A few years ago when I worked as a management consultant with KPMG in London, I mixed with a lot of IT experts (well, someone has to do it!) and there was an enormous amount of positive PR from the KPMG gang about the benefits of IT, what it could do and what it could help with.  Very impressive.

And then there were people like one of the “renegade” IT experts at the firm.  He would come along to meetings or social gatherings and relish in the joy of putting the opposite point of view.  I recall one of his favorite escapades was to quote from some high-powered survey carried out by one or another seat of learning that had tried to value the combined benefit to society and then compare it with the cost.  They covered a long time frame to iron out peaks and troughs of IT development and costs - a forty or fifty year period, I think.  And the conclusion?

There was no net benefit!

Now I’m an accountant by profession so I know you can prove almost anything with statistics.  And I believe that the survey had a high level of contribution from economists, so draw your own conclusion about the results.  But I always remember this guy’s contrarian point of view when I have the sort of problem with my home office computer gear that I experienced this month.

I’ve become reasonably self-sufficient on the PC front over the years.  I’ve had more than one computer virus and had to recover from a crashed hard drive or two (survived only because I have a poor but at least a somewhat effective backup system, for anyone in doubt).  And I try to keep up to date by reading through the hints and tips you can find at places such as this cool stuff website.  But the latest problem drove me nuts.

I have a network with two desk top computers and one laptop connecting to the cable modem via a router (a Linksys, for what it’s worth.  Made by Cisco?).  The laptop is a wired connection and the desktops are hard-wired to the router.  All of a sudden a few weeks ago, connection to the Internet would slow down and eventually stop.  It was almost random - not all machines at once, not all sites at once, but selectively sites became slower and eventually refuse to load at all.

So cnn.com, for example, would gradually slow down each time you returned to it and then finally not load at all (some cynics might regards that as a good feature to be enjoyed, in the case of cnn.com, but let’s leave that alone for now).  Other sites would load ok before, during and after this period.  If nothing was done, more and more sites would be added to the “won’t load” list until it became impossible in practice to use the Internet.  By a process of elimination I found that the only way to remedy the problem was to disconnect the router power supply and then reconnect it after a few sessions.

I tried everything to cure the problem.  Eventually I found an online forum where this phenomenon had been experienced by many sufferers.  Some cures worked (for example, update the firmware; clear the cache) but no one solution worked all the time for everyone.  I tried all the “cures” but it made no difference.  At last I gave in, bought a replacement (not a Linksys this time!) and sanity is restored.

But I’m left yet again with the memory of my former colleague and his contrarian views.  The time and effort involved in dealing with the problem in the first place, trying to fix it and then spending some hard earned cash as the only alternative - does it make the benefits of having the darned things in the first place really worth it?  I think on balance it does, but when you’re in the middle of trying to cure a really stupid problem, you do wonder!