A Venerable Laptop is Laid to Rest

October 13, 2008

Welcome back to the blogosphere, Matt Traum!

My HP Pavilion ZV5000 laptop kicked the bucket last week. This poor piece of portable Pentium 4 obsolesce faithfully served me for over 5 years. Our modern computer age demands planned obsolesce no more than 2 years after the purchase date; meaning my laptop remained useful to an extreme geriatric age. The thing survived an MIT doctoral dissertation. So, I was convinced that it could survive a nuclear war and that I would never need a new computer.

Through it could seemingly deflect mushroom clouds, my poor laptop was eventually done in by Microsoft updates. Although I could find no conspiracy theory on the Internet, I am convinced that those updates Microsoft keeps installing on Windows computers are malicious. Microsoft is trying to push its new Vista operating system, after all. How difficult would it be to check the operating system and age of a machine while running an update? If the computer isn’t running Vista, the update loads a bunch of clutter onto the machine, which gets worse with each update. Eventually, the machine is bogged down to a snail’s pace. This performance degradation entices the user to shell out for a new computer AND Microsoft’s new operating system. Hallelujah!

Of course, I have no proof of this conspiracy theory; except that over the past few months every Microsoft update that finds my laptop has caused it to run ever more slowly. By Monday last week, it took my computer 10 minutes to find its own hard drive. By Thursday, boot-up led inexorably to the Microsoft Blue Screen of Death^TM. Sure, I could probably wipe the hard drive, reinstall the original software, and revitalize my relic laptop for another 6 months of service, but who has the time? It seemed like the right time for a new computer anyway.

So, for the past week, I have been exclusively using my work computer pending the purchase of a new home machine. However, since I have a specific agreement with my employer that I will not use any university resources to produce this blog, my readers were left pining away for a new post while I purchased and set up my new home desktop machine.

Sorry for the hiatus, but now that I’m up and running at home again, my blog posts should return to their regular frequency.

Posted by Matthew Traum on October 13, 2008 | Comments (0)

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