Call me paranoid (you won't be the first), but I am convinced that PC software and hardware vendors conspire to ensure that all new hardware is obsolete within 30 minutes of it hitting the market.

I have two computers. I usually use what I consider a perfectly good four-and-a-half-year-old, 500 megahertz Pentium III desktop computer with 384 MB of memory. The other computer is a lesser-powered laptop that I use when traveling. My laptop's capacity is just sufficient to tally up my grocery bill, as long as I don't buy too much.

When I bought the computers, I didn't think much about processor speeds, memory size, or storage capacity. They were then so over-powered for my needs that I was certain they would be adequate for the rest of my life. Right.

My computers perform much the same tasks as they always have. Nevertheless, I still bought into the software vendors' exorbitant claims for their new releases. Now, whenever I hit a key, the new bloatware takes so long to process it that I can leisurely stroll out to my neighborhood Starbucks for an espresso and my computer might be ready to accept another keystroke when I return. The excess caffeine is keeping me awake at night, which is great because I need the extra work time now that my computer is so slow.

As a paranoid person, I do feel justified in continually upgrading my Internet security suite. When I installed the latest, greatest version of my firewall and anti-virus software, the new suite included a spam filter. As soon as the upgrade was loaded, a background process started crashing on a frequent basis. Some sleuthing proved that the culprit was part of the Internet security suite. Given that the name of the process is something like "common client application," I'm guessing that it is a common client used by all of the applications in the suite. As you might imagine, software that provides Internet security is the last thing that a paranoiac wants to see fail. I immediately reboot my machine whenever it happens, even if that means losing considerable work.

At first I thought that it was a bug that might affect everyone using the new version, but I could find no mention of it on the vendor's site or anywhere else on the Web. I decided to try something on my own. Thinking that my now-underpowered machine was not giving the offending process enough juice, I called up the Windows task manager and assigned the process a high priority. Lo and behold, it rarely crashes now--as long as I remember to reset the priority every time I reboot. Windows isn't smart enough to remember to reapply that setting on every session.

Unfortunately, whenever I receive an email, my machine assigns virtually all of its resources to the high-priority process for the 12 and a half minutes that it takes for the firewall to decide if it should let the email in, the anti-virus software to decide whether to quarantine anything attached to it, and the spam filter to decide whether to shunt it off to a folder that I always empty without viewing. My computer does not have enough power to do anything else for those 12 and a half minutes, which is a rather extreme drain on productivity, since I get an average of a few dozen pieces of spam per hour.

You are probably asking, "Why doesn't he just splurge and buy a more powerful PC?" I don't because I work for my own company, so the cost comes out of my own pocket. If I buy a new computer every few months when the old one becomes obsolete, I will have to cut out some luxuries such as food, clothing, and shelter. My computer and I probably wouldn't last one winter day out on the streets of Toronto, my hometown.

I'm not above a little friendly bribery or extortion. If IBM would like to give me a new, top-of-the line ThinkPad--you know, one of those sleek, thin ones--with maxed out memory and storage as a birthday present every year, I might consider not mentioning IBM in any of my future rants. (Lest anyone take me seriously, let me make it clear that I'm joking. However, my birthday is December 18 should someone in authority at IBM choose, of his or her own free will, to make an annual test of my journalistic integrity.)

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, a writer, and president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto, Canada-based marketing communications firm. Joel has 25 years experience working in IT, first as a programmer/analyst, then as a marketer. He holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto. Contact him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., but don't expect a fast response if it has to come from his computer.

Joel Klebanoff is a consultant, writer, and formerly president of Klebanoff Associates, Inc., a Toronto-based marketing communications firm. He has 30 years' experience in various IT capacities and now specializes in writing articles, white papers, and case studies for IT vendors and publications across North America. Joel is also the author of BYTE-ing Satire, a compilation of a year's worth of his columns. He holds a BS in computer science and an MBA, both from the University of Toronto.

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