A Fond Farewell to my Secondhand Dell

Hey, that title rhymed without even trying!

Anyway, as I make the final preparations for this move, I have decided that my Dell computer, donated to me by my sister after she joined the Cult of Apple, would not make the move.

Most people only replace computers when they breakdown, make the BIG crash, other electronic cataclysms occur. If I waited that long, I'd be saddled with this thing for a loooong time, I think. No, this was a good machine that just got outpaced by the resource creep of all the applications and just couldn't keep up, tossing out low virtual memory warnings every hour or so. I could hear it's groans, like an old coot complaining about those damn kids on his lawn.

"256MB to run THIS?!? Back in my day, we did our werd processin', our emailin' and our web surfin' all on 64MB, and still had enough fer runnin' Quake 3! You young apps have no idea how to manage yer mem'ry!"

"Gawd, another service pak update? How come evry' time you find another one of 'em security flaws, it costs me more of my clock cycles?"

"I don't care what your hoodlum freinds are doin'! You ain't leavin this house without a 3.5 inch floppy drive! Any file that fancies itself to be more than 1.44MB can't be up to no good anyway!"

"If God had meant for us to read DVDs, he'd have wired it in with the CD-R! If the PS2 jumped off a bridge, would you do the same?"

"Lordy, you new LCD monitors are too damned skinny! Eat somethin' fer Crissake!"

I'm typing this from my new laptop, it's low end, but it's 2007 low end, which runs circles around 2001 mid-tier computers. I just transferred all necessary documents and files to it (and it still has room for so much more!), tomorrow morning I'm vaporizing its hard drives, and donating it to Goodwill. It's still good enough for them to refurbish it, and sell to a low income family that needs Internet access, or to some adventurous grandma that wants to see what exactly is this Internet thing that her grandkids keep jabbering about. I hope it will serve them well, for it has reached the end of it's usefulness for me.

Godspeed, my bulky sluggish friend!