Here in my column, I try to reflect on the situations I have seen in the course of my PC consulting wanderings around the area. Sometimes there is an amusing anecdote or two, but often the job is actually fairly, well, boring! One of the trends that I find interesting is that my number of contracted clients (those I see every week) is up sharply - I hope indicating that businesses have found a new interest in ensuring that their PCs are clean and healthy and that they are doing the right things for security and reliability. I would much rather make sure that a client's PCs are running right (the boring part of the job) than getting those panic emergency calls!
One trend (somewhat hinted last week) is that many of the PCs running Windows ME (Millennium Edition) are starting to fail. Since Microsoft Windows XP is almost five years old now, any PC that has ME on it is by definition getting to the end of its hardware life cycle. There are some problems associated with ME.
First of all, ME was a notoriously unstable release of Windows 98 - yes, it is Windows 98, with just some early XP features thrown in. The last "good" release of 98 was 98SE (Second Edition). In Millennium, Microsoft was starting to test some of the features that were eventually intended for XP - but they were in early form, not fully functional, and not very reliable.
Secondly, Windows ME is still built on the 95/98 platform. That was OK in the year 2000, but now you are trying to run today's applications on a foundation that is five years old!
Finally, the age of the PC hardware itself is a factor. I tell my business clients that the normal working life of a PC is about three years. Oh, that doesn't mean its going to literally fall apart one day after the three years is up, but that there is increased likelihood of failure, especially the hard drive. But if you factor in all the advances in performance and reliability that newer PCs have, running an old PC in an office or business environment is wasting your employee's time and increasing their frustration level. And the age of PCs running Windows ME is far beyond this normal lifetime.
As a result of this aging process, I have been getting a lot of phone calls recently from people with ME that are having various problems including system hang-ups, shutdown problems, and software failures. My response is (hopefully polite) but very firm: Buy a new PC! If you shop around, you can get an acceptable new PC for $500-$600 these days that is far better than the PC you have today - regardless of the price you paid for it. As a matter of fact, my business currently will not service any PC that doesn't have XP - period!
As far as upgrading the hardware or OS goes, I don't recommend it (see last week's column on RAM and hard drive upgrading). I especially don't advocate upgrading your old OS to Windows XP - this will cost you $100 and a lot of work, if it works at all - and that is if you do the work yourself. If you pay somebody like me to do it, fageddaboudit!
Along those same lines, the second question I ask of new clients (the first being which OS you have) is whether you have a high-speed Internet connection. Bob Seidel Consulting will not service PCs on dial-ups any longer. Although the rationale is different, the problem with dial-ups is that you just can't download the system fixes and updates you need to keep your PC clean. People on dial-ups are actually more prone to Internet problems, strange as that may seem, because they don't keep up to date.
So the worst combination is an old Windows ME PC on a dial-up line! If this is you, please consider your options. I would much rather help you install a new PC and copy your old data than to waste your time and money trying to upgrade or fix that old PC. Think about it...
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)