15 Dec 2005 ... Eulogy for my Computer

My beloved computer, Fiasco the Second, died Tuesday the 13th of December at appromaxiately 12:15pm. He died quietly, doing the work that he loved. He is survived by his older brother computer, Temperamental, and a younger half-brother, Meat. Fiasco had just turned five years old.

Fiasco II's passing was unexpected and has been a terrible shock to the entire family. It is always hard to lose a computer, but it is especially difficult during the holidays.

He had a good life, a productive life. Fiasco was always such a hard worker, and his ever cheerful attitude will be sorely missed. He helped me through hard times and shared my happiness in the good times. Typing, drawing, clicking, reading, creating and deleting, Fiasco has served me well and I bid him a tearful adiou.

So, yeah, the other day I was just working on some christmassy graphics for this place, and Fiasco just, *click* turned off. No explosions, no electrical fire, just quietly, a lack of power flow.

I went into troubleshooting mode, but it was pretty obvious that there would be no resuscitating poor Fiasco this time. I'm sure something on the motherboard burned out... not the first time, he had burnt out the motherboard connections for all the internal fans just a couple months after he was born: burnt as in smoke happened, which is why I am happily surprised there was no electrical fire or explosion this time around.

yeah, I needed a new computer anyway.

I wasn't too worried at first... I figured I'd move into my old computer for a couple weeks until after the holidays, get a job and then put together a new computer. Unfortunately, the old computer, Temperamental, is unable to cope, even as a temporary computer.

Temperamental has a 150mhz CPU and 32megs of RAM... Fiasco had a 850mhz CPU and 512megs of RAM. Temperamental simply can't run the software I'm used to: FireFox, Norton AntiVirus, Eudora, TreePad, NoteTab... Minimum requirement is a 200Mhz computer with a lot more RAM than Temperamental has.

Temperamental is doing the best he can, but he's really slow. It takes about five reboots in the morning to get all the software and DLLs organized enough to run... yep, that's about half an hour or so just to turn on the poor baby. Anytime I click a button, open a file, anything, there is a pause of a few seconds to a few minutes.

heh. So, my computer activities are going to be limited until I get some money going and buy a new computer. In the meantime I can painfully write S8 entries on Temperamental, and I can do some of my Internet surfing on my SO's computer, Meat.

But there's no more wacom tablet, no Palm handheld, no scanner... these all have USB connections and out of reach minimum requirements! Back to the dark ages: and looking forward to getting a new computer.

sighs. I had to go back through my archives here to figure out Fiasco II's birthday. You can read about that mess, and the short life of Fiasco the First, here: 3 Sept 2000. And I can tell you now, I'll never buy computer parts online again!