What’s a power user?

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A power user, a term often used in computing, is a user of a computer system who tends to work with more advanced features and functionality than a computer. This can apply to both computer hardware, the operating system and the software running on the system. There are also specific cases where the term is applied to certain software vendors or system privileges. In a more general sense, however, the term could be used in any case to represent someone with an interest and ability to make use of an apparatus beyond what would otherwise be considered standard use.

In what is considered the regular use of a computer system, most users tend to stick to certain tasks and rarely delve into the possibilities and additional functions available on the system or some software. Consequently, there can be different levels of power users. In one case, a software program running on a computer, such as email, is typically used to check messages and reply to or generate messages for sending. In this case, an experienced email user could go further by implementing encryption and digital signing for their messages to ensure greater privacy and establish additional spam filtering technologies as well as other filtering methods for automatic organization of emails. messages.

Taking it a step further, power users may also fall into the system software level. Some may install multiple operating systems on their computers, creating custom partitions of their hard drives to run these operating systems. Such a power user can also customize their operating system to look or behave a little differently than the developer’s or company’s standard version. He will use emulators to load operating systems and software into an already running system. He would also be able to write scripts for various aspects of the system to make programs run more efficiently.

At the hardware level, a power user spends a lot of time involved in the technical aspects of computer performance. Whether he’s involved in gaming or graphic design and rendering, he’ll also work with the high-end selection of video cards and displays. Things like floating point operations per second (FLOPS) and chip architectures that reduce die size, bus speed and width, pixel stuffing, and rasterization speeds are closely monitored by this type of power user .

Beyond these generalizations, however, some specific software vendors also use the term. Companies that produce very complex software systems, such as SAP®’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, or Oracle® database software, will give the power user moniker to users who have been trained in the more complex operations of the software . Microsoft® operating systems, from Windows® 2000 to Windows® XP, offer a special user group for administration, called Power Users, which grants group members some privileges beyond a normal user, such as installing software and other system components. The Power Users group was removed with the release of Windows® Vista® due to the security implications of escalating the privileges of a user with administrator privileges.

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