THE URGE

Dick Pountain/Fri 20 June 2003/2:27 pm/Idealog 107

Today I felt the unmistakable stirrings of an urge that I thought I had freed myself from several years ago - the urge to buy a computer, that is. It is not so strong yet that I can't resist it for six months or even a year more, but it is there again, which rather surprises me. This urge has nothing whatever to do with wanting a faster computer, or one with a bigger screen or hard disk or anything like that. The computer I have is already about three times faster than I need and I've only filled half of its 20Gbyte disk in two years use. Nor have I succumbed to the itch for a window in its side from which an eerie purple glow is emitted, or for gold-plated fins on all my RAM modules.

This latter is currently a hot topic hereabouts, as by the time you read this column Dennis will have launched a new magazine for customizers and hot-rod PC builders, and I played some part (if a slightly off-centre one) in the decision to create it. Nearly three years ago I wrote a gently mocking piece about how some PC users were becoming as obsessed with tweaking CPU speed as hot-rod car builders - and the deluge of mail that followed convinced us that here was genuine subculture in the process of forming itself.

I'm by now 100% converted to working with a laptop as my only computer, to the extent that going back to a full-sized desktop keyboard feels slightly weird and the monitor looks fuzzy and too far away - so that isn't it either. No, the urge arises from two simple factors: weight and backup. Over the last year subnotebooks seem to have advanced a long way, to the point where most manufacturers now offer something as slim as an after-dinner mint and weighing less than half of what my current notebook weighs. That's very attractive when you have to lug the thing through airports every few months. Of course the most seductive of them all is the gorgeous new 12" screen Apple PowerBook which looks more like an Art Deco cigarette case than a computer, but I'm afraid that I lack the courage at my time of life to move over to such an alien data environment (even given my past admiration for NextStep/OS X and the availability of useable Windows emulators).

The other, more important factor, is backup. In a recent column I described my current regime, which depends on disk mirroring across a small LAN when I'm in London and a portable CD-RW drive when I'm not. However neither of these schemes provides me with what I had for a while on my old ThinkPad, namely a bootable Ghost image that can completely restore my whole system in 15 minutes. Due to my cowardice in not reformatting and upgrading the OS of my current laptop when I got it, it has only a single disk partition which is now too big to fit onto a single CD. What I need to put me back where I was before in terms of securing my data and system is one of these newfangled  flip-to-disk type removable hard drives that can hold the contents of my whole 20Gbyte drive, but to make the backup time remotely acceptable it needs to be on a Firewire connection. And my current machine doesn't have Firewire.

I've checked out PC Card Firewire interfaces at the usual vendors and they're not expensive, but I already have a SCSI card filling one of my laptop's slots (for the CD-RW drive), added to which I frankly don't trust that the drivers for such a thing will not render my system unstable in some unpredictable way. I'd rather start from scratch with a new machine, with Windows XP pre-installed (the urge to upgrade operating systems I truly have conquered completely and utterly), one or two FireWire ports and a built-in CD-RW drive for daily data backups. One that weighs not much more than 2 kilos and is as thin as a biscuit. Now all I have to do is decide which one.

I played with a new T40 Thinkpad in the Pro office yesterday and was strongly reminded of why I like them so much. There's something about IBM's square-edged matte-blackness that feels grown up and makes many of their silver competitors look a bit like Star Wars merchandise. Plus I still like the red button pointer control, and I love their solid keyboards, and their screens are up there with the best. So it might be another ThinkPad. But some of 
Sony's Viaio's look terribly tempting, except that everyone says their service is crap, and Dell does that one that looks a bit like a PowerBook and... Spinning out the decision process for another six months will not be a problem, I'd guess.

It does feel odd though that for the first time in my computing career I'm being impelled to consider buying a new machine for security rather than performance reasons. And I still feel a little put-out that computer manufacturers are still getting away with selling PCs to naive punters with no adequate means of backing up their increasingly huge hard drives, and little explanation of the need to do so. It's rather as if Ford were to sell a car with no brakes, on the assumption that you were bound to know you have to add your own.