The oracle knows all. Not THAT Oracle, of course

Genius at work

Back in my Britpop days as a MacUser magazine hack in the 1990s, I would volunteer to sit alongside colleagues at an ironically entitled "Ask the Experts" stand at the magazine’s annual exhibition at London’s Olympia.

Visitors could book a 10-minute slot with an expert – or if they were unlucky, with me – and ask questions about their Mac kit, Genius Bar style, but years before Apple even thought of opening its own stores.

This required much less knowledge than you might think, since every punter asked precisely the same question: “What Mac should I buy?”

The answer to this is the same as if they’d asked what car/house/packet of biscuits they should buy: “How much money do you have?”

Some people found this a bit glib and a few thought I was about to sell them something. One or two – already jaded after being accosted at every stand at the show – jumped to the conclusion that I was somehow trying to rob them of what little credit that remained on their increasingly inflexible and unfriendly Access cards.

In their eyes, I was a kind of Macintosh-crazed Dennis Moore, able to hit a distant elm with one shot and brazen enough to swipe their last lupin.

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Look, I know the details have changed a bit since then, but the principle remains: when you want to buy a computer, you want the fastest processor, the most memory, the biggest amount of storage and the zippiest graphics card. Buy the best one you can afford.

If you can’t afford the best one, get one that’s cheaper. I would only ask “what do you want to use it for?” when someone asked about what software to buy.

I use this tack even now when I am asked what computer to buy by family, neighbours, passers-by and nutters who accost me on the train. It has never failed me.

The only time I was shocked speechless by a punter asking me what computer to buy was when, after I replied “How much money do you have?” he immediately shot back: “Money’s no object”. No-one had ever said this before, nor has anyone since.

He worked for a company supplying services to the NHS.

Returning to my training delegate concerned about her viruses, I answered as honestly as I could, pointing out that no off-the-shelf anti-virus program is remotely infallible and that some are a bit useless and that one in particular – one of the most successful on the market – is an outright con.

The best AV utilities, in my opinion, are those that can only be licensed in user increments of 1,000. The stakes in the corporate space are so much higher than for SMEs that the developers working in this environment give more of a shit and their daily updates actually look for code signatures that matter.

Unfortunately, it is not possible to buy a subscription for a single copy, but you could always ask your head office to invest in a corporate licence and request permission to add it to your home computer.

Naturally, I keep all this to myself. Why complicate a simple question with a long explanation? When someone says they have a quick question, what she really means is she wants a quick and simple answer and you had better bloody hurry up about it, otherwise she’ll slag you off in the training course feedback form.

“Buy a copy of Kaspersky,” I reply. “They have a discount on.”

With that, my delegate ticks the box labelled ‘10’ and walks away smiling. I follow shortly after, my head hung low and full of shame that my fatigue forced me to cop out and switch into Say-Any-Old-Bollocks mode. 10 out of 10. It’s what I’m best at. ®