An onion computer is a work laptop that you’ve had for years and can’t bear to replace yet :-). Just looking at it makes you want to cry, like an onion.

Every large or small company has its IT priest or person responsible for technology. Normally the guy works until the next generation comes along and flees from innovation like the devil from holy water… nothing should ever change. The same guys who condemned your company to use Windows 2000 because XP is no good, Vista is heresy!

The twisted faith of these people is so strong that you can see them using Mac Book Pros… but they’ve formatted the thing and taken out the best part, Mac OS X, to install anything else. Can you imagine a Mac Book Pro with Ubuntu? I mean, just Ubuntu? It’s like buying a Ferrari to go to the fair.

Another IT person’s arsenal is internal systems. Want a new hard drive? Open a ticket to system XYZ… When you’re lucky, their system is integrated with other company systems; if not, you’ll have to sign up :-)

If you get tired of talking to the on-call priest, one way to get rid of them is to ask about backups. If the guy is an IT person himself, he’ll disappear in under 5 seconds, saying it’s your job to do the backups… on those shared network discs with 1GB for everything you have :-)

But what’s even better is when you have to write a report saying that the Onion Computer is slow. I got mine with 1GB of RAM and managed to upgrade it to 2 GB (30€!). The HD still needs enchanting (320GB - 40€) because the Onion Computer’s hard drive is very slow and small (100GB). A computer like this isn’t too bad, but try running Visual C++ 2005 in a virtual machine (Virtual PC) with 512 MB of RAM or bringing back the NetBeans from the depths of the HD. Running, it runs; everything works. Now if the most expensive thing in this whole story is developer time, why not have better machines? I see a Mac Book Pro at the end of the tunnel…

Another factor is the stress of arriving early and waking up the Onion Computer. I have a morning ritual: arrive and boot, run to make coffee (yes… here you do everything) and then come back to log in, drink more coffee, open Firefox and Thunderbird… but there’s never enough large cup for all that coffee. The poor Onion Computer takes about 5 minutes to do it all! And the Onion Computer is temperamental. If you bother it during this morning ritual, the time can double. To really get the Onion Computer angry, let Skype auto-initialize… then the day was ruined.

One good thing about the Onion Computer is that the worst part of the day is in the morning; after that, it’s an acceptable and reliable machine. I think the problem is the hard drive getting tired and the stupid Windows XP not being able to access the disk. The little brother Onion runs Linux. With 1GB of RAM, I don’t have a problem and look, I even leave Tomcat running! Speaking of which, I installed Windows 7 on my Mac, but I left Mac OS X :-). So far everything is fine. I’m not sure if the difference is good hardware or if Microsoft forgot to make Windows 7 slow, but they must fix that in the first service packs :-D