Shoes, Ships, and Sealing Wax

The exorcism is done

I got the demons out of the computer, finally, though it did take reformatting the hard disk. (But I managed to save the cicada pictures!) Since I was destroying in order to create anew, I went ahead and upgraded to Windows XP, and I've loaded up on security and so on...I have a firewall, I have spam filters, I have pop-up blockers, I basically can't hit a key without software asking me "Is this ok?"

I'm proud of myself...I went to the computer store and stood in front of a shiny new P4 3 gigahertz machine with 512 MBs of RAM and a 160 gig hard drive, and I was so close to just bringing it home. But it did occur to me as I stood there that I don't even how much faster 3 GHz is than my current machine (1 GHz, I think)...I mean, yeah, it's two faster, but what does that mean in practical terms? I don't have time to make coffee while I wait for it to boot up? Do I need that much computer?

I also remember buying a computer with a 20 MB hard drive and saying "I'll never fill this up." And actually, I never did fill that drive...that machine had DOS 3-something, and WordPerfect 2-something, and a little database thingy. It was a step up from the old IBM with the dual floppies (one drive was where I left the boot disk...kids, did you know there was a time that boot disks weren't just for emergency recovery?)

So while I know as soon as I get a bigger badder machine I'll need it, and then I'll need more later, for now I decided to stick with this desktop. With its additional memory and new Windows it is almost like new. There's something elegant about that blank teal screen, so uncluttered and crisp...I'm vowing to save all my files in neat folders with descriptive names, and back them up often. I will be a model computer user.

And using it I will be, for several days. I have a lot of software to reload and lots of backups to restore, and then maybe I'll get around to noticing President Reagan's death, Smarty Jones' lose at the Belmont, the National Race for the Cure, Game 6 of the Stanley Cup, and my niece's new bike...