I've been reading PC Pro magazine since the dawn of time, it feels like. If you subscribe it's cheap as chips, and is always a good read. (No, I don't work for them!)

Plus, it always comes with an interesting coverdisk, either a CD or more likely these days a DVD. I'm pretty sure there's never been an issue that hasn't contained something worth at least evaluating, and frequently there have been amazingly good things, software I now use on a daily basis. (No, really, I don't work for them!)

Because I'm sad, I've taken to cataloguing the Full Product software on these covermounts, which generally are the most useful things on there. And now I've knocked up a web page for this info, which you might find useful. If there's anything you're after I guess their back-issue department might get it for you. (No... really... I don't...)

Way back in February 2007 I wrote about how underwhelmed I was at the prospect of the imminent release of Vista, see here. Subsequently, I purchased a laptop with Vista on it, though I would have much preferred XP.

The lap top is jolly nice, (see here) but I've really always felt that its performance was being hampered by Vista. I can run a benchmarking test on the laptop and then on my desktop and the laptop wins hands down. But in day-to-day to use, the laptop feels sluggish. The desktop runs on XP. Added to which, Vista just is so very irritating to use. It keeps asking me stupid questions. Okay, not stupid... but certainly unwelcome questions. And every now and again it just... stops. It just comes up with its swirly hourglass replacement do-dah and just does nothing for a while. And don't get me started on file transfer times!

I'm not alone in feeling that Vista is pants. Everyone, pretty much does... even possibly Microsoft. Recently I had a letter printed in PC Pro magazine, where I argued that the only way Microsoft could redeem their tarnished image (re Vista) was to provide upgrades to Windows 7 for free. Naturally I wasn't actually expecting them to do so... and naturally they haven't.

However, they have offered it cheaply if you pre-order. From PC World, to be precise, it can be pre-ordered for 45 quid. Not bad at all. So I have indeed pre-ordered it, for delivery in October (or so).

But the moment I hit the order confirm button... I felt like a fool. Microsoft sold me a duff product. And I've just shelled out another wodge of cash to get away from their screw-up. I've paid them again. How dumb of me. But what choice do you have? You can't go back to XP (easily) and I can't take Linux seriously... I've got work to do!

I hope to goodness W7 turns out to be as improved as the reviews claim. If it turns out that it's as bad as Vista, boy will we all be looking stupid. And, as you may recall, Vista got pretty good reviews before it actually hit the streets.

Time will tell. But either way I won't be a happy bunny with Microsoft. It remains to be seen just how irritated with them I'll eventually be.

I recently had a letter published in my favourite computing magazine, PC Pro. The topic I addressed was that of whether powering PC equipment on and off does it any harm or not. I wrote thus:

"I have been following your campaign to get us to switch off our computer equipment with interest these last few months. I absolutely go along with you on this, and I have been encouraged to switch off even more of my equipment at night as a result. However, I must say that I'd draw the line at my PC powering off relatively frequently during the day, not for any time wasting or ecological reasons, just simply because surely this must wear it out more quickly? I've noticed a couple of brief mentions in the magazine that PCs and monitors these days are happier switching on and off than they were, is this demonstrably true or does it just suit your argument? It has frequently been my experience that it's at the point of powering up computer equipment when things go wrong. I'm no scientist, but surely the change from hot to cold to hot etc must put a strain on electronic equipment? Do modern TFT monitors mind going on and off frequently? Do PC processors suffer wear from the huge temperature changes as they power up and down? I would be a total convert to the whole switch-it-off debate if you could persuade me there was no damage being done. Any chance of such a test appearing in the magazine?"

They were very nice to publish the letter (well, an extract from it, actually), however I was somewhat dismissed as being someone who was harking back to the days of mechanical devices, and everything was okay now.

The following month, a like-minded soul had his letter published as a follow-up to mine, again questioning this assumption that things are okay these days.

I just don't think they are, and I again emailed them, thus:
"You mentioned my worry being a hangover from the mechanical world... well let me give you another similar analogy. With aircraft, though total flying hours is used to determine if a plane is worn out, what they really worry about is the number of landings. That big thump does more damage than cruising along for hours. Is it maybe not the same with switching electronic gear on and off?
Now then... "News" in issue 151... "But it does save £50 per year on power" when referring to Vista's default power settings... it won't save anyone 50 quid if in fact it shortens the life of the equipment... in fact it will cost a packet in terms of hours lost and hardware replacement. I would really like to see an electronics brainiac's response to this... like your article on what kills hard disks... surely the manufacturers do research of this nature... someone must know for each component what the actual damage (or not) of powering on and off does to each component?"

