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Oh dear. My PC is starting to show its age. I’ve had it a while, lovingly applying little upgrades and fixes, building it from scratch about four years ago, nursing it back to life the day it exploded and filled the room with smoke and bad smells, and kept it safe in an unreachable corner under my desk.

But tonight, for the first time, I’m stuck with an expansion dooberie without a slot to fit it in. Not because my slots are full; just that my motherboard is too old to do the job - it lacks the necessary kit.

Which means I now have a dilemma.

You see, I need to to do some freelance, so I could justify buying a new (cheap) PC. The money from the freelance work would pay for half of it, and I could claim some of the rest against my tax.

Except I don’t want to. I want to buy a new Mac later in the year when the mini makes the switch to Intel, and I’d like to upgrade my iBook some day, perhaps before the end of the year, so I can’t really justify having yet another PC hanging around the place. That would make one Linux machine, three Windows machines, two Macs and a Linux-based server all whirring away, making the underside of my desk sound like the launch ramp of an aircraft carrier.

And that’s before perhaps buying a Mac mini and upgrading the iBook.

But there’s another reason why I don’t want to buy a new PC: Office 2003 and XP Pro. If I bought a new one it would likely be running XP Home, and I couldn’t install the Pro edition currently on my PC onto the young upstart because it would refuse to authenticate. Likewise, I couldn’t install Microsoft Office 2003 on there for the very same reason.

That’s not a massive problem as I’d switch to OpenOffice, anyway, but it does mean that if I thought along the lines of the average user (and I think I am), then Microsoft is actually holding me back, and making me stay with what has proved itself, tonight, to be outdated, old equipment, simply because I can’t justify the cost of buying new copies of its software.

If I’m not a minority, I can’t believe the hardware manufacturers are too happy with that state of affairs.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 16th, 2006 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.