smart computer use?

If it’s not a major inconvenience, it can be very worthwhile to keep an old computer or two around. I’m not necessarily talking about ancient computers. I’m talking about stuff like keeping the last computer that you replaced with your newest computer. And maybe the other computer before that.

Why?

I like to think that even if I buy a new computer, the old one can serve some dedicated or more specific purpose.

For example: An old laptop that I have serves as a drum machine. It runs a copy of Propellerheads Reason 2.5 (which is very lightweight on resources, by the way). I use it only as a drum machine and synthesizer. Nothing else.

The computer works great for that purpose, even though it is over 5 years old.

This might just be my overreacting, but I think the thought is valid.

It seems that at certain times I am just a slave to my computer software needing to update itself. Between using 3 different computers on a somewhat daily basis there is sometimes more time spent getting distracted by prompts for updates. And when stuff prompts me to update it, it’s always at an inconvenient time as far as my computer use goes.

Windows XP pretty much is always prompting for some sort of update. I get prompted by the Java runtime engine to update frequently. Wordpress screams to be updated from right underneath the main options menu, but not very frequently. Firefox releases an update. Thunderbird prompts to download latest update.

AVG anti-virus at least updates itself. Sometimes it throws a prompt up that actually sits and tells me it’s gonna count down from 30 before it gets out of my way. Why not 5 seconds? That’d be much more reasonable.

And then I move onto the next machine and pretty much go through all the similar update motions at other random intervals.

There’s all of that bothersome stuff.

And then Propellerheads goes and releases version 4 of Reason. So I actually go through the entire process of ordering, paying for, and receiving in the mail a Reason 4 upgrade.

It’s probably going to be worth my time to actually pay attention to this matter and disable a bunch of the auto update processes. Life will once again resume without updating madness.

Alright. Here’s a classic tale of computing.

Approximately 38 minutes ago I grabbed the laptop (the one I’m using right now), flipped it open, and thought to myself “hey, I should email that Doom rickroller video to some people right now”. How I came to this thought is a much longer and different story. I’ll leave it for a different time. If you are wondering what a rickroller is, check this out. I found the whole rickroller thing to be pretty amusing.

Back to this story.

I opened up Firefox. All my tabs were reloaded from the night before, including the tab with the Doom rickroller video from youtube. I then opened up gmail and started to compose a message.

Upon hitting ctrl+v to paste the rickroller video link into the message field, Firefox just pretty much froze up. Weird. I waited minute just in case it was a javascript thing or something. No go. I then tried to close Firefox. No go.

This laptop, although dependable and pretty nice, can get kinda flaky when it’s left on and goes in and out of hibernation a lot over an extended period of time. Being the somewhat impatient and reckless computer user that I can be sometimes, I just held down the power button and killed the machine.

Upon restart, the machine crashed and rebooted. I was asked politely by Vista to go into a startup repair mode. Okay. Sounds good. I’ve never seen this before but it sounds like a good idea. I ran startup repair. The machine sat and thought, using a load bar to show me that it was thinking about something. Then it prompted me to run system restore.

No way. I didn’t want to run that. I had just installed Propellerheads Reason 4, and didn’t feel like needing to reinstall Reason if the system restore rolled back too far. I hit Cancel.

Now, you might be thinking I’m an idiot. Truth is, sometimes I just don’t care if my computers crash. I should maybe be more concerned.

I then had to sit and wait for about 20 minutes while my machine completed the startup repair operation. I had no idea how long it was going to take until it ended.

All I wanted to do was email the rickroller video link. That was just too much to ask.

Anyways, after the repair completed and shut down, I started the computer and decided to type this. Good stuff I guess.