I'm fully aware that this alarm's existence demonstrates that my brain has been colonized by high-tech marketing. And though I might take some solace in noting that at least my alarm doesn't go off every year or two, the way it would if I really believed the hype, the fact of my indoctrination is unavoidable. More megahertz! More gigabytes! Cheaper every year! What a steal!

This year, though, when the alarm went off, something strange happened: I woke up, took a look around at both my current computer of choice and the possible replacements, hit the snooze alarm and went back to sleep. Maybe next year.

Multiply my lack of purchasing enthusiasm by the millions and you have a recipe for the kind of inventory backlog and industry slowdown that's hit the entire computer industry this year like, well, a Bengali typhoon. Last week industry research firm Gartner Dataquest reported that the U.S. PC market actually contracted by 3.5 percent in the first quarter of this year.

New-economy theorists hypothesized that the upward curve of technological innovation and the inexorable logic of Moore's Law would consign the old business cycle to history's ash heap. But the personal computer industry has always been enslaved to its own unique cycle: There's a periodic lag between the amount of computing power the industry can pump into users' hands and the number of useful things the software industry can devise for us to do that actually require an investment in that kind of power.

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So even though that watchdog of digital consumerism, the Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg, has announced that "this is a great time to buy a PC" -- and thanks to recent price cuts by inventory-overloaded manufacturers and resellers, I'm sure he's right -- I'm still scratching my head trying to figure out why I should bother.

Let's look at the reasons people buy new PCs:

1. They don't already have one. With well over half the households in the United States now owning at least one computer, this reason, while still occasionally relevant, drives less and less purchasing.

2. The one they have doesn't work anymore. It's true -- over time PCs (particularly those that have suffered through operating-system upgrades) sometimes get so gummed up with multiple installations of software and corrupted system files and such that they just stop working right. And the hapless consumer realizes that for the money and time he could spend trying to fix the damn thing, he could probably buy a snazzier new computer. This used to be a surprisingly common occurrence, but Microsoft has gradually improved Windows over the years so that even the most wretchedly decayed PC today usually manages to limp along rather than going totally kaput.

3. Their old computer's hard disk has filled up. Each generation of software expands to fill the newer, bigger hard drives available. So if you've got an older computer that you keep cramming new software onto, you will eventually run out of space. (And then of course there are those 10,000 MP3 files you downloaded from Napster.) Sure, you could clean out your directories, or move the files to some other storage medium, or fuss with installing a new drive in your old box -- but it's easier to just take the 10 gigabytes from your old computer and dump them into your brand-new computer, whose 40-gigabyte drive will hardly feel what hit it. While I bet there are more computer purchasers out there who buy for this reason than you'd think, they are going to be reluctant to admit it, and they're going to feel guilty afterward: It just seems wasteful and self-indulgent -- like buying an SUV because you don't feel like changing the oil in your subcompact.

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