Three Stories (Part 2)

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I've been given a laptop, and Blogger has now been down for 36 hours.

I have a friend who bought a laptop two years ago. It's an AMD dual-core 2.11 GHz with a 230GB SATA drive and an x48 DVD-/+R DVD writer. All of which is prominently displayed as a selling point, aimed at customers who don't know what any of it means.

It has a design which could be called 'horrible' if you're an artist, 'impractical' if you have to use it, and 'retro' if you're a journalist. 'Retro' used to mean '20-50 years ago' - now it's 'the cutting edge of two years ago'.

It has AHCI (Advanced Host Controller Interface), which depending on how you look at it, means either it's optimised to run Windows 7 (whatever that means), or you need to switch the AHCI off to install any other operating system.

It also has a sticker marked "Windows 7 Compatible", Windows 7 pre-installed...and absolutely no way to fix Windows 7 when it goes wrong. Which it did.

That's Windows 7 all over. It's great at diagnosing and fixing its own problems, until it reaches the limit of its self-repair ability, at which point you're royally screwed. A disc for reinstalling Windows would be the easy and obvious solution - but none is provided, the assumption being that Windows 7 will never need any user maintenance.

Which is why my friend couldn't reinstall Windows, which is why they spent two weeks wages on a new laptop (with near-identical specifications but a non-retro design), which is why the old one is, in their words "scrap - it's yours if you want it". Which is why I have it. It's now working perfectly.

I once knew a man who sold his car because he couldn't get 'the smell of sex' out of the seats. I'm not sure how I should feel about that, being a contributor to the smell, but it did seem odd to spend a month changing cars instead of an afternoon washing (or even replacing) the seat coverings.

You don't throw away your coat because there's a hole in the pocket - you either mend it or use the other pocket. You might throw away your mattress if it starts leaking its stuffing - though mine is patched up with gradually increasing amounts of duct tape, and fulfills its function just fine.

Televisions are difficult and expensive to repair, so it actually does make sense to replace them when they stop working. But it's pretty simple to upgrade your laptop's hard drive or memory, plug in a USB keyboard when the onboard one gets unreliable, and reinstall the operating system when it falls over.

They're just not presented that way to the public. Personal computer development has slowed to a crawl, which means your new laptop won't be much different to your old one - but you get the new one because you're under the impression that you can only upgrade (or indeed repair) by replacing. And that small upgrades are really big ones.

A decade ago you could expect speed to double every year, now every few years you get the number of processors doubling, running in parallel at the same speed as the old ones - which is useful if you have the minority of software that can take advantage of it.

You may have 500GB of drive space instead of the 250 of five years ago, but it still accesses at 7200rpm. USB 3 may be available, but most of the devices in the shops still use USB 2.

I'm always happy to have an extra laptop. The one from my friend spent last night sitting in one corner making data backups, while this one rendered text-to-speech mp3s and ran a script to downloaded every episode of Monty Python from youtube in sequence, while I dozed on the taped-up mattress.

My old laptop is set up for general purpose email, browsing and wordprocessing. I lend it out to people whose laptops have gone wrong, to use while they're shopping for new ones.

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