"So about a year ago, the SO finally upgraded her Net connection to DSL, carefully installed the Yahoo! DSL software into her creaky Sony Vaio PC laptop and ran through all the checks and install verifications and appropriate nasty disclaimers.

"And all seemed to go smoothly and reasonably enough considering it was a Windows PC and therefore nothing was really all that smooth or reasonable or elegant, but whatever. She just wanted to get online.......

"She got online all right. The DSL worked great. For about four minutes.

"Then,.... something swarmed her computer the instant she tried to move around online and the computer slowed and bogged and cluttered and crashed, and multiple restarts and debuggings and what-the-hells only brought up only a flood of nightmarish pop-up windows and terrifying error messages and massive system slowdowns and all manner of inexplicable claims of infestation of this worm and that Trojan horse and did we want to buy McAfee AntiVirus protection for $39.95?

"Four minutes. And she was already DOA.....

".....This exact same scenario, with only slight variation, is happening throughout the nation, right now...... The McAfee site claims a whopping 91 percent of PCs are infected... [by] a stunningly vicious array of malware and worms and viruses, all aimed at exploiting one of about ten thousand security flaws and holes in Microsoft Windows.

"Here, then, is my big obvious question: Why the hell do people put up with this? Why is there not some massive revolt, some huge insurrection against Microsoft?...

"There is nothing else like this phenomenon in the entire consumer culture. If anything else performed as horribly as Windows, and on such a global scale, consumers would scream bloody murder and demand their money back and there would be some sort of investigation, class-action litigation, a demand for Bill Gates' cute little geeky head on a platter.....

"And with very few exceptions, every Mac owner everywhere on the planet simply looks at all this viral chaos and spyware noise and Microsoft apologia and shrugs. And smiles. And pretty much ignores it all outright, and gets back to work......

"I'm a power user. And I have yet to suffer a single debilitating virus or worm or spyware or malware whatsoever. Not one problem in 15 years, save the time I spilled water in the keyboard of my PowerBook and I took off the back and let it dry out for two days and it worked perfectly.....

"....Surely thousands (millions?) of work-hours have been lost nationwide as tech departments spend untold months debugging and installing PC virus protections and keeping abreast of the latest and greatest worm to come down the pike, all due to Microsoft's lousy software.....

"And what about my SO's PC woes?..... [she] bought herself a beautiful new iBook.

"And of course, in a year of solid use, she has yet to have a single problem.

"Oh wait. I take that back. She has had one nagging issue with her Mac. One program keeps crashing in the middle of her work, for no apparent reason. It is baffling and frustrating and makes you shake your head and want to scream.

"The program in question? Microsoft Word."

"Napster Inc. on Wednesday unveiled a portable version of its music subscription service, backed by a $30 million ad campaign that takes aim at rival Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPod player.

"Napster's promotion includes a Super Bowl television spot urging fans to compare the costs of spending $10,000 to buy and transfer 10,000 songs from Apple's iTunes store to an iPod, with the $15-per-month fee to carry songs from a catalog of over a million tracks on Napster-compatible players."

"When those strange and unfamiliar electronic tones emitted from my PowerBook, I knew it was going to be an expensive day.

"I've lugged this PowerBook G4 from Apple Computer for the better part of four years. I've replaced its hard drive once and its battery once. Only once has it given me any significant trouble, and that was when, during a trip to San Francisco, the hard drive decided go on an intermittent strike, working only some of the time.....

"A long visit with a friendly technician at the Apple Store.... was frustrating--through no fault of his--but mostly because after I carefully described the problem, the machine exhibited none of the symptoms.....

"Since time was short and I had no confidence in this machine, I opted instead to plunk down the cash for a new PowerBook. I opted for the 15-inch model with the 1.67-gigahertz processor, an 80-gigabyte hard drive and a SuperDrive that can burn both CDs and DVDs......

"I fell in love with this new machine right away.... but the episode has me thinking about the entire economic experience of laptop ownership, repair and so on. I don't know what the typical lifespan is for a laptop computer, but I'm betting it's not long.....

"Today's laptop designers are being lauded for their design expertise and for their ability to cram all sorts of features into ever-thinner and lighter bodies. But why aren't hard drives as easy to replace in a laptop as the battery in a mobile phone? Why should I have to pay a professional to do the work to replace it, and in some cases lose the use of the machine for a few days in order to get it done?"

"There was a time, not too long ago, when "laptop" would have been a comical way to describe a portable PC. The first lug-it-with-you personal computer was the 25-pound Osborne 1 in 1981 (the company went bankrupt in 1983).

"Laptops have not only gotten smaller since then, they have gotten far more powerful and diverse. Now you can get a foldable computer with processing power and a screen big enough to rival even the most sophisticated desktop machines, or, conversely, you can get a super small, but fully-functional machine that weighs less than a Sunday newspaper.

"Here is a rundown of some of the best machines from every subgenre of the laptop world. "

"Qualcomm has pushed out an update for its Eudora e-mail client to fix multiple security flaws that put users at risk of computer hijacking.

The San Diego-based Qualcomm Inc., which offers a free version of the client alongside premium versions, said the new Eudora 6.2.1 corrects several vulnerabilities reported by research firm NGSS (Next Generation Security Software Ltd.)"

"Two U.S. Representatives have resuscitated a bill to enact a national recycling program for electronic waste, following the successful launch of two state-run programs.

The bill, co-authored by Reps. Mike Thompson (D-Calif.) and Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) last week, would create the National Computer Recycling Act. The act, if approved by Congress and signed into law, would tack on a $10 administrative fee to the sale price of computers and monitors to fund recycling efforts."

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