We all know the old adage that men will never ask for directions, preferring instead to get lost rather than admit we have no idea what we’re doing. Same for calling a handyman; why would we need to pay someone to replace a refrigerator compressor when we can just do it ourselves? Even when it becomes painfully obvious we will never get it fixed, and parts have been strewn all over the kitchen, we still resist assistance. We can’t admit we don’t know, or admit defeat, or show weakness of any sort. It’s even been proven through research!

Now, that sense of I-can-fix-this-itis extends to the world of technology. Crucial, a manufacturer of computer memory, conducted a study in partnership with GMI research to investigate attitudes among men and women and their self-perceived ability to diagnose and fix a computer problem; Specifically, a computer that is experiencing slowing and occasionally freezing up.

When presented with this scenario, almost 90 percent of men identified lack of memory as the least-likely culprit, and a failed component as the most likely, with lack of hard drive space as the second most likely cause. Of course, a failed component wouldn’t cause a slowdown, it would cause a failure, although lack of hard drive space could be considered. The numbers were the same for women, but only about half of them felt confident in repairing their PC, as opposed to almost 70 percent of men. Men apparently also consider their PC to be a fixer-upper project that should extend at least five years, the results for women weren’t given.

Here are the caveats: This study was commissioned by Crucial, a manufacturer of memory, and they are working under the assumption that a slowing PC is caused by lack of memory. That is very often true, but not always, which is our second caveat. Lack of hard drive space, too many programs running in the background (which should be disabled rather than given more memory), malware, bad code, many things can cause a machine to slow down, and diagnosing even simple problems can become very difficult.