A lot of people have no idea why a computer’s doing what it’s doing. A lot of people who know an awful lot about computers and how they work may end up with no idea, because most of the time, there can be several different explanations for a particular action. Troubleshooting a computer, for the average person who doesn’t really know how to get inside and find out what’s up, is kind of a lot like trying to be Dr. House, but less educated. You try something, see if it works. You try something else. You do this until the problem is solved, or it nearly (or fully) kills your patient.

The problem with this approach is that when it’s successful, some people don’t have the education to explain why it was successful. This is how computing superstitions are formed. MSN messenger crashes if you run it at the same time as winamp? Streaming video buffers more consistently when the window is minimized? Many of the actual solutions are so arbitrary (did you know that you flip the hold switch back and forth three times and then hold menu and the center button to refresh a frozen iPod classic?) that it seems just as reasonable to believe that you solved the problem by crossing your fingers, or changing your socks. I hope to provide some simple, relatable analogies for some popular computing superstitions, and hopefully explain why they don’t work.

Closing Applications Helps Eliminate Video Lag

So lets say you’re trying to watch an episode of the Daily Show online. It just went up, and you’re settling down for your lunch break to watch last night’s episode, because you went to bed at 11 so you could be alert and effective at work. You sit down with your chicken caesar wrap and your… I’m gonna say S Pellegrino, only to discover that it has to stop and buffer halfway through the theme music. It does it again, and again, about every 8 seconds, all the way through the episode. You closed Microsoft Word, though, and you closed Skype. What could possibly be slowing it down?

For this one, I’d like you to imagine you’re ordering a pizza. You call in, ask for a large pepperoni, well done, nothing they shouldn’t be able to handle. They say it’ll be about 45 minutes before it’s ready to pick up. You’ve ordered here before, though, and it normally only takes them about 25 minutes! Which do you think is more likely:

That the pizza is going to take longer because there are a lot of people ordering pizzas from that restaurant at this particular time.

or

That the pizza’s going to take longer because you were making a sandwich while you were on the phone with them.

Modern processors don’t exactly strain themselves rendering lofi streamed video, these days. The more likely culprit are the hundreds of thousands of college students who just woke up to watch that particular video along with you. Comedy Central’s servers can’t keep up with the demand, so it’s going to take a little longer to deliver. Now, lets say you are downloading a particularly large powerpoint presentation at the same time. This is slightly different. This is more like you ordered several pizzas from several different pizza parlours around the city at the same time. However, the amount that this will affect your buffering rate is about the same as the effect of all those pizza delivery guys will have on the speed of traffic on the way to your house.

The reason the belief that closing programs affects video lag is so common is that people don’t like to feel helpless. They like to believe that, somehow, changing something on their particular computer will affect the performance. Sometimes this just isn’t true. Occasionally, you have to set it aside, let it buffer, and maybe come back to watch it when things are a little bit less busy.

I hope coming to terms with that will make you more patient, less anxious, and a better grounded user.