So are you going to upgrade? "Upgrade what", you ask. "Upgrade anything", I say. Question of the hour is, why would I want to upgrade anything? It's really funny to listen to people clamor about the "wonders of Windows 2000". Doesn't seem like any of these people have heard about the 65000+ DOCUMENTED bugs in it. And the real show stopper is the wonders of its "rock solid stability". Admittedly the Windows NT line IS more stable, but you know what? Windows 95 is stable too!... at first. Yeah, when it's brand spanking new, and everything goes right, Win95 is actually really stable... then you start installing programs... dll's start conflicting, programs mess with the registry, and whamo you get pop up fun with illegal operations every 5 minutes. Not only that but the system requirements.... heh, you better have a fast computer with lots of RAM.
Now Windows isn't the only thing that falls prey to this sort of ludicrous circus of upgrading. Its pretty much the trend now days for a corporation to bloat their programs... microsoft especially. Ask a person why they upgraded from Word 98 to Word 2000, or from ICQ 99 to ICQ2000, or lots of other programs... actually MAKE the person LIST 25 features that make it better. You know what you'll find? First you'll find that the people probably didn't even know half the features that were on the old program. And that would obviously imply that they don't use them. Second, people upgrade on the ASSUMPTION that a new version is somehow magically better. If your already satisfied with a program, why would you trade it in for an upgrade which is almost guaranteed to take up more space, and system resources while running slower? If your not satisfied with the program now, why would you get an upgrade at all? Why not try a different program that might be better. The answer is, people just don't know... they fall prey to the "I need to have the newest thing out there" mentality.
And then there is poor, poor ICQ... a wonderful little program that somehow spiraled out of control. Now your probably thinking that I'm going to talk about how much better ICQ99 is compaired to ICQ2000... ya know what? ICQ99 SUCKS TOO. Not only did it take up a lot of resources, but it dumped so much crap in my registry that my computer ran slower even when the computer wasn't running the program. Then there are the wonderful features such as postit notes and other useless addons. Listening to a typewriter sound everytime I hit a key, who in the hell came up with this "feature"? No, after a week I was blessed to come across an install for ICQ98, and I dumped 99 in a heartbeat. I adore '98... it's small, it does what I want it to, easy to use, fairly simple to configure, doesn't take up screen space, or much hard drive space. And it hardly takes any rescources to run it (well compaired to most programs). It does tend to occasionally crash within 1 second of starting the program, but if it doesn't crash in that one second, it simply won't crash period (on my computer). Now tell me again why I want to upgrade and how my life will never be complete until I do?
 | ICQ98 --> ICQ2000 |  |
And if your wondering, no I didn't even bother installing ICQ2000... I noticed on CNET that ICQ hit 100 million downloads. Out of curiosity I looked at the reviews. Generally about 70% of the people said it had too many useless features, and was way too bloated. Even the people that liked it said it was bloated... and that tells you something. One comment: "if you have more than 65 megs of RAM you hardly notice the program is running..." 65 Megs??? Just 65 Megs? I remember about a year and a half ago when people gawked in amazement when I said I had 48, now I can hardly chat online without 65? If it takes that much memory, this program better tell me the answer to life, the universe, and everything. That, and the program installer alone is 6.3 megs. Did they accidently hide an operating system in there or something? When they say bloat-ware, they aren't kidding.
Yet out of morbid curiosity, I decided to go to ICQ's site [icq.com] to see if I could take a gander at a screen cap. Did I mention that ICQ's site is BUTT UGLY. I mean I'd rather stare at a gorilla's ass crack for hours on end, as opposed to looking at this site for 2 minutes. And if that isn't enough to turn you off... you can actually see the ICQ interface. What delusional hippy on crack came up with that "flower-child meets Windows 3.1" interface? Upgrade? no thanks... I'll stick with what I'm using, provided that the sight of ICQ2001 doesn't make me clinically ill and drive me into using M$DOS.