The New Computer

 I was getting complacent about my old computer, which turned out not to be wise, because it started blacking out on me. Solid black nothing for a few seconds, and then it came back on. I was going to live with it, until I realized that the blackouts were happening more frequently and lasting longer.

So I decided to get a newer, non-blacking out computer.

Which I have done. Now I’m on the new computer learning curve.

This is an all-in-one computer, so it’s a monitor and a keyboard, and somewhere under or inside the monitor is where the computer innards live. It’s taking a little getting used to. My old computer ran on Windows 10. This one runs on Windows 11. There are little differences to which I need to become accustomed.

So far so good, right? I will reach a point where I’ll feel like this computer is as comfortable as old shoes, but I am not there yet. It has properties and abilities of which I am not even aware. My main uses for a computer are email, watching reels of gorillas and monkeys on Facebook, and playing solitaire. Windows computers have always been good for playing solitaire.

In fact, Mac aficionados have cast a lot of shade on PCs because they believe Macs are superior in every way. They might be right. I don’t know. I only know that I can afford to buy a PC, and the price tags on Macs are way out of my ballpark. I know they are good machines – I started on Macs back in the 1990s, believing they were superior. I had at least three – a Performa, an iMac, and an iBook. All worked fine, until they didn’t, and then I had to take them off the island to a Mac repair shop. About 2004 I purchased a Dell laptop because the newspaper for which I wrote used a PC platform.

I discovered almost immediately that I like PCs better than Macs, for a few reasons, but the main reason is that PCs are language based, and Macs are visuals based. Language is my wheelhouse, and I was happy to start using the dolled up DOS system upon which Windows was based. It felt more natural to me than the Apple products.

Also, for a few hundred bucks I could get a computer that did everything a much more expensive Mac did. The other reason I like PCs is that I don’t have to leave the island and find a repair shop every time something goes caca. Nowadays, you don’t even have to defrag computers once a week.

I used to enjoy the colors that came with the defragging screen, I admit. But I don’t miss the process of sitting here waiting for the computer to sort itself out. Soon the defragging process was changed to an unsupervised process that automatically took place in the night. You could pick the day and time. Now defragging is not even mentioned. I wonder if computers defrag anymore.

One of the properties of growing old is realizing how fast your life went by. The pace at which computer technology and usage has grown parallels that speed. You can get the best and most modern version of a computer, and in a blink there are machines coming out that do more, faster, and your computer is a dinosaur.

A dinosaur is what I feel like these days. I really enjoy talking with members of my cohort – the early baby boomers – they get the references and jokes that I get. Whenever that meme comes up on Facebook that says, “If you remember more than 10 of these things, you are older than dirt,” I say, ten? Heck. I always remember every single one of their examples from bygone days. Wringer washing machines, little wax “coke bottles” with sweet syrup inside, candy cigarettes, and meat from the butcher shop wrapped in brown paper and string. We reused that string, too.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, new computer, I feel like a dinosaur, and my printer won’t work yet. It will, I know, if only because I have three boxes of ink cartridges for it and I don’t want to give up on it until I have used up that ink.

So here I am, trying to figure out this spiffy machine’s workings. I’ll get there.