For a long time, Jerry Pournelle has been one of my favorite writers. Pournelle has graced the pages of Byte for as long as I can remember, outlasting the printed version of the venerable computer mag, which can now be found only online.

In his column this week, Pournelle comments about the war, makes a prediction I don't think will pan out, and goes on at length about Windows XP.

I don't know if this is the proper forum for computer/technical issues, but Pournelle's column has intensified the dilemma with which I currently grapple - to upgrade or not?

In addition to an ol' reliable Win 95 166, I run ME on two machines - preinstalled on both, but a 6-month-old Maxtor 20 GB hard drive failed in my 'new' Dell 866, and I reinstalled the OS on that box, which has 384 MB of RAM and is my main machine, the other ME system being my laptop.

My quandry is this: ME is unreliable on the 866 and I'd like to upgrade, but don't relish the hassles described by Pournelle and echoed by others about XP upgrades. I have a ton of applications and don't want to spend a lot of time troubleshooting each and every one, verifying that everything works properly and so on.

If I apply the old chicken noodle soup for PC expedient, then Atares, my 866, is OK. That means saving early and often, closing background applications, and rebooting at the first sign of flakiness.

Oh, the other thing is that the 866 is not online.

Any recommendations, observations or random thoughts related to my issues? Please save Linux/Mac/Win 2000 recommendations for another time.

Thanx
sp