I liked this post so much that I'm reproducing it here. My friend the God of Positronic Law Practice Management thinks the way I do about computers (only more deeply).
"Want to play with your computer? All the latest & greatest hardware & software? Why not? I would rather putter in my garden myself, but diff'rnt strokes for diff'rnt folks. Just do all this on your PLAY computer.
Do your work on your WORK computer.
KISS -- Keep It Simple, Saluki. Avoid the bells & whistles, the latest & greatest, all the cool stuff that tells your fellow geeks: I am a cool guy. I overclock my CPU, I use multiple boots so I can run different flavors of Linux, I download all the latest patches & fixes whether I need them or not . . . and I spend hours every week on the phone waiting for technical support to pick up.
Regard your work system as what it is: a tool to make money. Nothing more, nothing less.
Stay a couple years behind the times with your software. Go with the Goliaths in their product lines, not the Davids. Regard Microsoft as the Borg (resistance is futile), 'cause they are.
Attach only the peripherals that you actually need. Load only the software you actually need.
Spend your time as a lawyer, not as an unpaid IT guy.
America OnLine automatically zips my files when I attach two or more of them, and then just as seamlessly unzips them for me when I download them. AOL makes everything just as easy, including tinkering with the free website I get with my membership, which brings in such an already high & increasing share of my revenues that I'm phasing out yellow pages ads.
In short: use only what you need, choose mature & stable technologies, stay in the middle of the road, avoid situations which typically cause conflicts & incompatibilities. One of my friends calls me "the king of the one-finger drivers," 'cause I likes to Cadillac down funky broadway with the radio on & a cool breeze in my hair. Feel the alpha wave cosmic flux & go with it.
To an amazing extent, Windows, AOL, Quicken, MS Word, & FamilySoft do it all for me. The only product area where I've gone deep is security. I also have a few 3rd party utilities & applets, such as my clipboard extender that I use all the time, and I also like Firefox. I'm using Norton's virusware until my free update subscription runs out, then I'm switching to McAfee, which is free with AOL & signature updates are totally under-the-hood.
I always go very deep on RAM & hard-drive space, & hit the market sweet-spot for CPU, & I treat myself to a nice monitor, 'cause that's a quality of life issue. And I'm totally OK with replacing my 'puters every time Windows gets a major upgrade.
Example of the Positronic Way of Geekery in action; I bought [my son] a state-of-the-art gamer from Gateway; the tech who set it up practically came in his pants. After a decent interval, [my son] managed to goof it up so badly it wouldn't boot.
Could I have fixed it? Sure. But wouldn't it be cheaper to work & earn income than to spend who-knows-how-many hours fixing it? Yup. So that's what I did, but he got only an OK Dell this time. He's happy, I'm happy, Dell's happy."
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