From: Experienced User
Re: It Ain't the Way It Used To Be
I have been following this debate since we got really excited that we could go to an 80 character screen and 64K on our cutting edge Apple. I have owned four PCs and 2 Macs and used many more than that at work. By training I am a control systems engineer. I have written both 6800 and 8085 hex code.
I now have a 450MHz, fairly generic P-II PC, with 250 MBRAM and two USBs in use (a camera and an iPAQ). It's nearly 3 years old and was at that time a top-of-the-line box. I bought it because my prior box had been a Mac-II that bombed fairly frequently, couldn't run a decent CADD program, and cost WAY too much considering its functionality. For a living, I write books, do CADD, consult, and try to keep track of my money. I can now say with some rationale, that owning a PC has become a vicious treadmill.
When I added the iPAQ i had the wondrous experience of BSD, as often as 7 times per day. This little irritant often takes TWO boots to clear. So I thought I would go modern and upgrade to Win2K... AFTER blowing the $300 for software and attendant upgrades, I still can't figure out how or whether to do the upgrade. Now, this is pretty dispiriting, as I don't think I am that unusual and am certainly not a stupid person. The problem is that I can't get a full complement of drivers even if I wanted to and NO ONE will tell me how to do the complete process of reformatting the monster and getting back to where I was should I make a mess of it. The manufacturer (Micron) refuses to support a machine that old and tells me that I shouldn't bother, preferring to regale me with stories of people who replace their computers every 90 days...
Did you hear that PC fans? 90 days.
After confronting this little tid-bit I concluded that I really don't want to spend the rest of my life feeding CDs and waiting for downloads. I would prefer a slower product life-cycle with more time spent developing rugged, error-free software and making sure that a minor concern such as CUSTOMER SERVICE is respected by maintaining access to a current set of drivers or links to get them from someone else.
I really don't mind that technology progresses so rapidly, I simply resent the fact that products are sold as backward compatible to Win98 and are not. I don't appreciate each vendor messing with the guts of my system software without explaining the rationale BEFORE I BUY THE PRODUCT, a 'What we do to your machine,' as it were.
"Oh but CO that would be too hard, there are so many configurations out there..."
Exactly.
Wake up PC land, this customer is looking around again.