Desktop software: not green, not lean and mighty unclean

Stan Beer
Monday, 09 June 2008 13:17

Opinion and Analysis

Within days, I discovered to my amazement that I had simplified my computing life by an order of magnitude.

All my business and personal emails were being forwarded to my Gmail account and they were instantly there - no downloading. OK the interface isn't as good as Outlook and it's not as easy to search but it works and it doesn't keep me waiting.

Google Calendar is also very functional. Just as good for me as its Outlook equivalent.

The Google Docs word processor is nowhere near as powerful or feature rich as MS Office (or OpenOffice.org) but it's good enough for me - and I use a word processor all day nearly every day. As far as tracking changes are concerned, it keeps a complete revision list of all versions of a document - great for collaboration.

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is not about how good or otherwise the Google service apps are. The point is that since I've been using and storing my data in them, I've become machine and operating system independent. And because of that, I no longer need my big mother of a number cruncher.

In fact my number cruncher had a hardware failure two weeks ago and I haven't even bothered to get it fixed. When the big box failed, I just turned on my laptop logged into Gmail and continued working.

The curious thing is that working on my much less powerful laptop, I haven't noticed any degradation in system performance. The only desktop applications I run are Firefox and Skype, although I do have a copy of Office 2007.

Now I plan to use my laptop as my main computer and buy a small cheap sub-notebook (a netbook) with some sort of cut-down Linux like Ubuntu Remix for travelling.

Now what should I do with my big number cruncher? I don't play PC games so I suppose I could get it fixed and sell it at a computer swap meet. I could use it as a test machine. However, with all the power that this thing chews up perhaps the environmentally responsible thing to do would be to have it recycled for parts.