Hardware/software conflicts in my favor

I just got a new laptop from work. This is a joyous, joyous day.

My old laptop was five years old, which is 127 in laptop years, and my 2002 vintage RAM had gotten very tired. To be brutally honest, it had lost some of its mental capacity.

Sometimes I would try and load a Web site and the hard drive would spin and spin and the laptop would shake and I’d stare at the green bar at the bottom right, never quite filling all the way up, and a bird would chirp outside the window and I’d look out at that and get lost in a reverie about the wonder of nature and, before you knew it, it was lunch time and I had forgotten what Web site I was trying to load. And then it would cough to life and I’d remember, oh yeah, I was going to look up that song on All Music, and I’d hit refresh and soon enough the workday would be done. My productivity suffered slightly.

But this new laptop! It flies on gossamer wings. I can have my work e-mail running in the background while I play Flash games. Most importantly, without the games freezing up.

The real secret to my new laptop’s success, I realized, is that while my company upgraded the hardware they were perfectly happy with the same software from 2002. I was pleasantly surprised to see all my old friends on my new laptop. Hello Qwark Xpress 5! Qwark 7.3? Never heard of you. And I’ve got Photoshop 7.0, which practically runs in DOS, but by God it’s fast.