wipeout

The Hater is about to declare war on Microsoft. He says he's tired of fixing sick windows-operating-system-things. He's even adding the word "Macintosh" into his everyday conversations; I think it's a trick to get me used to hearing it.

A couple of weeks ago he had to wipeout* and reload the laptop. Its windows were dusty and sick. And now the desktop is acting funny... and he's threatening an all-out war. He spent multiple days fixing the problems. It's fixed now, so why can't we just fix the desktop, too?

You have to know this desktop is about seven years old. He bought it at Wal Mart for $450. The processor speed is 433. He's added 512 megabytes of memory, which is the only thing that's kept it running. It doesn't have any USB ports, but we do have adapters so that the USB things will work in the Serial ports. It's so old it has a 4" hard disk drive (that's right, a floppy drive, which was a main selling feature at the time). The hard drive is a whopping 18 g; most everything today has at least 40-60. It burns CDs at 4x speed (which means if you want to burn a cd with 10 songs, it will take the computer 30 minutes to finish). It's been moved 6 times and has aided in an infathomable number of papers (that's the best I can do; he won't even fancy a guess at how much he's used it). In short, it's an old friend.

He says he wants it to be fixable so we can continue to be a happy family, and I'm holding out that it can hang on another seven years. After all, it'll be my best friend again when I'm stuck in prison again next month.v

* "wipeout" is a random debate argument where people argue that humans will eventually lead to the downfall of the universe due to artifical intelligence, making aliens mad, time travel, nanotech, etc. It links to extinction. I was going to make a big nerdy parallel about how the slow death of the desktop is like wipeout, and it sounded great in my head, but the execution just didn't make it. I can't come up with a suitable link because the desktop is just too old and frumpy for an exciting sci-fi story. But it was a great idea, and so I mention it here, which makes me only slightly nerdy instead of super nerdy.