Our PCs are more powerful than ever, so why do they feel so slow? It might be our expectations have increased. Or it might be the applications installed on them. A new PC today has 1 million times (4GB vs 4KB) more RAM than the earliest computers. Creating a program back then meant optimizing every line of code. Today, faster computers have enabled programmers to get sloppy. And sloppy code means slower computers.

Symanted launched the new “lighter” version of its Norton 360. Users had complained that after installing the previous version their “PCs experienced severe performance troughs.” It seems users are starting to push back on sloppy software, telling the software industry: I bought a faster computer so my computer would be faster - not so you can write bloated software.

Robyn Peterson isn’t a computer newbie - after all, he’s in charge of technology for tech publisher Ziff Davis. So how did he lose his backup? Using a popular techie solution for online backup: FTP-ing his files to a web hosting provider. A perfectly reasonable, if somewhat tedious, solution. But as he found out, not such a secure option.

“We have been cracking down on people using our services for backing up files,” Robyn was told by the provider. The Terms of Service said their “servers are not intended as a data backup or archiving service.” Don’t check the fine print? Or don’t think it’ll be enforced? Ok sometimes…but when you really need that backup, you don’t want the response Robyn got when he asked whether his deleted files were backed up: “backups go back a maximum of only two weeks, and no backups are guaranteed.”