As previously written in my first installment of being more productive on the computer, I shared some tips and tricks to working faster on your computer with common keyboard shortcuts and faster mouse paths to getting things done, such as sending off an e-mail, replying to an e-mail, or saving documents quickly and efficiently. This was a great way to become more productive yourself.

However, there is another facet to being as productive as possible with a computer – having a fast and efficient computer that easily keeps up with you and does not bug you with errors, pop ups, or have any kind of hindrance to your productivity.

Do you often find that you have to wait several seconds, sometimes even minutes for a commonly used application to load, or even for your whole computer to turn on and boot fully into ready-to-go mode?

Let’s do a little quick math, assuming that it takes a solid 20 seconds for a large application to load, and you load it frequently throughout an average day, say 5 times a day.

5 days multiplied by 20 seconds is 100 seconds per day. Multiply that by 5 days a week, or 20 days a month, or 240 days a year and it translates into nearly 7 total hours a year wasted in waiting for a computer to load a business application.

Now here’s the real kicker. What if your company has 15 employees and they all need to work with this application frequently? That translates into 105 total hours a year wasted for all of your employees and co-workers’ time.

I have recently upgraded my laptop with a Solid State Drive (SSD). The performance differences between a regular mechanical hard disk drive and a solid state flash-based drive are astounding:

Windows 7 boot time before: 63 seconds, after: 14 seconds
Loading FireFox Web Browser before: 5 seconds, after: < 1 second
Loading Adobe Photoshop CS4 before: 23 seconds, after: 3 seconds
Loading 20 applications at the same time (Calculator, Notepad, Word, Excel, Photoshop, FireFox (5 windows), Internet Explorer (5 windows), PowerPoint, Access, Windows Media Player, Windows Explorer)

Before: 1 minute, 14 seconds
After: 8 seconds

After this SSD upgrade, I will never again go back to spinning, mechanical hard drives for my personal PC builds or high-end client computer builds.

The computer is today’s business’ backbone. It’s lifeline. It’s recommended to have new computer hardware every 3-5 years so that none of your co-workers or employees lose valuable productivity time for your company. Even more importantly, a regularly maintained network, computer, and server infrastructure is a must to protect against viruses, impending hardware issues or failures, software insecurities or incompatibilities, and other general productivity-slowing issues.

Contact me today if you want to turbo-charge your productivity!