Leaving Well Enough Alone

By Wayne Maruna

You’ve seen the big orange, pink and white billboard many times, I’m sure,  New Bern Runs on Dunkin.  It’s Dunkin’ Donuts’ localization of their national theme, “America Runs on Dunkin’”. 

Nothing against our neighborhood donut shop, but the sign’s message is not literally true, of course.  It’s hyperbole.  It’s marketing exaggeration.  What you and I might otherwise call **, which I probably can’t say here, but I’ll spot you the B and let you figure out the rest.  (And while the slower among you spin through the alphabet looking for that second letter, I’ll tell you that if you get to T, you went too far.)

America might run on gasoline, or on electricity, or on natural gas or coal, but not on Dunkin’.  Now it is true that I kick-start my mornings by grinding some of their very fine coffee beans and brewing my own coffee at home, thereby saving about a buck and a quarter on the retail cost of a cup-a-Joe and its requisite caffeine wake-up call. 

I watched a brief segment on HBO recently where a round-table of tween-agers talked about how part of growing up was learning to recognize the nuances of advertising, recognizing that not everything is as it gets painted, no matter how loudly Billy Mays may be shouting at you from your television.

You need to be equally cynical when viewing ads for computer software, especially at this time of the year when the calendar is getting ready to roll over.  It used to be that model year advertising was the purview of automotive companies.  But software marketers are using it to advantage as well.  I was thumbing through PC World magazine when I saw Symantec’s ad for their Norton Internet Security 2009 product.  It caught my eye because I had recently installed the newest version of my favorite backup software, Acronis True Image, on someone’s machine, and that new version was called Acronis True Image 2009 instead of the previous Version 11.  Software vendors like having the year in their titles.  They’re hoping it will capture your imagination like the newest model cars used to do.  I mean, who wants to be driving around in last year’s software?

But wait a minute.  Do you really need that new program version?  Ask yourself, what does my current software not do that I need to have done?  As for True Image, I have version 11 on one machine, version 10 on a second, and version 8 on a third, and they all work equally well.  These were not upgrades but purchases at different points in time for different machines.  There is no compelling reason to upgrade at this time.  I’m still using Microsoft Office XP, having said ‘no thank you’ to the 2003 and 2007 releases, thereby saving myself hundreds of dollars.  When the time does come to replace my version, I’ll likely go the free route of Open Office, the downloadable free clone of M.S. Office.

My wife and I played the upgrade game for years with our graphics programs.  We have several versions of Print Shop Deluxe and PrintMaster, but we finally called it quits after version 17 (really)!  Each version promised more than the last but seemed to deliver more bugs than anything else.  Apparently the current owner, Broderbund, has also slowed down their upgrade process, as they are holding at version 18 for PrintMaster, though their competing program The Print Shop has gone all the way to version 22.

If you’re a Norton fan, you may in fact want to look into the 2009 version.  For a long time I’ve called Norton a bloated resource hog that was just as likely to cause as many problems as it fixed, but from early reports that I’ve read, Norton got the message and targeted a leaner version of the program and may have actually achieved their goal.  For my part, I’ll stick with the free AVG anti-virus program.  While new signature files are transmitted daily, they only issue new versions of their program when the nature of the anti-malware business demands a new program engine.

            A good rule of thumb for dealing with your computer is the old truism, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.  Trust me, that will save you a lot of needless headaches.  Contemplate that while sipping down your next cup of Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.