when your toaster doesn’t make toast properly, you unplug it, take it out back, smash it with a hammer, and buy a new one. you don’t bother checking if maybe the power coming out of the wall is no good, or if the dial was set to ‘no toast’ instead of, say, 3. or if maybe the button isn’t working. it doesn’t matter, if any of the inputs are wrong, the machine is BROKEN and you replace it.
not so with, say, a dvd-rom drive. why is my drive opening for half a second then closing again, forcing me to sneak discs in and out of it? why won’t it load from the cd-rom drive which is perfectly fine? why can’t it detect the cd? who fucking knows. i could go buy a new dvd-rom drive, but that might not solve the damn problem.
of late i have been fantastically impatient with my computer whenever it craps out for no apparent reason. i don’t really feel like it’s happening any more often than it ever did before, i’ve just grown increasingly less tolerant of this sort of bullshit. if all i did with my computer was play games i’d throw it in the fucking garbage tomorrow. there is no comparison between fiddling with your system to maybe get a game running, and putting a disc into the x-box and waiting a few seconds for it to load. perfectly. every time.
i am waiting with fucking rapt anticipation for the day when computers aren’t technology anymore, and simply work properly all the time, until they break, and you buy a new one.
It won’t solve all your problems, but a pre-built system, especially one from Dell, can really help to address these issues. Also, buying higher-quality parts. You and I both follow Dad’s school of computer part shopping, which is to buy the cheapest part available - but you pay for that in the long run when the parts fail. Buying the name-brand is totally worth it in the case of hard drives, optical drives, and processors.
July 14th, 2005 at 6:09 pm
That day is here, dude. That’s why we bought our Gateway machine. It runs great, and I don’t look at as some special device, that I have to upgrade and maintain and keep in good order. Obviously, there’s some minor upkeep involved, but defragging and running virus scans are no more hassle than running a head-cleaner through a vcr. Mostly, I just look at it as this thing that gets me online and copies my cd’s and lets me play with pictures.
It’s an appliance. When it stops working, I’ll get rid of it and get a new one. I like that.
July 17th, 2005 at 1:34 am