The Fate of New Computers in My House

Originally posted 2008-12-12 07:27:04

In recent months, two computers in my home reached the ends of their useful lives. The first was the HP desktop that my children use. They’ve loaded so many game demos on it over the years that it had become painfully sluggish. I was going to wipe and reinstall the OS, but the DVD drive doesn’t work. I had replaced the drive some months ago, and it worked for a week then quit working again, so it’s probably an issue with the motherboard. The computer is old enough, and my time is valuable enough, that it was simply cheaper to give the computer to a geeked-out nephew and buy a Lenovo on sale for less than $500 (3 GB RAM, 500 GB hard drive, 19\” monitor).

The other computer that died was my wife’s HP laptop. The connector on the power cord was bent in some sort of accident, which can easily happen in my home (three adults, five children, three dogs, one cat, and a parrot), and I don’t know if the problem is with the power cord or the connector on the computer, but no matter which it would be expensive (both to the wallet and the schedule) to buy replacements and troubleshoot the issue. Old laptops don’t merit that kind of hassle. So again I went shopping and found a $499 laptop–again, a Lenovo–with 3GB RAM, 300+ GB hard drive, and all the power my wife needs to do email, buy things on the Internet, and update her Facebook status.

Both these new computers are much more powerful than their predecessors. They’re sleek, robust, and satisfy all my wife’s and children’s computing needs. I should be a hero, but I’m not. They hate them. The culprit? Vista. They say, \”It’s slow and it doesn’t work right.\” Apparently, they’re not the only ones saying that, as Windows market share drops below 90%.

My children use two applications: Firefox and Word. They surf the web and they write papers for school. They’ll soon be moved to OpenOffice.org. My wife uses 3 applications: GMail (through Firefox), Facebook (through Firefox), and OpenOffice.org. Oh, and she shops, all through Firefox. I’m switching them both to Linux this weekend, and I’ll regain my hero title.