She takes the view that she doesn't have to be personally clued in. She had been halfway through her homework, when her computer first crashed.

It had unfortunately taken part of her essay with it. She had responded in precisely the correct way, using the method employed by everyone from nerd geniuses through to utter noobs. She swore at the monitor, waited for it to switch back on and hoped that the problem had gone away. This is the fail-safe ' have you tried turning it off and on again' strategy. Not only does that often work, but it would also allow her to say 'yes', when it would be the first question that I'd ask of her. Over the next few days, she faced the Blue Screen of Death several times. She eventually surrendered to the inevitable and came into Skype looking for me. #CNET SPECCY MAC#Ĭompleting our trinity was a woman who works on the Apple Mac service desk.Īlso in the call with me was a man who'd spent his teenage years building computers, and most of his spare time writing programs to run on them. The geek conversation was already in deep cyberspace, when my friend nervously joined us. Once we'd established that she had indeed turned it off and on again, there was a barrage of questions about spec. This was a woman who'd previously struggled to find a fuse in a plug, now she was being asked about graphic cards, CPU and the core temperature of her PSU. I waited for her cringing and apologetic protests to abate, then reminded her that last time something had gone wrong, I'd made her download Speccy. There was a short gasp and the lack of verbal response this time felt more hopeful. Half a minute later, she proudly pasted into the text chat her entire software specification. It was followed by an instant chorus in three voices. We had spotted the problem immediately and we knew just how to fix it. The program has been developed by Piriform. I know it appears that everything that I recommend is from them, but they really do make great software. I don't set out to merely download everything that the company makes. I'll discover things for myself, or follow a word of mouth recommendation, only to learn that it's Piriform once again. You stop being so pleasantly surprised after a while. I found Speccy after posting on a Tech Forum.

I'd included a screenshot of my own computer's temperature in order to illustrate my point. One of the replies came from an extremely technology savvy man (one of the moderators in fact). He disdained the program that I'd previously used to determine it.

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