Rediscoverer

It’s my birthday today. But nevermind that. I got a new PC as an advanced birthday give. Well not really a gift. And not really intended for my birthday. It’s just that my brother was stupid enough to mess with my old PC (prehistoric computer). One day I came home with coverless CPU welcoming me at my desk, the hard drive and CD-rom drive detached. I got really pissed off (I arrived late in the evening from work) and almost woke everyone in the house. My mother told me that my brother (who just arrived from several months of his duty on a ship) tried to “repair” my PC (just ot remind you: he doesn’t know anything about computer hardware!) and see what he can do with my busted CD-rom drive (he was planning to replace it with a spare one). I was always reluctant in disassembling and replacing the parts of my PC because the parts were in critical shape. It was really old, a PIII 550 mhz, 64+32mb SD-RAM PC-100, 10G disk space (laughable, yes; but it was the top of the line during its time). If any part of it breaks down, I won’t be able to find any replacements, which means “bye-bye PC”. It tried to save my PC by putting back the harddisk and the CD-rom drive. Someone also messed with the processor settings. Mom also told me that my brother tried to bring it to a repair shop when he realized things were getting out of hand. But of course, the technician wasn’t able to revive it since it was way too old for him. Might be because of some weird evil magic, I was able to run it and see the Windows start up screen again. But then, it just froze… and that’s just about it. I didn’t see the start up screen again. I tried to repair it again but I kept on getting a mild dose of free flowing electrons on my arms. The PC was turned off but still plugged in, so I knew it was already grounded. I remember a previous computer repair shop telling me that my PC was hopeless, since the power box (I don’t know if it was the right term) inside my PC was failing, and anytime soon my motherboard might get toasted. I think it already happened.

My mom gave me some money (from her savings) to buy a new PC (and save my brother from a terrible beating). But I told her I’d pay it on a monthly basis, so I can tell myself I am the sole owner of my PC, and have all the authority to eternally ban my brother from PC use. More than half of the money that was used to buy my old PC came from my allowance savings (from skipping break time meals) during my first year in college. The rest was from my parents, but they told me I should share the machine with my sister and my brother. I know that I would regret this someday, since they used to break my toys when I was a kid, I was afraid they’ll do it to my new “toy”. They said being the eldest, I should be more considerate and share. Errr… I didn’t have much choice. But now, I have total control over PC use.

My new PC is quite lovely (btw, I only bought the CPU, my monitor was still good since it was replaced not more than a year ago). It’s faster than my office PC, nice 3d graphics card (help! I might get addicted to PC games again!) plus a DVD-rom drive (too bad a rewriter didn’t fit the budget). When I worked on remote, I accomplished things much faster. Well, it is almost as fast as my office PC when it comes to web dev (running a localhost and testing apps), not to mention my dial-up connection is (most of the time) faster than our (clogged) DSL connection at the office so my uploads are not stalled/interrupted. Perhaps, when I get decent DSL connection at home, I might work on remote more frequently. It’s really nice specially during those days when you need all the time in the world to to some work and couldn’t afford to lose your precious time going into office.

Hmmm.. I’m still thinking of a name for my new PC. Just in case you’re wondering, I named my old PC “SANG”. Why? It was named after my imaginary friend (no she’s not one of the code elves). Weird.