How productive are you on RISC OS?
Published on 10th Oct 2005, 17:17:54, source is drobe.co.uk
By Chris Williams
User says Windows gives RISC OS a 30 minute head start
Letter WROCC member Richard Ashbery has written in to complain that he's wasting time securing and maintaining his Microsoft Windows computer, which is affecting his productivity. He said, "I seem to be spending more and more time running basic software security and integrity checks on my PC and wanted to see just how long it takes to update and run them. I was staggered to see the amount of time I waste. To illustrate the point I decided to create a simple poster on my RiscPC while the checks were carried out."
Richard used to write Vantage tutorial articles for Qercus, although has since ordered Artworks from MW Software after seeing it demonstrated at the Wakefield show. The simple poster in this exercise (pictured above) was designed using DrawWorksXL and EasiWriter Pro+.
He added, "I'm not familiar with any of the PC graphic packages and its been a long time since I used Macromedia's Freehand and that was on the Apple Mac. Because of RISC OS familiarity, confidence and ease-of-use I will continue to use the OS for as long as I can. The poster is purely for illustrative purposes and was done to show how easy and quick it is to create simple graphics using RISC OS. However I have done one or two for advertising my local camera club."
| Maintenance action | Software used | Download updates (minutes) | Execution time (minutes) |
| Anti-virus | AVG | 3-5 | 15-20 |
| Check for spyware | Adaware | 3 | 2 |
| Check for spyware | Spybot | 8-10 | 2 |
| Disc maintenance | Defrag | N/A | 5-20 |
| Sub-total (using average times) | 16 | 35 |
| Total | 51 |
Dial-up Internet user Richard says his PC is powered by a 2GHz AMD Athlon 64 processor with 160G hard disc, 512M DDR RAM, ATI Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantis AGP graphics card and Windows XP Pro. The poster took 30 minutes to create on his 200MHz RiscPC, meanwhile the PC was still crunching its way through maintenance checks.
It's arguable that for a complex illustration, once a Windows PC eventually gets started, it could out run a RiscPC or Iyonix - much like a cyclist versus a car over short and long distances. On the other hand, not every user will want to produce high quality graphics, and also, not all users will have the same level of computer usage as Richard. It's a very subjective issue even though Richard's point is particularly interesting, even more so when you take into account those users who emulate RISC OS hardware on top of Windows - this may change if a VirtualRiscPC port for Mac OS X ever appears. In the meantime, is RISC OS productivity a myth? How productive are you on RISC OS?
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Letter WROCC member Richard Ashbery has written in to complain that he's wasting time securing and maintaining his Microsoft Windows computer, which is affecting his productivity. He said, "I seem to be spending more and more time running basic software security and integrity checks on my PC and wanted to see just how long it takes to update and run them. I was staggered to see the amount of time I waste. To illustrate the point I decided to create a simple poster on my RiscPC while the checks were carried out."