Rowe's and Columns

Every time I install new or upgraded software on my home computers, I can feel my blood pressure rise. I recently upgraded from my Norton Anivirus (NAV) on my home laptop from 2005 to 2008 when my annual maintenance subscription came due. The upgrade cost me many hours of sleep.

The install went fine at first, but afterword, I was unable to get my PDA to communicate with the PC through Microsoft ActiveSync 4.2. I tried uinstalling NAV 2008 and reinstalling NAV 2005. No good. Then, I learned from a friend who is an IT professional about nonav.exe, a utility by Symantec that he claimed would completely eliminate every remnant of Norton Antivirus. Symantec doesn't make it avaialble to the public, just to IT people, but you can find it online anyway.

I found and downloaded nonav, but it in fact left remnants. After running the program, I was greeted with a popup window telling me something about MSI whenever I booted my computer. I was almost ready to reinstall Windows, but decided to try system restore first. I went back to three days before the upgrade. The restore went well and I reinstalled NAV 2005. It worked, but I still was unable to get my PDA to communicate to the PC. And, I was back to where I had only a few days left on my subscription. I tried using the upgrade code from having paid for NAV 2008, but it wouldn't take.

I reinstalled NAV 2008 over NAV 2005. The install again went fine. At least I had my new subscription working. Still no PDA communication, though. I even tried installing ActiveSync on my home desktop PC (witn NAV 2005) and connecting the PDA there. Still no comms. I was convinced that the PDA's I/O connector was broken or I had some other hardware probelm. The next day, I installed ActiveSync on an extra computer in the office (the IT folks gave me administrator privilages as long as I don't use it on the company network). I was able to communicate with the PDA, so I knew that the hardware was working. That evening, I reinstalled ActiveSync 4.2 on my laptop and this time I had communication to the PDA. I have no idea why it failed nor why it workes again, but at least it does.

Episodes like this one make you wonder why you even bother to upgrade a working system. Many of you probably wonder that, too. Now, someone has written a white paper about it. In "Chasing Moore’s Law – The Truth Behind the OS and CPU Upgrades for Industrial PC Users" by Alan Koch, Advantech Corporation, Industrial Automation Group, explains that for many industrial control systems (and I'd add test systems to that), there's no need to upgrade to ne computers or operating systems as frequenly as we do for home and office PCs (my Windows 98 PC ran for nine years and I still keep it as a backup).

Koch writes "Every new OS has many more features than the previous generation, and requires faster CPU performance (increased demand for new hardware) much more disk storage (increased demand for new hardware again) and more memory (even more increased demand for new hardware) than the earlier version required."

When the NAV 2005 subscription expires on my home desktop PC, I'll just renew the subscription without upgrading. It's not worth any risks of upgrading that machine.

Keep those old PCs running as long as you can. Upgrades are always painful.