I hate Moore's Law!

I hate Moore's Law! That storable information on silicon promises to double every year –or 18 months, it's still a short period of time–causes me no end of disruption to my life. For example, just recently I attempted a modest hard-drive upgrade in my system from 13 to 19 Gbytes–not even the 40-Gbyte minimum that's common today. But that's when Moore's Law got me. The 13-Gbyte model had been annoyingly divided by the manufacturer into 2-Gbyte partitions that cramped my style. I was tired of running out of space in a partition, so a bigger drive with no partitions was inviting. However, I found hard-drive replacement not that straightforward. The first hint came when I accidentally fried some memory when I opened the computer box. Get twice as much, my son suggested, so I got 256 Mbytes. Now, though, the old hard drive wouldn't boot Windows 98. To make matters worse, we couldn't put Windows 98 on the new drive and finally settled for Windows Me. At least we had e-mail, but we also couldn't reload Microsoft Office.

Moore's Law is a grand bother to an average
computer user–or is it? The computer's BIOS recognized that we had two hard drives in the system, but Windows Me refused to see the second one. The operating system acknowledged that we had a network–my son's computer is linked to mine–but we couldn't access anything on it. I was rebooting the system a lot and finally paid attention to the first screen. My computer is powered by a Pentium II processor, and it dawned on me that the Pentium II system is the problem. Pentium is up to 4 now, and somewhere along the way learned how to address more than 2 Gbytes of hard-disk storage. Just saying I want a bigger hard drive–and having one –isn't enough. The unpartitioned 19-Gbyte drive was being treated by the Pentium II computer as if it had a mere 2 Gbytes. The whole point of the bigger drive was more space. Now the whole point will be for me to get a new computer. My demands require it. We folks who work in the electronics industry will also appreciate the business. Looking at my situation from that perspective, I love Moore's Law!

Len Schiefer, Chief Copy Editor