I have been procrastinating the purchase of a new computer for six months now. In another of the gender role reversals my marriage is known for, my wife has literally been offering me free money since last year to accomplish this task.
“Take the retirement money,” she implores me. “Right here out of the I.R.A. 64, 65; what’s a year when you’re already that old? Get a toy! DVD burner! Warcraft!”
And it’s tempting, God bless her. But “the good stuff always gets cheaper,” I tell her, often adding “baby,” and after spending thousands and thousands of dollars in my lifetime I have finally started to realize that it all ends up in the same place.
Still, there is such a thing as waiting too long.
Bill Gates is unveiling Windows Vista this week. Anything I tried to buy now would almost certainly come with it. New Windows doesn’t happen often, but every time it does it’s like opening up the newspaper and seeing, “English 10.0 ReLeased To-dai; Gleep Glop Glorp; Verbs at End of Sentences Always Now Come.”
It’s not a lot like that, but it’s a little like that. And there’s the next six months of your life.
Luckily, that gets better if you wait too.
January 30th, 2007 at 11:39 am
I thought it interesting that the lead story on MSN.com was “Vista:15 reasons why you should make the switch”. I have always been privy to your Windows change-over antipathy, even as far back as the original release of Windows95 - which revolutionized the use of cute graphics to depict computer operations. Windows 3.11 didn’t have a flashlight when you looked for things, or a graphic of pieces of paper switching folders when copying files. It simply moved the files. At the time, I thought your dour view on new Windows was a little bit severe. I was excited (in a mild nerd way) and hadn’t lived enough life to see through hype yet. I’m sure the new Windows will be better insofar as it fixes all the security glitches until they discover that the same thing that allows for translucent windows can be exploited to reveal your SSN, address, and most traumatic childhood experiences. By the time all the fixes come out, it’ll only take a cray and the next generation of quantum memory (where stuff is temporarily strored in a limitless parallel universe - same place as where optimus prime’s trailer goes) to run. Yet, for all of this, the new version of Microsoft Word will be functionally equivalent to what was out 12 years ago - only it’ll run much, much slower on a much newer, faster machine.
January 30th, 2007 at 12:59 pm
Or you could leave the evil of Microsoft altogether and join me in happy-Apple-land. Yes, where the OS is stable, and it has been slowly upgraded over the last few years instead of a wild release that “changes everything”.
Not to mention if you already have a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, the Mac Minis are really reasonable, and surprisingly powerful.
Just my two cents… which is worth more than everyone else’s two cents due to a impressively favorable exchange rate.
January 30th, 2007 at 2:20 pm
We have gone over this time and time again, young man. I would almost rather have John Hodgman actually stab me in the back. In one of the fleshy parts. Missing all the vital organs.
January 30th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
now that the can is open and the worms are spreading around the site, i’d like to second raukodraug and say that not *all* computers on the market at this moment will soon be upgraded to vista.
(join us)
January 30th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
You guys are right; it could always be worse. My entire computer could work like iTunes.
January 31st, 2007 at 12:36 pm
you could pay a dollar for each website you looked at. Pop-ups would still be free, though.
February 4th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Macintosh!
February 5th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
Goddammit, stop loving merchandise! Believe in something!