Zen And The Green Art Of PC Maintenance

In an earlier column, I publicly named and shamed myself for my rampant addiction to shiny new kit.

This guilt over tech consumerism had been boiling under for a while but the iPhone 4 launch proved to be the gadget which gave the camel a nasty case of lumbago. No more being sucked in by the Jobs distortion field I told myself. From now on new tech will only be purchased to replace devices that have gone to the great tech museum in the sky.

Given all the furore around the iPhone’s antenna issues, the decision to out myself turned out to be a pretty good one. Being an early adopter is always a risky strategy given the penchant of Apple and others to beta test their new kit on the live market.

So I am feeling rather smug and sustainable at the moment knowing I dodged the antenna bullet, saved some cash and avoided consigning another bit of kit to the waste-stream (albeit with a short stop-over in my bottom drawer).

Dodging The iPhone 4 Bullet

But there is a but. Even knowing all about the antenna issues and Apple’s potentially duplicitous behaviour is shipping the iPhone 4 with a fault in the first place – I still want one. The desire for shiny new – precious – things is hard-wired I suppose, and eventually I will succumb. But I am adamant that won’t be till my existing iPhone 3GS is beyond repair. So in a strategy which I guess is tech addiction’s equivalent of a nicotine patch, I bought myself a shiny new case for the old model and also downloaded Apple’ latest iPhone OS update. Hey presto – a new iPhone or something very close to it. The outside looks different and so does the software.

This tactic of modification rather than upgrading could be seen as the IT equivalent of the car body-kits and silly transfers that teenage boy-racers are so keen on. Slapping a new spoiler on your Nissan Micra is not as satisfying as owning a new Golf GTi but it helps to satiate the upgrade demons.  Moreover, improving or modifying existing kit might sound like a pointless diversion but it is actually closely allied to a more fundamental approach to electronics, domestic appliances, and even cars – repairing and reusing them for as long as possible.

The current generation’s penchant for disposal rather than repair is easy to write-off as the rumblings of the baby-boom generation, but they have a point. Confronted with a broken device and the prospect of dealing with an IT help-desk, the pain-free option is to junk it and consume the new model. During the boom times, the “replace rather than repair” option was a no-brainer for many but with the credit harder to come by than an apology from Steve Jobs, fixing the device you have reverts to the sensible option it always was.

The push to fix more tech – for businesses as well as consumers – has come to the fore recently following a move (albeit a self-serving one) to have VAT on IT repairs abolished. Tech repair specialist Comtek recently launched the campaign which it claims would make repairs cheaper and reduce the amount of e-waste companies produce as they would be able to repair kit rather than junking it.

Comtek’s chief executive Askar Sheibani claims that the government’s recent tech initiatives have been too focused on energy efficiency and new clean technologies (and on the other side, the government has actually disbanded the body charged with promoting recycling of electronics). Repairing old kit is not going to win over many new voters or grab that many headlines but it would help to reduce the amount of raw materials churned through by the tech industry. One chip takes more energy to make than all the energy used by a laptop for three years, is one example he cites.

Energy efficiency is always going to be a big winner with industry as it is a perfect excuse for upgrading – witness the recent car scrappage scheme for example. Junk you’re old polluting junker and get an energy efficient new model. However, reports emerged that car makers were actually using the scheme to off-load models that weren’t much more energy efficient than the junkers they were replacing in some examples.

Obviously the concept of repair over consumption is a worrying one for the tech industry and there has been a lot of time and lobbying effort to discredit it. That said, there have been improvements in software and hardware that potentially make newer devices more energy efficient but whether these off-set the environmental damage and carbon produced from mining, processing the materials used to make the new device is very hard to quantify (Check out the comments here).

Sweating Assets

Ultimately, the decision to repair or upgrade boils down to a philosophical choice. You could embrace the true sustainable tech route by only using mainly open-source based systems, running on older kit which has serviced its carbon debt. This DIY approach puts the user back-in control but – and it’s a big one – requires an awful lot of knowledge and time for tinkering. The other option – and one that has proved popular through the boom years – is to effectively outsource the problem, and your control, to the device makers. Everything is shiny and productive, until you run into a problem – then you find out who is in charge.

The best way to sum this up is with a few lines from Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (substitute motorcycles for computers where appropriate).

“I could preach the practical value and worth of motorcycle maintenance till I’m hoarse and it would make not a dent… either one of them could learn to tune a motorcycle in an hour and a half if they put their minds and energy to it, and the saving in money and worry and delay would repay them over and over again for their effort. And they know that. Or maybe they don’t. I don’t know. I never confront them with the question. It’s better to just get along.”