It's been a long day; I did a review, writing exercises, a preparation to expand my web page, and now this, all with my computer crashing every hour or so.
Eileene's dad is heavily into computers, and likes to build his own from factory parts. And, like any good technophile, insists on upgrading every other week, whether he needs to or not. Every time he decides he's had enough of one of his computers (yes, there are three or four in his house now), we inherit whatever he's just rejected, with gobs of memory and performance on par with the top-of the line PCs on the shelves today. Almost.
See, because the computers are in a continual state of upgrade, and because Eileene likes to prowl around for the latest software utilities, nothing is ever 100% compatible with everything else. And, since computers are such delicate creatures, that means my machine is always a little wonky. This month, it's a lot wonky, and crashes at least four or five times a day. I've learned to save often.
There's a joke list drifting about the spam lines describing how automobiles would work if they were made by Microsoft, jokes like, ?You could only drive using Microsoft gas,? and ?Sun would make a car with better mileage, more features, at half the cost, but it could only drive on 10% of the roads.? My favorite line, the one that really rings true is, ?Every so often as you were driving along, your car would just stop, for no apparent reason, and you would have to restart it. We would consider this normal and acceptable.?
Why do we consider it normal and acceptable for computers to crash frequently? Obviously, if it goes under every couple of hours, something is wrong, and I'll get mine fixed shortly, but if it only went, say, once a day, I'd just deal with it. Unless their computer were running an air traffic system or nuclear power plant, a lot of people would just deal with it. ?It just does that sometimes.? And why, given the PC's flaky behavior, hasn't someone stridden confidently up with a more tractable model and swept the competition aside? Perhaps, now that Microsoft is sitting on the lion's share of the market, the bugs are indirectly part of a plan to keep things that way. Not that some executive is ordering his engineers, ?Make it crash a lot,? but rather the quirkiness of the system is a way to restrict compatibility. And if it crashes, well? you can just restart it. It's perfectly normal and acceptable.