As I've been sorting out the next few weeks of judging and visiting Massachusetts, I touched base with the Nostrumite, who almost didn't make it to return my emails because he is in a state of permanent depression over his recent attempts to upgrade his computer. "I shoulda bought a Mac," he told me glumly. "A couple of weeks ago I got an error that my PC's hard disk was out of space, with marching orders to erase or die, and since then, every day a little death doesn't begin to describe it." You've got to hand it to him: even in the midst of core meltdown, he manages to toss in a Sondheim reference. That's my boy!
He began by eliminating some of the games he never plays anymore, he told me. He has a habit of buying a game, playing it for two hours until he reaches some particular difficulty that will take some clever offense, and then tossing it on the cybernetic ash heap. "I got rid of Age of Mythology, which I never liked, and Age of Empires, which I bought because they said it was just like Age of Mythology, which should have been a warning rather than siren call, but in any case, after that I blew away American McGee's Alice and a few unintellible zip files and a couple of copies of the TRPC software, and I was cooking with gas. Megabyte after megabyte fell like scales before my eyes." Unfortunately, by this point, the machine was slogging away at the speed of a Commodore 64 or Lionel Richie, whichever seems slower to you while sticking roughly to the same metaphor. "My virus definitions were older than a Commodore 64," the Mite said, "or older than Lionel Richie, so I downloaded and installed a new version of Norton. While I was at it, I scraped the bottom for spybots. I really felt as if I was cleaning up dramatically." But he had as yet gotten no increase in speed. Far from it. "So I went for the Big One, and loaded up good old Service Pack 2, which is the Godfather 3 of operating system upgrades." Which solved the problem? "Now it takes me ten minutes to start up, which means I'm afraid to ever turn the machine off." Any plus sides? "Well, once I got into the upgrading mode, I upgraded iTunes so that I could buy the Triplets of Belleville theme song"—that, I will add, was my recommendation to the lad, who fell in love with the tune at first byte—"but then I couldn't offload to the iPod which also needed new software, so I upgraded that, and lost about half my music, that is, anything I had put in with any software other than iTunes. At which point, I would have murdered Commodore Perry, or Sophie Coppola, or anyone else who got in my way."
But the machine was now back to fighting speed? I asked.
"I shoulda bought a Mac," he replied.
It ain't easy, being a Nostrumite.
No comments:
Post a Comment