A useful CD? - I'll drink to that

What do we do with old CD-Roms? I reckon there is an opportunity for the drinks coaster industry if it wants it. I have a handful of the old Novell technical service CDs supporting a couple of audio CD towers in my front room - the CDs sit at each corner and stop the towers from wobbling on the carpet. Well, I couldn't see a use for them - of course, if they had been Windows NT technical CDs it would have been a different matter. (Sorry, Novell, only joking.)

But what about all the CDs stuck on the front of magazines? What do you do with them after a month or so? Do you keep them or do you dump them because there will be a new version of DirectX or whatever in a couple of months?

This question has a tad more poignancy than usual at the moment because my desk is creaking under the weight of thousands of CD-Roms, each holding thousands of software programs. I'm worried this will to lead to a software drought. I can see us having CD bans during the summer months, when we will only be able to load software off floppy disks. Of course, this will lead to further problems because we are already using all our floppy disks as drinks coasters.

But why can't we have something useful on these CDs - or, better still, why can't we have proper upgrades on these CDs? For example, you may have come across Symantec's Act contacts database, a fine example of the genre if you like that sort of thing. It currently resides at version 4.0, but if you have internet access you really should be at release 4.02, which is a fair bit sweeter. The upgrade file sits on the Net just begging to be downloaded. When you arrive at the page it murmurs in a pathetic voice: 'Please download me.'

'Sure thing,' you say in your effort to be kind to software upgrades.

So you click on it and then the dreadful truth beckons ... it is seven megabytes.

'Jesus H Christ!' you exclaim and hit the cancel button. And life continues.

The issue here is why can't these bits of software, which may actually be of some use, be put on the CDs on the front of magazines? Surely it would be a doddle to have shed loads of really useful software that some of us can use to improve our lot - and reduce our telephone bills - on these magazines?

Take, for example, the number of modem upgrades going on at the moment.

Can you imagine how useful it would be to have the flash upgrades and driver upgrades on these discs? Simple program upgrades could be sorted in a flash - and the magazines I suspect would be, if you excuse the vernacular, gagging for it.

At least there would then be a reason to keep the CDs. And this is the perfect time for me to introduce the latest product from Chrisl Corp: the CD-Rom Tidy and Drinks Coaster Holder.

You can always rely on Chrisl Corp for your Christmas goodies.

Chris Long is a freelance IT journalist.