You can Steer Clear of the Obsolesence Iceberg.

Last week a client avoided a near-fatal disaster involving an ancient piece of custom-written software written by a programmer who had retired to Florida many moons ago and had it running on a Windows XP computer with NO Internet Security software (that means – NO Antivirus – NO Antispyware) and – this might be the best part – the Windows XP was bootleg.

Folks, you just can’t make this stuff up.

Luckily, the owners had enough foresight to jump ship to a new computer – complete with AntiVirus software and a genuine copy of Windows. We avoided a near-catastrophe as I spent hours forcing this ancient piece of software to run on modern equipment.

The final hurdle I had to jump over was to force Windows XP to think this new computer had just 512MB instead of the (conservative, I thought) 1GB of RAM Dell shipped it with.

My parting advice to them as the owners smiled and shook my hand was — “Plan to replace this software sooner rather than later.”

These two bagel boys got lucky in many ways and ended up no worse for wear (except for my hefty consulting bill). Time is now on their side to make critical decisions sometime in the next three years and totally abandon the ship of a piece of software that hasn’t been maintained or in any way updated in the past ten years.

In part 2 we’ll discuss all the many benefits of keeping up-to-date with major technology like Windows 7, QuickBooks 2010 and the latest iPhone.

In a future post I’ll talk about the scared-to-death Quicken 98 user who I finally, after months of persuasive effort on my part, coaxed into making the leap to Quicken 2002 – just two months ago.