"But Charlie, aren't computers fun?," you ask. Well, no, they're not.

If you've been reading my editorials on this Web site, you may have gotten the impression that I'm not too fond of Macs. Well, you're right. But that's not the whole story. I'm not too fond of PCs, either. Or of Linux boxes, UNIX workstations or IRIX boxes, or any computers, for that matter. "But Charlie, aren't computers fun?," you ask. Well, no, they're not. Maybe they're fun for pencil-neck geeks who don't have anything better to do than tinker with video cards, software glitches, reinstalling operating systems and updating software with even more problem-plagued patches. But for us video editors, computer problems are like a deep freeze. All is stopped at the molecular level until that pesky computer problem is solved. No computer equals no show. No show equals no money. It's that simple.

From what I can gather, most of you are video editors, producers, creative types and TV directors like me. You probably know your way around your computer; you can usually fix problems that arise, but get stumped when the whole system goes belly up. The lucky ones among us can throw up our hands and cry out to the nearest Information Services (IS) employee. The rest of us either grimly set forth to fix it ourselves or call tech support in hopes of a quick fix. So there we sit, waiting on hold, forced to listen to hoary old Barry Manilow songs while the meter is running in two places: one, we're not getting any work done, and two, the call itself is often charged by the minute.

There must be a better way.

Enter Windows 2000. "Oh, great," I thought. "This is the answer to all my prayers! A stable operating system that's easy to use. All right!" But no. At first, I was extremely impressed. In fact, I actually went for two whole months, while doing some enormously taxing things with my computer, without rebooting. Not one time did it crash. But then, tragedy struck. I had decided, for some reason, to turn the computer off one night. You know, give it a rest. Bad idea. The next morning, that sucker would not start. Said "operating system not found." So, I called tech support, and all they could recommend after two hours of trying this and trying that was to reinstall the operating system. Oh no! I had to reconfigure everything. It took the rest of the day, and them some.

That's OK, though -- at least I didn't lose any precious data. I learned long ago to back up everything. I was safe. Anyway, I would soon send that evaluation computer back to the manufacturer. Not long thereafter, another PC box came into our Midwest Test Facility, ripe for some serious testing. All went well for about a month. But then, that complete crash scenario happened again! Reinstall the OS again. Jeez, this is getting ridiculous. Then a couple of weeks later, another Windows 2000 box here at the Facility did the same thing. Not long after that, my dad (quite a computer expert!) had the same problem -- mysterious total crash, had to reinstall everything. All the computers I mention here were running Service Pack 1 and were not subject to any virii or anything else weird enough to cause such mayhem.

Which operating system do I prefer? None. I think there's a special place in hell for all of them.

So what have I learned from this? I've learned that computers and their attending software are crappy. They break. A lot. And don't you Mac fanatics write me nasty notes about how I shoulda/coulda used a Mac and these problems never would have happened. You know as well as I do that these kind of horrific problems run rampant on all computers, big or small, insanely great or not. I also learned that anybody who doesn't back up his/her data regularly is either playing with fire or has no data worth saving. It's just a shame that we need to waste so much precious time getting these infernal contraptions to work as advertised. We are editors! We need to edit, not tinker.

Charlie White has been writing about new media and digital video since it was the laughingstock of the television industry. A technology journalist and columnist for the past seven years, White is also an Emmy-winning producer, video editor and shot-calling PBS TV director. Talk back -- Send Chazz a note at cwhite@digitalmedianet.com.