Pulling the Plug on an Old Friend

I said goodbye to an old friend the other day. My friend was the silent type...Quiet, never saying anything bad to me, never complaining, never causing a problem, but always at my beck and call when I needed something done. My old friend sat quietly in a corner of my office for three years, waiting to help me.

Then, when I closed my office, my friend came home with me and sat in another corner of my basement office for four more years...always there, always quiet, but ready to take care of my every need. And, never once, did my friend cause me any problems. Twice a year, I had to change my friend's clock for daylight saving. But that was about all the attention it got, other than an occasional cleaning of his vital parts.

No, my friend didn't die a natural death. My friend was disconnected from life support by me and sent to a dark place in a storage shed, probably never to be revived again.

You see, my friend wasn't a human being. My friend was a machine. To be more specific my friend was a Novell file server that I used to store my data.

When I turned it off for the last time, it wasn't because of any internal problem. Quite the contrary. My old friend was still working just fine. In fact, it sent me one last message on my Windows 2000 workstation...notifying me that it was logging off. You will never know how bad I felt at that moment, knowing that it would probably never talk to me again. I felt like such a traitor, pulling the plug on a friend's life.

The reason I turned it off was because my wife and I had acquired two new computers with Microsoft's Windows XP Home Edition. Little did I know when we got these two computers (one a laptop), that it would not support a Novell Netware connection. You see, with Windows 98 and Windows 2000, the Novell connection was part of the Windows operating system.

But, in order to connect with the Novell Server with Windows XP, I would have to upgrade to the deluxe version of XP...for about $100 additional per computer. Once again, I felt cheated by the giant conglomerate known as Microsoft. It is yet another example of their tactics to quietly drive their competition out of business and force people like me down the path they choose.

Like you, Windows has driven me crazy for years with it's many documented problems and multiple crashes, while my Novell server sat quietly in the corner performing its job perfectly. Yes, Windows works pretty well most of the time, but not as well as my old friend. Yet, it was the perfect performer that was turned off, not the Windows computers.

Lack of choice was the real cause of death here. I didn't have a choice because Microsoft opted to charge me $200 to make my Novell computer useful. And I chose not to pay them their blackmail fee.

I am not smart enough to change over everything I own to use Linux, nor am I rich enough to switch to MacIntosh. I am trapped in the choice I made many years ago to let Microsoft DOS and Windows be my operating systems. Had I only known...

I am reminded of the line spoken by the composer Salieri at the end of the movie Amadeus:

"Mediocrity is King...Medicocrity is King."