Planned Obsolescence

Anyone with a computer three or more years old has probably experienced it -- the computer's version of tired blood. It doesn't boot up as fast as it used to, applications seem to take an age to initialize, even shutting down takes forever -- it just seems to have lost the sharp edge it came with the day you opened the box.

You have followed the suggestions in those endless computer magazine articles: defragment your hard drive, get rid of applications you don't use, clean out the cookie jar once in a while. You even download FREE software which will tell you what your problems are. It does. And then it invites you to BUY the software you need to fix them.

You talk to the guys at your local computer repair shop, and what do they tell you? Get more memory! Get a bigger hard drive! Your operating system is out-of-date! For only $150 we'll take care of it! They will even try to convince you that the electrons your system came with are too slow, so you need new drivers -- the information highway is no place for slow drivers.

I have a conspiracy theory about all this. I am convinced that all computer software is written with embedded delay loop counters that are initialized with the square root of the number of minutes elapsed sinced you purchased your computer, each time the software is executed. During any operation, startup, shutdown, application initialization, these delay loops are executed so as to make it appear your computer is slowing down, when in fact it's the software that is slowing down -- deliberately! How about that for a theory?

Acer AL1916 Display

The Acer AL1916 display I bought with my media center computer has given me very good service -- until the 3-year warranty expired. Then. it started developing an "artifact" at the top right corner of the screen in the shape of a green and black cloud with an incipient tornado hanging from the bottom.

The artifact seems to reside on the outer layer of the display, so that the cursor slides under it and it is possible to click on the barely visible windows control buttons. However, the artifact is slowly growing, and will eventually degrade the quality of the display to the point of being unusable. Aside from being a nuisance, this problem is one you'd think the folks at Acer would be eager to learn about.

However, now that the 3-year warranty is up, I can find no way of reporting this problem to Acer. I heve tried several approaches, phone and email, to no avail. I could, of course, spend $30 or so for a 30-minute support call, but what could they possibly tell me that would be helpful? I am the one trying to give them informaton! Frustration!!