It would be good to get a definitive answer on this, as a recent tv programme highlighted just what a large carbon footprint making a PC causes. If we end up breaking them by attempting to save a little power, that can't be right can it?

A chronological list of the computers I've worked with:

	IBM 370/135 (1975) A huge great thing taking up a large air-conditioned room, protected by an air-lock and copious tac-mats. Made a hell of a racket, but had flashing lights and everything. A proper computer, not the mamby-pamby stuff we have now. Main memory was 240k. Yes. The huge disk drives with removable multi-disk platters that weighed a ton held about 30Mb each. The console was not a screen, it was a teletype thing, producing reams of paper with gibberish on it. Programs were loaded from Hollerith punch cards, see here. more info on the IBM 370 here.
	NCR 8500 Criterion (1981) I can't recall any of the spec of this thing, neither was there a lady in white included with the one I worked on. At the time I was totally into the thing, I was a systems programmer, tuning the beast and writing apps too. It had less flashing lights than the IBM, but it did at least have a screen for a console. The disk drives were large heavy things that spun very fast. To change a volume you pressed a button and waited for it to slow down and stop, then open the lid, screw on a big plastic lid thing and wrench it off. Once, I opened it up and put on the lid, only to find it was still spinning at full speed... I was lucky not to break an arm or worse. The engineer told me this was impossible, due to an 'interlock' that stopped the lid opening while the drive was spinning. I've never trusted 'impossibilities' since!
	Commodore Vic 20 (1981) My then boss bought one of these for games, but asked me to write an accounting system for him, so he could claim it as a business expense. It survived a serious car accident and eventually I did program a simple accounts app for him, which I seriously doubt he ever really used.
	Sinclair ZX81 (1983) I bought mine from a mate for 15 quid, with the 16k ram pack as seen here... which was a total pain... any movement and the thing would crash the machine. I did once type in a huge program only to be unable to save it to cassette. The flickering caused by typing (it couldn't take input and do output at the same time!) was horrible. Eventually I swapped it for a flash gun for my camera, a good deal!
	NCR Decision Mate V (1985) A lovely bit of kit, I wish I had one now. Built like a tank. I wrote a game of Breakout on it in Basic. See my other blog entry on this here.
	Apricot Xi (1986) I used this as portable machine, the keyboard clipped to the back of the main unit, which had an extendable carry handle. The screen was quite light and easy to lug around too. It had a small hard disk, and a neat feature, the keyboard had a little LCD display above some keys, so you could program your own functions for them. Small, but perfectly formed, I used it to telework, writing Accounting software in UCSD Pascal.
	Amiga 1500 (1991) I won one of these in a competition in the magazine "Air Forces Monthly". It was worth around a grand at that time. It was just an ordinary Amiga 500 in a PC sized case, its only advantage being that it was expandable, not that I ever did add to it. I amassed a huge amount of software for this thing, games and serious stuff. It was fun to program, using a Basic like language called, um, Amos I think. Hard disks and their controllers were pricey back then, so I never did go beyond running everything on two floppies. The drives were maddening, slow and they used to click annoyingly when empty, trying to detect if a disk had been inserted, bonkers. I still have it, it just about works, though it's packed away in the loft these days. Not that I'm a huge gamer, but the Amiga did run my favourite game of all time, F/A-18 Interceptor. Looks awful now, but at the time this was the most fun I'd had in clothing.
	Compaq Deskpro 4/33i (1993) At the time I got my hands on this, it seemed like the dog's whatsits. It had an 'overdrive' chip fitted to it eventually, making it go a tad faster. A simple, compact and sturdy design, it lasted for years, and still works to this day, the last time I tried it anyway.
	Compaq Contura 3/20 (1994) I got my hands on about four broken models of this, and from them built one working machine. They had variously been dropped, run over (!), and caught fire. But there were just enough components to make one fully working laptop. Though the battery has long since dies, this mongrel still works. It runs DOS and Windows 3.1 quite happily, and it's tiny hard disk has 'Stacker' running on it to double (maybe) the space. Now hard disks are so cheap and so huge it's funny to think such software was once de rigeur.
	Various dull PCs, Reseda, Pionex, Premier. Bring on the clones. Many anonymous (for which read 'cheap') IBM PC clones followed, with ever increasing speed and memory as various Windows versions attempted to eat the hardware advances. It's all a con, isn't it? The better the kit gets, the more resources the O/S requires, just in case you thought you could sit back and enjoy a PC for a few years. Not a hope, see my blog entry on Vista here, and read 'The Subliminal Man' by JG Ballard.
	Compaq Presario SR1539UK (2005) And here we are with my current PC. As of now, March 2007, it's just over a year old and as usual that initial rapture of a new super fast machine with acres of disk space has faded... I guess I need to weed out the rubbish and re-install XP to get back the performance, but what a performance to do so, can I be bothered? Bought for 800 quid from PC World, I see now that better spec'd versions these days are a lot less, but it has been ever thus. It has an AMD Athlon 64 processor, but such is my addled state and to be honest boredom with the hardware side of IT, this means little to me. It works, it's quiet, it does the job. If you'd shown it to me when I was working on and IBM 370/135, I would never have believed such a device was possible, let alone that I'd own one. (awwooooga, awooooga, 'old man' alert... enough already.
	Fujitsu Siemens Pi2515 (2008) I treated myself to a laptop. Well... I'd finally got wireless internet sorted out, and I thought, why not... they're cheap now. And it was... just 400 quid from Dabs. It's got a whopping 250gig hard disk, 2gig of RAM, and the nicest screen you could ask for. Naturally Vista renders it as slow as can be, though not unacceptably so. I suppose. I'm trying hard not to load it up with all the usual rubbish that eventually causes Windows to grind to a halt, so far so good. Hate the touchpad thing, but then hate them on every laptop. Battery life is 2 hours, which seems par for the course, but never, of course, quite long enough.

