Total Cost of Ownership

Buying a new computer (or at least thinking about it) has got me musing again about how we really own our machines. They're called personal computers and they really are. But how much of it do you really own? Sure, after you purchase it and making it feel at home, you have a great sense of ownership. It's yours, all yours. The thing is, you can't really make 100% use of it.

OK, Windows takes up a chunk of the hard disk, RAM, and CPU. That's a given. It's the operating system, after all. Although there's a lot of Windows components running you usually don't need that you'll have to disable yourself.

Windows isn't the only thing installed on your new computer. The manufacturer will have loaded it with various kinds of trial software and other offers. If you're not conscious about these, they'll be running or just sitting there on your computer, taking up resources even if you don't need them.

To be a responsible netizen, you need to secure it with a firewall, antivirus, at least a couple of anti-spyware and maybe phishing and spam filtering software. If you do enough research, you'll be able to find free and decent software you can simply download from the great Internet cloud. After installing, these security software will have to run every waking moment of your beloved computer.

So, do you really own 100% of your very own, very personal computer? Even if you wanted to, you'll be hard pressed at best to be able to use 100% of the CPU cycles. Same thing with RAM and disk space. Ok, maybe you can use a barebones Linux build. But then, you can't play Starcraft with it.

When you were shopping for your computer, you might have thought "Hey, this CPU is 5% faster than this one." But have you thought about 5% of your CPU's computing resources being devoted your antivirus software for the rest of your computer's life? I'm just guesstimating that 5% for antivirus thing but you get the idea. Who knows? Maybe it's accurate.

We've all taken to accepting all these as part and parcel of today's computing. The way things are today, with Windows in particular, it's necessary. If only there was a totally secure system, we won't need security software. Makes me think about OS X and Linux. They're getting attractive but there are a lot of situations that require working with Windows. Like that dreaded W word (hint: Work). Besides, even OS X and the Linux distributions are not totally secure either. And since there's no totally secure system, we have to live with personal security software. The consequence is we have lost maybe 10% or 20% of computing resources. Alright, so maybe we own 100% of our PC. Only, we can't make use of 100% of it, even if we wanted to. How's that for ownership?