imagine if companies really took the time to factor in how every minute in lost productivity in time, what that costs – what that real hard dollar cost is – I think they would be quite surprised.

Alan:  If just saving maybe 2 minutes every hour – it doesn’t sound like that much; but when you take that times however many employees you have…(if you have 100 employees or 400 employees) 5 days a week – that is a lot of money that is just being tossed down the tubes!

Anthony:  Those are real important dollars, and I haven’t met a business owner yet who wants to throw away their money. Given the facts, what we try to do is to have people determine for themselves – because every company is different and every user is different – what the actual costs might be for that person. Let’s say that it is 10 minutes a day of lost productivity – and we can help companies to factor in to figure out what that real dollar amount is.

Alan:  When you’re looking at defrag software to cost money – that’s really looking at it in the wrong way. It is how much time and productivity you can put back into the work force by getting rid of these bottlenecks. Why pay for the bottlenecks?

Anthony:  You’re right. No one wants to buy anything. They want to see what the value in it is and we do our best to help them see the light, as it were.

Alan:  You can download Diskeeper from your website with a full 30-day trial; use it and see what it does.

Anthony:  That’s all we ask people to do.

Alan:  Anthony, thanks for being our guest here on Let’s Talk Computers, talking about the ways that companies can look at their computer system from the users’ standpoint. And we look forward to having you on the air again, real soon.

Anthony:  It’s my pleasure, Alan. It’s always fun to talk to you.