The Geek, being the Fabulous Geek that he is, recently saved me from computerless horror by giving me one of his old desktop computers. My laptop is hardly a year old and it keeps overheating and shutting down. Without warning. It's pretty annoying. And wouldn't you know it, it starts all of this crap just after the year long warranty expires. Classic. It was a replacement for my old laptop which got declared a 'lemon' and replaced for free by a big box store around here that I prefer not to promote. However, we didn't have the ready cash for the service plan that would have fixed my ailing laptop, so it basically becomes junk. Really expensive junk.
It's hard to transition to one place after the carefree roaming of my laptop, but I will manage. Already there is a collection of random things that crinkle, rattle, and are shiny under my chair as the wee squirt entertains herself while I check email. Not to mention teeth marks on the legs of the chair. (I think she's getting another coupla teeth!)
So, like the lower-(techie) class, non-snobbish, she-geeklet that I am, I like Vista. Wail and moan, I know. I still like how it lets me deal with photos, which, lets face it, is my main job around here as I chronicle the raising of THE cutest girl in the universe. So I wrangle around for an install disk since my laptop only came with the 'repair' disk, (cheapskates!) and do the install. The Geek supervises, although I am pretty savvy and can run circles around my parents (and other folks only slightly older than me) in the tech department.
The Geek steps in for the final wrangling of some elusive drivers for my monitor with speakers attached, and he solemnly turns to me and says, "Your computer wasn't meant to run Vista. It's gonna be really slow."
"Crap!", I think, "Cause I need my computer to be fast when dealing with large picture files!" I hop on and give it a whirl and, oddly enough, it doesn't seem that slow. Now granted I haven't tried editing a huge file in photoshop yet, but honestly! How bad can it be? Then I get to thinking.
Slow is relative, really. Isn't it? I mean, when I remember back in '96 when my professors at Uni said they wanted us to look stuff up on the internet, we GROANED! Out loud! It took more than a minute to load each page! It was tedious stuff. And the pages were lovely, no picture, no flash, no ads, plain old boring text for the most part. So the Geek's computer may process stuff at the speed of sound, or light (as it were) but I don't really notice a difference if my computer takes a little bit longer. I usually take that moment to make sure Someone isn't going for the computer chords or trying to eat the cat's tail. I've been known to start a program and then walk away from it for several hours...
Ok... that was weird. Mid sentence, my computer just...
Wait. Don't crash. Please!
Reset screen resolution to huge??? What the...
Reset it to normal... ok. Computer? Are you ok?
Crazy black screen with vertical lines of code from the matrix, but not as cool???!!??
Crap.
The Geek spoke the truth. My hardware can't keep up with my software. (Ain't that always the way?)
1 comment:
Post a Comment