KILLING UPDATE FOR THE DYING DESKTOP PERSONAL COMPUTER
/This is an opportunity to give you a little delayed warning about a Microsoft update. Sadly, if you are a corporate Kasperky antivirus user, or if you have lagged behind in updating your Kaspersky protection to the latest version, you may have already found out about this update the hard way.
Short version of the linked article: Everyone should remove Microsoft update 2823324, which was distributed in the latest "update tuesday" round of Windows operating system updates. It has the possibility of causing your system to become un-bootable. If you don't know what "un-bootable" means, it means that you will lose the use of your computer entirely until the problem is resolved.
Happily, if your System Restore capability is enabled in Windows 7, which it is by default, you should be able to get your system back up and running, but it may take some finagling with bootable operating system media. If your head is swimming and you are feeling nauseous, please contact your trusted computer service provider. They will take care of you pretty easily.
So, what about the dying desktop personal computer? Reports published in the Wall Street Journal indicate that personal computer sales fell more than 13% since last year, and last year was not a particularly good year for those sales. WSJ used the term "free fall".
Ever since Apple released the iPad in 2010, this day was inevitable. The iPad product has been a smash hit, and this year, the entire computer industry is finally offering competing products that are not first time experiments in mimicry. We all have only so much appetite for electronics, and inevitably, many of us have decided that we can do fine with our desktop computer at work, and only use a smartphone and/or a tablet computer at home.
For years I have thought that the requirement to lay out $1,000 or more for a system that we really don't want in our homes was not sensible. The conventional personal computer was designed for "desktop productivity", not for casual communication and entertainment, which is what most of us do on our home devices. $300 to $800 seems like a much more reasonable proposition for most of us.
In conclusion, the drop in sales is simply the other shoe of the explosion of sales in smartphones and tablets. We are finally getting what we want, and that is not such bad news at all, if we all feel better about our lives as a result.