The article 'Old computers a toxic time bomb' is a testament to the consumer society where capitalism creates and forces upon us.

Back in the 1970s in my Business Studies class at university, the lecturer told us about built-in obsolescence - i.e. how car manufacturers design products to work well for a number of years and then start to give problems, forcing me to eventually buy a new car, refrigerator, TV or anything else for that matter.

Since it was a subsidiary subject, I handed in a blank exam paper to show my contempt for the business world but graduated with a degree in electronic engineering anyway. In any case, the Business Studies lecturer never allowed any dialogue to take place. He spoke and we took notes and that was that.

Especially in the PC industry, products don't have to break down to become obsolete. PC makers are constantly upgrading processors, hard disk, etc while the software developers come out with a more bloated version of applications consuming more of these PCs' resources thus getting back to square one.

In short, PC consumers are kept literally running up a down-escalator or like hampsters- on a treadmill keeping up with their latest and fastest offering while believing that they are acquiring the 'latest' and 'most advanced' technology.

At the same time, the IT media and advertisers help create a culture among PC users that they must have the latest and most powerful PC or feel inadequate in the eyes of their peers if they don't. In short, the PC hardware and software industries and the IT media help create a kiasu mentality amongst PC consumers - much like the fashion industry.

This sense of 'needing' to have the latest and most powerful PC is most prevalent amongst home users, rather than business and corporate users who are more prudent in their purchases and as the article points out, it's the home and small business users who contribute most to discarded PCs, thus contributing to environmental degradation.

For instance, walk into any lawyer's office and you can find them still using a DOS-based word processor on their 486 -based machines- which is all they need to type letters, contacts and affidavits.

The move from the 8088 -based PC to the 80286 based- PC was a genuine technological quantum leap from an 8-bit external bus to a 22-bit bus, while the 80386 processor has a 32-bit bus, but since then, the 80486 and Pentium processors still uses 32-bit buses plus additional features like caches which make them perform faster but they are 32-bit processors nonetheless.

In short, there has been no technological quantum leap in PC processors - apart from performance - for the last 10 years.

An 80386 -based PC with an 80387- maths co-processor and 8MB of RAM can still run Windows 95, though it will be a bit slow.

Thankfully though, people are re-selling used PCs as well as refurbished PCs both in Malaysia and around the world but it's quite probably still a drop in the bucket compared with the number of PCs being discarded off.

As for re-cycling of monitor cathode ray tubes, these items are mainly made of glass and can be melted down, with the lead extracted and recycled. It just needs someone to do it.

Perhaps one day, we may find the familiar old newspaper man going around yelling " Suratkhabar lama, bateri lama, komputer lama ."

Spaciba (Russian for 'thank you').