The End Of A Blogging Era

I don’t want people to get upset at this, but I have some sad news that I feel I need to inform you about. A death, very close to my heart has occurred of a very close friend. In fact, my greatest ally when it came to writing rants about varying topics in usually over a thousand words. I now have to face a future in blogging without the help of this friend. I will continue, but it will be difficult for a long while. I miss having this companion by my side. The death happened Tuesday the 5th April 2011 late in the evening. It was sudden and unexpected. Attempts at resuscitation were futile. For once, turning it off and on again did not work. The cause of death was the failure of a vital organ: The graphics card. Yes my loyal reader, my laptop, imaginatively named ‘Laptopo’, has died.

Just weeks before his third birthday, the dreaded blue screen appeared. It’s like watching the life drain from the eyes of a loved one as they look at you for the final time, before collapsing in front of your very eyes. You become over whelmed by emotion. It happened so quickly you just don’t know what to do. You rush over and hold them in your arms, turn them off and on again in a vain attampt to rescue them, but it was too late: upon the reboot, it was obvious The Grim Reaper has taken his latest victim.

Evidence upon the reboot that Laptopo has died.

Tuesday was a normal day. That evening I had come home and switched on my laptop like I do every single day. I had sat on Facebook and Twitter reading boring update after boring update after boring update, while doing little bits of writing here and there for various projects. Like every evening, I also spent time bemoaning the slow streaming of videos on YouTube. I had watched my current favourite song (Patrick Wolf – The City) in staggered moments. Then, I began watching Stewart Lee clips for some comic relief, when, while Stewart Lee slatted Russell Brand on my screen, Laptopo died. I had a tear in my eye.

That tear was partly due to the untimely death of my friend, but also for the inappropriate timing of my friend’s death. Just when you need them the most, they bugger off it seems. As many teenagers of my age doing their A-levels will know, exam season is fast approaching. Therefore it is handy when your laptop, with all your work saved on, dies and takes it all with him. Some will cry ‘Well, you should have backed up’. Well, Mr Hindsight, I have been backing up. Once a month, I back up. A back up was due, so the past months work was lost. Not a lot, but enough to be a big pain up the royal arse.

The next day, I drove to PC World with the corpse of my fellow comrade on the passenger’s seat, to beg of them to save the memory of the deceased friend.

 Now, this were my blog changes tone from being a compassionate epilogue about the death of a loved one, to a rage against the machine.

 Bloody PC World! Like every corporate machine, they want money to even look you in eye.

This particular corporate machine back it’s customers into a corner, so they have no choice but to either be a computer expert themselves with all the correct gizmos, or to pay a PC World employee to do it for you. It cost £30 to get my stuff, which I created myself, back in my accessible hands. This was my own writing and my own photography. If you spent a week building a lovely shelving unit, then you had to pay a stranger for it, you would be fuming. Mind you, if the Coalition had its own way, they would start taxing people as freely as that.

The people at PC World were rather lovely, if not unnaturally obsessed with watching Loose Women and Janet Street-Porter’s lazy right eye. I still wouldn’t say the experience was worth the £30. All he did was dock my Hard Drive (If that isn’t a euphemism, I don’t know what is…) and put various bits of its contents on a DVD disc. £30! Pah! If I were a Gypsy, I’d put a curse on them; or sell them some lucky heather in an attempt to earn my money back.

Now, my computing life is very scattered. I have my music and pictures of an external Hard Drive. I have my current work on a number of memory stick. I’m borrowing a laptop to allow me onto the Internet for a few weeks (and indeed writing this very blog from). Then, I’m using my old laptop to do work on, such as using Photoshop. I was using my old laptop for the Internet, but then I remembered why it became my old laptop. Every 5 minutes, the Internet cuts out because the laptop stupidly decides to change the network password. I never named my old laptop because we never really ‘hit it off’, and now you understand why: he was a bastard!

Now, I’m going to have to spend hours pouring over websites to determine what laptop will be a sufficient replacement. You can’t replace love like what I and Laptopo had, but he was soon reaching retirement age. He became easily confused and was very slow to do anything; much like a senile old man you have to keep waking up whenever you want to have a conversation with him.

It looks like I will soon be entering the Windows 7 generation, and from what I have experienced on this laptop I have borrowed, it is exactly the same as Vista, just a bit more transparent and the use of any lexis is kept to a minimum. Obviously Microsoft spent billions of dollars on redesigning their new Operating System. I would get a Mac however if I had the money, but bloody Apple with their desirable, white, products, have to make everything so sodding expensive.

Now, please join me in a moments silence to remember my great friend. Rest In Peace Laptopo; you were one in a few hundred thousand!