End of an Error

I've got what I believe to be a very high threshold for frustration - this probably contributes to my procrastination; the anxiety of rapidly approaching deadlines had not, until recently, inspired in me any sort of anxiety. However, when I reach my breaking point, it's game over. That happened last night with my old laptop, an HP TC4400.

It was a sexy little machine at first - I picked up her just before MERP, at the beginning of my medical career. She's a tablet and is thus like a petite laptop gymnast - cute and flexible. However, true to my nature, I didn't want to spend full price on her, and, in perhaps my greatest tech mistake, I bought a factory refurbished unit, rather than springing for a new model. Somehow, in my mind, this convoluted logic made sense, even though I decided to splurge on an extended warranty, knowing that there might be problems. I think I expected them.

I carried her to MERP, and the honeymoon period was fantastic. Things behaved as they were supposed to, and, whether real or imagined, I felt that my tablet tech was as impressive as another brand-new device, the first iteration of the iPhone. The first sign that things were perhaps not so peachy was a short, neon-blue line that popped up on day at the bottom of the screen. I thought nothing of it.

I took her to the island, and she must have gotten pissy, because that's when all the problems began - you see, as a tablet, the screen is supposed to flip orientations when she moves between tablet and PC mode. She is not supposed to do that on her own, whenever she wants, whenever she's connected to an external power supply. It drove me crazy. I couldn't send her in to get repaired because the warranty didn't apply out of the country. I emailed back and forth with tech support, and finally settled on disabling the screen rotation altogether, functionally removing all of the features that had made her a cool tablet. We fell into an uneasy peace, then - for whenever she'd push against my restrictions and try to rotate her screen, she'd get (we'd get) a big, obnoxious error message - it was generally only three or four, but I've occasionally been assaulted by stacks of 40 of them. At the same time, the cursor would go and spasm in the right lower corner of the screen, clicking on whatever was there, completely beyond my control. There were no patches, there was no software to download - it was like she'd contracted a personality disorder, and no drugs could fix it. Actually, it was more like recalcitrant grand mal seizures - she'd go into her fits, and there was nothing I could do but wait them out.

After our time on the island, I brought her back to convalesce in the US. 5th semester came and went, and her condition worsened - midway through my step prep time, as the warranty deadline neared, I contacted tech support to get her taken care of. There began the disaster - I wasted hours on the phone with Hewlett-Packard, unsuccessfully trying to get her fixed remotely and then, when that failed, begging and pleading with them to send a box so that I could have her repaired. I had to continuously supply them with the e-receipt of my extended warranty because, according to their records, it had already passed. I tried, and they failed me - the whole damn company. Shortly thereafter, she contracted some rampant Russian or Albanian virus in the guise of antivirus software and, instead of taking her in to someone, I just wiped her hard-drive clean, reinstalled her operating systems, and bought the best antivirus I could find. Fortunately, I'd had everything backed up. I'd hoped that a complete mind-wipe would do something for her seizures - sort of like a corpus callosotomy ( the corpus callosum is a bundle of nerve fibers the two brain hemispheres use to communicate - historically, it was cut to prevent seizures from spreading from one side to the other). However, this didn't work either.

I put up with her little fits for months, occasionally reaching the place where I was ready to smash her to bits but, at that point, she'd behave, as if her performance was merely to show me who was in control. The breaking point came last night when, the the midst of one of her first, the successor to the virus from last year slipped past Norton's defenses to assault me once again. I ran Norton over and over, but the damn software kept on finding "no virus", and the fits continued. I'd had enough.

So today I went out to Best-Buy and picked up a new girl. It felt like a whim, but it really wasn't; I've been browsing laptops on the sly for a while now, wishfully-thinking. She's a fiery red Dell Inspiron 1564, with 4GB of RAM, 320 GB of memory, and a nice i3 processor - not top of the line, but I'm not yet ready to drop 2-grand on a computer, especially with student loans. So I think my new girl and I will be getting along nicely, but some of my bum luck continues. Over Christmas, I'd purchased an external hard-drive to protect myself against my old girl's fits. The new one must be a little possessive - she didn't recognize the external hard drive, and by the time I got it open, it looked as if I'd never backed anything up at all (possibly due to the difference in operating systems). At least I've got my trusty pen drives at home. Good bye, old girl.

This whole thing....the crashing and replacing of computers and digital information in general has me thinking. I'm always a little chagrined when some catastrophe occurs to computers. Here we've built up these complex little machines that only a few of us can understand (I'm talking DOS, not Windows, but even then....), and we rely on them so much. I'm sure this a long-dead horse, but it's a little chilling in a sci-fi esque sort of way - not that they're going to become sentient and rise up against us (I'll be that's where you though I was going), but that we place so much importance on them, and when they mess up, we're kinda screwed. I lost a lot of data in this update, but nothing truly important - the important things all exist in real life. It's not fair to say that electronic music, picture, and document files don't actually exist, but that's sort of the case. We can view them and alter them, we can enjoy them - but if they're not tangible, they only exist in one place - inside the human mind - and are backed up on our pretty machines. Every once in a while I write down my musings and story ideas, and I panicked for a moment when I thought that all the newer versions were gone...but they're not; not only do I have them printed out somewhere, but I have them in my head.

If all the digital music were gone, where would we listen? If our little laptop Windows to the world suddenly went silent and dark, we'd have to go back out there for our art and literature, for our enjoyment, our learning, and our work. This whole experience has reminded me that they're just tools - nothing more. Just as electronic medical records are required by law to have their hard-copies stored in hurricane-proof housing, no necessary bit of information should exist solely online.

Yet...as quickly as prized information can disappear into the abyss, if I were to post vulgar pictures of myself on facebook, or blog about ideas that are radical and hateful, I may never get a job; people would be able to find those things forever. A conundrum, eh?

And so I extol the virtues of the hard-copy, and turn a wary eye to deceptive conveniences of the digital; I am devolving.