SWEEEET

She Who Must Be Obeyed and I just scored a sweet new computer.

Our last kludgy piece of shit was a 2000-vintage HP with a 900 Mhz Smelleron Celeron processor. When we first got it, it came bundled with Windows ME, the most heinous operating system ever to see the light of day. I’d like to bitch-slap Bill Gates with the business end of a nail-studded baseball bat for foisting that Steaming Chunk o’ Excrement on the American public. Upgrading to XP was the only thing that saved that machine from being chucked right out our second-floor window.

But this new baby rocks. At 3.2 GHz, it may not be the fastest thing out there, but (cue Galileo voice) nevertheless, it moves. And the 19-inch flat panel is oh, so easy on the eyes. Our old machine also had a 19-incher, but this one has a tiny footprint and weighs a fraction of what that massive CRT did.

My task this evening - aside from dealing with the mare’s nest of wiring behind the desk - was to get the DSL hookup working. Mission accomplished. I managed to convince BellSouth to send me the new modem gratis - the old one was a five-year-old internal modem, beyond obsolete, and I didn’t feel like screwing with the whole painful process of opening the old computer’s case, taking out the POS, then shoving it into the new one. This one was external, a snap to set up...and router-friendly to boot!

A new computer always takes some getting used to. Like a new pair of shoes, it takes a little breaking in before it’s as comfortable as your old pair. But once we have our New Baby loaded up with a decent chunk of our old image files ’n’ stuff, it’ll feel just like home.