Sunday, November 11, 2007

Celebrating seven years with my crappy, junky, grumpy, age-old, yet never-say-die PC!



Man and Machine…They always found a differentiation. Not always, maybe

Some seven years ago, when I bought my current PC, I didn’t know a damn thing about computers. Hell, even I couldn’t find the crappy power button to turn it on. The guy who came and hooked the thing up showed how tahe graphics load, how to play an mp3, a movie and all the major tricks. After the fella left, I thought it ain’t gonna be too hard to run this thing, but didn’t take long to realize that I had made a major mistake. I didn’t know where the power switch is. Fed up with searching, phoned a buddy and he said the button should be there. Finally I got my finger stuck in a hole, and bang! The thing worked! Well…that’s just history. I’m still running it since then and there’s a whole saga behind it. For the first few months, when it broke down, I used to carry it all the way to Kandy, where my computer shop was. The only (yet the best, as they say) remedy these genius computer shack repair guys know is formatting the boot drive. The same happened for me, despite how minute the problem is. Then I thought this ain’t gonna do, and since then I doctored my own aches and pains. That’s when I started to feel computing, and that’s when I started this passion. Well, it wasn’t the end, but a beginning of a different companionship with this machine and myself.

For every quarter of a year, something gets blown off; nevertheless, this junk has survived a miraculous seven years. The last gadget that faced its demise was the goddam CDROM drive. Hell, it ran a good ol’ 6 years non-stop. Way, way better than the crappy Creative shit that was on sale in every corner of the street back in 2000. It had all the wizardly crap like remote controls and all, but it wasn’t just enough to survive long, at least in our reach. Presently, the CPU looks bare naked and the last time I saw the casing cover of the CPU was back in 2006. Sometimes the CPU goes dead silent. It may sound cool but that’s when I know the cooler fan has stopped. With a couple of thumps, the thing starts to rotate and I’m back on line. During this seven-year tenure, few hard disks served its time until I switched to Hitachi. Hitachi is more silent unlike the old Quantum hard disk; which, when operating, emulated the noise of a tractor running in my room. My UPS is with the repair guy for over 2 years and he and I have both forgotten it. Now he thinks he owns it and I don’t give a damn. It ain’t cool to run a comp without a UPS, but what the heck.

Well…This saga with this machine, and myself - it will go on…Till one meets its demise...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That 'Buddy' u r referring in ur article is me.. LOL. God, how funny that Telephone conversation was...I still can remember...:D