This weekend I received my just desserts for casting the pearls of a new monitor before the swine of my outdated and rather schizophrenic computer. After a thoroughly typical and not unexpected blue-screen-of-death operating system freak-out, I restarted the beast, only to receive an error message I hadn't seen before. I can't remember the exact wording at the moment, but the gist was that my hard drive had just noticed a problem with its addressing. Jacob sat me down and told me tales of data loss and system crashes, and explained that the best thing to do would be to dump everything off of that drive and reformat it. Argh, I said, but okay. Maybe a new drive would be needed, he continued, at which point I arghed some more.
He had a brainstorm just then and suggested that rather than buying a new drive, I could make use of the laptop I inherited from him. The short battery life wouldn't matter if it was always connected at my desk, and it was already running a more stable operating system than what I have on my desktop. That sounded good to me, so we hooked up the laptop to its base station to see if it would play nicely.
It seemed to be playing nicely. Jacob was doing something arcane with drive diagnostics on the desktop, so I turned to the laptop and tried to think about what I'd need to make it my only computer. I opened a few folders, looked at a few programs, and decided I couldn't think about anything without music. I put in an Interpol CD and waited for it to start.
Pop. Pop. Snapkchssst!
That is not the beginning of any Interpol CD with which I'm familiar. That was the sound of the laptop's power supply shorting out, complete with sparks, a puff of smoke, and the acrid smell of burnt electronics.
This is what I've decided to do. I'll keep the power supply in a special violent-electronic-death display with my old audio card, which has an honest-to-god scorched crater in it. I'll take the laptop, which is now responsible for the destruction of at least two power supplies, and seal it up behind a brick wall Cask of Amontillado-style. And I'll take my fucking desktop computer and reformat it, wipe every trace of Windows 98 from its drives, and never speak that name again.
Posted by dianna at July 11, 2005 11:18 AMYay! That last sentence is the best news I've had all day!
Posted by: Jacob at July 11, 2005 12:16 PMYou know, I only held out for so long because I'd held out for so long. It's a pride thing. I can't ever seem to be more knowledgeable than anyone else where computers are concerned, but by god I can be more stubborn.
Until, of course, the whole thing stops working and then I find myself very pliable indeed.
Posted by: Dianna at July 11, 2005 01:48 PM