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No pity, please. It has been my choice. I have never owned a new car -- it seems like a waste of money to me. I have always driven some sort of beater, and I have chosen much the same route with my computers. Never the fastest or shiniest, never with that coveted "new computer smell" the great ones have, but good enough to get me where I need to go, and get me there until it dies some day with its light still blinking, alongside some lonesome shoulder of the info superhighway.
This past week I bought a new computer, my seventh in all, counting laptops. And it's a good one, a Compaq Presario 4784. Not the equivalent of a Lexus or Mercedes, but still near the top of the line for speed and power (200 megahertz and 32 megabytes RAM).
I bought it at a superstore, another first for me. When I got to the display that interested me an intense customer was blocking me out, badgering the sales person with questions. He wanted assurances on a million fine points before purchasing. Would the voice messaging system interfere with the CD player, etc. The salesman was using all his powers of concentration to keep his eyes from rolling around. Not being so constrained, I taught him a lesson by pushing through them, and loading the box on the cart without asking a single question. I'll regret that some day, but it felt good at the time.
Buying a Compaq may seem strange in that this column two weeks ago described quality problems a Compaq customer was having. But I have heard worse about other well-known brands. I read up carefully on 200 Mz MMX machines from Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, and NEC. I wound up picking Compaq for the fun features.
One was the free Zip drive. A Zip drive looks like an ordinary 3.5-inch floppy drive, but it uses a special Iomega diskette that holds 100 megabytes of backup data. There are more elegant backup and archiving systems, but this works fine for me.
The machine also has a sleep mode. In the past I left my computers on 24 hours a day. This wasn't wasteful when computers used small power supplies in the 1980s, but with the big V-8 engines of today's PCs, the electric meter in the basement starts to spin. Sleep mode puts an unused PC into suspended animation, shutting down all processes, but not needing a lengthy bootup to start again -- one click and it all pops up for you.
Setting up, never a hard process, is made completely easy by the colored plugs: red is for the speakers, orange is for the keyboard, green is the mouse, etc. The system even comes with a video intro starring John de Lancie, the fellow who plays the mischievous godlike character Q on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Q, the last letter in Compaq, is a gimmick throughout the machine. A Q button atop the CPU flies you off to a home base, outside Windows, where technical help is always available.
(How is this for Q-like behavior: When I hit the Q button just now, my new PC crashed for the first time.)
And a more pleasant surprise. Getting a machine with a first class video card and 2 megs of graphics memory does wonders for the images onscreen. The resolution just sparkles. Text is clearer. I don't need glasses to type! And the wallpaper I use as a system backdrop looks like just that: wallpaper.
Computers are expensive -- this one cost $2300, with no monitor. Though the industry sells 3 million boxes a year, what I am experiencing is rare for me. I've made up my mind that this a time I'll make a fresh start. I'll install all my programs from scratch, and load only data files from the old machine -- none of the jungle of drivers and *.old and *.bak files accumulated over the years. I'm going to be very good. I'll uninstall all my old programs, weeding out the drivers and hidden files, instead of just deleting them.
One last car metaphor. When your old car is getting toward the end of the line, you can feel the struggle every hill you climb. When you get a new car it is a physical thrill to feel the new propulsion. That's the feeling of a new computer, too. Instead of seeing the dreaded hourglass icon while the CPU processes a command, I hear a snap, and there's the program, staring me in the face. I don't have to nurse this PC along, it wants to run.
You know those dreams people have, in which you can fly, and everyone is amazed that you can defy gravity? Jung said that it was a dream of actualization. Freud said it meant you were too repressed to have a proper sexy dream. I think it means you have a new computer.
To contact Mike Finley ...
mfinley@mfinley.com
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