Medici Capital > Articles > SECTION 1 - IT In Your Personal Life

Article By:
Andrew Sirianni

SECTION 1 - IT In Your Personal Life

Tuesday, 6 March 2007

A colleague and I presented recently at the Pharmacy Snow Business Conference held at Mt Buller and posed a question to the participants: "How many of you know the specifications of your personal computer (PC), either at home or at work?" To my surprise and amazement, one person in the entire room raised their hand. From that point, my discussion changed course from advancements in Information Technology (IT) to UNDERSTANDING YOUR I.T.

We do not sell IT equipment or software. I am not going to tell you that your business is losing out by not having the latest gadgets and gizmo's. What I am going to do is ask you to think about what you are trying to achieve in your business and professional endeavours. With this in mind, how are you using IT to support this?
"How many of you know the specifications of your personal computer (PC) at home?"

A personal computer is now available in many homes, and considered more of a necessity than a luxury in our growingly networked society. But how many of us have taken the time to consider why we require a computer? What sort of functions do we use a computer for in our personal lives on a daily basis? And is your computer capable of handling these functions?

I will outline my point with an example. Flipping through a flyer advertising computer deals, I am presented with a PC for $800 all inclusive. Seem like a fantastic deal? Well, let's look into it.

The computer comes with 256MB of DDR RAM, an 80GB hard drive, a 17 inch flat screen with a resolution of 1280 x 1024. Now what does this mean?

First, let's look at the RAM. RAM stands for Random Access Memory and essentially holds information about your programs and systems until they are saved to your hard drive. To quantify this, if you edit a Word Document, your edits are saved in RAM until you save the document. Or when you cut and paste a picture, it's held in RAM until you clear the Office Clipboard. Or when watching a movie, the data is transferred into RAM as a buffer, then displayed. The benefit of this is that reading from memory is faster than accessing your hard drive for every step of a process. In this case, wehave been offered 256 MB of memory. Now it is interesting to note that the BASE level of Microsoft Windows XP requires 128 MB of memory to run. So from initial analysis, we should be ok. However, it doesn't stop there.

As most of you are aware, Microsoft Windows has launched a number of software updates, most notably Service Pack 1 and Service Pack 2 (and I hear that Service Pack 3 is on the way). Each one of these adds additional memory requirements to the system. So effectively, a computer running Service Pack 2 will require about 300 MB of RAM to operate effectively. Given that this is what is required for JUST the operating system to run, it is obvious that this computer would not cope with the demands of running the Windows at a comfortable rate let alone any programs you would wish to run on top of Windows.

For most personal computers, I would recommend a minimum of 512MB as the very least amount of RAM that you should consider. However when looking to use a PC for images, movies, videos or music you should consider a minimum of 1GB to ensure adequate performance.

In reference to the hard drive, while 80GB should be sufficient for most users, there was something in the fine print that I thought I should mention. The speed of the hard drive is 5400. This number is essentially the equivalent of the revs in your car. It refers to the RPM at which the drive spins, or the speed at which data can be written to/retrieved from the hard drive.

A good speed is 7200. So for 5400, no matter how fast my processor is, or how much RAM I have, there will be a bottle neck at my hard drive when trying to access data. So if you're looking at storing and retrieving data on a regular basis from your PC, or you wish to save and retrieve large files, you will wait longer with a 5200 hard drive than you will with a 7200 hard drive. And given the current prices of hard drives (minimal), it will be beneficial to purchase the faster drive.

In the way of hard drives, you should always look for a 7200 RPM drive and you know you are getting a good deal if the price/data ratio is at most $1 to 1GB.

In reference to the screen, there has been a lot of fanfare about flat panel LCD screens. It appears the bigger the screen, the better it must be. However this is a perfect case in which the assumption is not true.

The screen offered, a 17 inch LCD is reported to be ultra sharp claiming a resolution of 1280 x 1024. This simply means that the screen is made up of 1280 pixels across by 1024 pixels high - in other words how much detail can be shown on a screen. Once again, on face value it looks good. Yet, I am using a 12 inch laptop with a screen resolution of 1280 x 1024. So for each inch squared, my resolution is MUCH higher than this 17" screen ad hence my picture quality, on a smaller screen, is superior.

Once again, look at what you wish to use the PC for. If you are working with spreadsheets and documents only, then this may not be such a bad thing as the screen resolution of your text may not be an urgent concern. However, if you are requiring the PC for multimedia, you will want a better level of resolution to ensure your appreciation for the images/video is best.

I hope that this has raised a few questions for you regarding your own PC and provided some understanding as to why each component is important. So now, take some time to consider: "What do I use my PC for?"

If you are simply using it for editing documents and emails, then you may not require the best screen resolution, or levels of RAM that are too extensive. However, if you are using the PC for images, multimedia, or even running lots of software applications, (either individually or simultaneously), you will notice a significant improvement in a computer that is better configured with more memory and graphical capabilities.

CONCLUSION

I hope that this article has provided you with some interesting discussion points regarding IT in pharmacy and your personal life. I realise I have created more questions than posed answers, but such is the nature of IT. There is no one solution. Each business must look at their needs and requirements and then take calculated judgements to ensure that they take steps to adequately meet these needs.

But to ensure you are filling your need, you must have an understanding of what your requirements are and how your IT solution will meet these requirements - both on a technical level (software and hardware) and on a social level (policies, procedures and interaction with the system).

As I stated from the outset, I am not asking you to buy the best IT solution money can buy, nor am I recommending that there is one solution out there that's the be all and end all of IT. What I am saying is this:

Consider what your goals are (always keep an open mind);
Consider the purpose your IT is going to serve and use the IT components that suit your needs;
Identify and structure the use of your IT;
Manage your IT solutions; and
Make use of your IT reporting functions to tell you how you're doing.

Your IT is the biggest information repository you may have, both at home and in the business. Hardware and Software can do some amazing things. But efficiency does not always result in effectiveness. Take steps to ensure you know what IT you and your business uses, why it uses it, and how you can harness the power it produces.