NO (X)PASARÁN!

Dick Pountain/Fri 12 December 2003/3:25 pm/Idealog 113

For the last few months I seem to have been stuck in heavy techno/philosophical themes in this column, so perhaps it's time to look at something mundane and boring, namely my computer systems. Actually my computers haven't changed since the last time I wrote about them here, but that is a story in itself. Despite all my agonizing over spanking new, wafer-thin laptops I still haven't bought one, and I can't honestly say that I feel diminished in any way. On the contrary, I've bought myself a 1983 left-handed Fender Stratocaster and a nice new Dobro for just a fraction of the money that I haven't spent on computers this year...

I've come to realize over the last year not only that I've now officially ceased to be a computer nerd, becoming instead a mere computer user, but more worryingly I'm a type of computer user for whom the industry now doesn't cater at all (and maybe can no longer even see on their radar). That is, I'm a single-user, home-based worker with a minimal interest in game-playing and a purely utilitarian relationship to the Internet. Nobody else ever uses my computer, nor ever will, so I don't give a damn about logons, accounts, profiles and policies - in fact they annoy me and worry me in equal measure, having been locked out of computers that have unilaterally decided to lose their passwords in the past. I never have more than two or three programs running at the same time, and I've barely half-filled a 10GB hard disk in three years.

My current system consists of two laptops, a Dell and an HP, both somewhere around 500MHz and with 128MB and 192MB of memory respectively. They're connected together by a USB-USB network that runs at 3Mbps, which I use to mirror the data directories of one machine onto the other, for some degree of resilience. That's all done automatically by batch files run from the task scheduler. I have a CD writer that I use regularly to back up my valuable data (it's not big enough to easily back up my whole hard disk, but then neither would a DVD-ROM be). My most valuable, current working data, also gets automatically sent to a remote, off-site machine several times a day. You may have gathered that I don't trust computers any more. Neither of my machines runs Windows XP, which I've finally decided that I want nothing to do with at all. That's partly why I haven't bought a new laptop (I can't face the thought of having to immediately downgrade it to Windows 2000).

I don't want XP for two reasons: product activation and service packs. I've had a little experience, almost all negative, with the service packs for Windows 2000, and the thought of being tied to them like a saline drip for the rest of my life is just intolerable. And as for those people who allow Microsoft to pump the packs into them automatically, they must be bonkers. I only write for a living and Office 2000 already does far more than I'll ever want, so there's no reason to go XP on that score.

I don't have broadband either, though it's readily available in my area. I only use the Internet for the odd Google search a couple of times a week and for book shopping on Amazon, both of which are perfectly manageable over a 56K dial-up link. My email is all done through off-line Cix conferencing: I don't even have the virus-magnet Outlook installed. My phone bill for the last quarter was £60 and the cheapest broadband deal would almost double that for virtually no increased utility to me. I'm heartily bored with people droning on about how convenient an always-on connection is: that would mean the convenience of having to run a firewall I suppose. Who it's really most convenient for is Microsoft, permitting it to sell you a half-finished operating system and then force you to download huge patches to fix it. And more convenient for dorks who want to send you huge digital camera dumps of their grandchildren without the inconvenience of learning about JPGs or compression.

It isn't that I don't have any fun on my computer at all. I do play games quite often, but my favourites are Freecell and Scrabble, neither of which taxes the hardware acceleration of even my puny S3 Savage 8MB graphics over much. I also play music using the neat shareware WinAmp player (yes, yes, skins and all), and even stage my own mini-raves using a variety of visualisers - Geoforce is my favourite, kicks up a storm on Bartok piano music.

I'm sure that one day I'll be forced, by eventual hardware failure, to upgrade to some future Microsoft operating system, but I'm not going to willingly collude in the mad process of escalation that's been set in motion. If I worked in a big office I'd be quite happy to have an XP client on my desk - with some other poor sap of an administrator to look after it at the server end - but I don't work in an office. I fully understand that Windows 2003 Server and all its trimmings signify that Microsoft has finally cracked the enterprise sector, and will probably displace the mainframe entirely over the coming five years or so. But none of that means a hill of beans to a single, home user like me - and the resulting products are just way too complicated for what I need.