I Hate Computers

Hate. Loathe. Strongly dislike.

OK, perhaps I am practicing a wee bit of hyperbole here. Perhaps I’m only very annoyed at one particular computer and still think that most other computers are pretty decent. But that one bad egg…

The computer in question is my five-plus year old, seven point five pound Toshiba laptop. Deciding to be a good computer citizen I upgraded the OS on this aged machine so I could get the latest security patches in place. “Upgrade” is not exactly the correct term. The ‘upgrade’ mode of the installation kept munging the boot loader so for the sake of expedience I opted to reinstall the OS. “It wouldn’t possibly,” I thought to myself, “overwrite the /home partition. That would be just silly. What little (and all unimportant) data I have on this thing will be safe.”

Hahahahaha! Foolish mortal! No, the installation did, in fact, wipe out my /home directory even after I confirmed the partitioning before telling it to continue. I have to believe that I missed some setting somewhere as this could not possibly be the default.

OK, so, I lost a smidge of data. Meh. So what? Don’t care. That’s why we have CVS. I lost all my settings and customizations to my KDE environment? Alright, that one is a bit annoying. Thunderbird isn’t installed anymore? Now you’re starting to piss me off. The wireless card no longer works? Pardon me a moment as I break down…

Nooooooo! Let there be rending of clothes, tearing of hair and gnashing of teeth! It took me forever to get that bloody thing working! Weeks of endless frustration! It was years ago! I couldn’t recall what I did to fix it if my life depended upon it!

I can’t face doing that again, I just can’t. I’ll turn into a gibbering, drooling moron, curled up in the corner of my office swatting at invisible flies.

Unfortunately I can no longer function without a laptop and need one NOW. I may have to bite the bullet and pull the trigger on that 13″ black Mac Book{.broken_link} that I’d previously convinced myself I didn’t need since, after all, my existing laptop was chugging along quite nicely. Yeah, I’ve been doing a decent job of paying down my credit card and this would delay that but I have a LOT of stuff to work on and I NEED a functioning and reliable laptop with functioning and reliable wireless. I don’t have the time to deal with this crap.

Wrestling with Linux on vintage laptop hardware takes a lot out of a gal. Will learning a whole new OS and UI paradigm be less painful than this? *sob* I don’t know. And right now I’m too weary to even think about it seriously.