The first Personal Computer I ever had the chance to use was a bit odd. I expect the vast majority of folk from that era, the late 70s, were exposed to the IBM PC. But I worked at a company who, quite unusually, had all NCR computer kit. And so when the first personal computers came along it was natural that we should get the NCR version of this new and exciting toy. (Back then NCR were quite big, I guess a lot of you would only know them for cash tills. IBM were the BIG cheeses of those times.)

Here it is. 8-bit. Black and White. CP/M operating system. Huge great floppy disk drive, which held next to nothing on them. No graphics, just text. I loved it. It weighed about half a ton, being very solidly made of metal. It was a neat and tidy design. Things were (cliche alert) simpler back then. The truly great bit of design was the way you extended the machine. Unlike PCs then (we called 'em "Micros", actually), and now come that, you didn't need to take the case off to add expansion cards. Oh no, nothing as crude as we are now used to.

No. Around the back of the machine were slots. Expansion cards were metal boxes, maybe the size of the fingers of your hand, which slid into the slots and engaged with the socket deep in the machine. Simple and effective. You could add memory, network adapters, all the usual stuff. How the system we have now won out I don't understand. Oh, yeah I do... these cartridges must have cost a fortune!

Does anyone have a working version of this beauty? I hope so, somewhere. Let me know, please.

And there was not a huge amount of software available. Especially games. But I was addicted to a text based platform game. Across the screen were various levels with ladders between, made up of ___ and H and | symbols. You were an O (I think) and using the cursor keys you climbed an jumped to the top of the screen. Simple, addictive. Anyone know what this game was called, and can I get a copy anywhere?

ahhhh... I'm so happy... recalling this game made me go and look on t'Internet, and eventually I found what I was looking for... the game was called Ladders, and some fine chap has ported it into Java, so experience my first PC gaming experience here.

So Microsoft have released Vista. Is it me, has it been greeted with a certain amount of apathy? I mean, who's really bothered? XP kinda works. In fact Windows 98 kind-of worked.

I think it all went wrong for me when we lost the DOS prompt. I know, I know, old man talking... but the thing was, it was more fun back in those days. It's too easy now, in a sort of hard way. Using DOS, you knew you were up against it... when you got something to work it was an achievement. Nowadays, you get something to work under Windows and you think, well I should bloomin' well hope so. Not the same.

And, I suppose, really, deep down inside, the problem is, Muggles can use Windows. I liked it when my knowledge of strange commands set me apart from my fellow man. "Run 'chkdsk'" I'd say and people would be in awe and want to know what this magic meant. Ah the good old days.

More to the point people would pay you handsomely to know all that rubbish. Being a computer programmer may have been nerdy and sad, but it was well paid nerdy and sad. Once I'd morphed into a 'Software Engineer', strangely things changed.

Anyone for a return to MS-DOS then? Think how fast it would run. Come on, you know you want to...