A Magic Box of Terror and Wonder

My friend Gabriel is a computer repair guy, self-employed, who last time I checked charged $75.00 per hour. He once told me that something like half his house calls were for problems no more complex than showing the owner the power button.

I'm typing this on a Gateway laptop that Barb and I bought from a tenant in Mom's building who purchased it new in June of last year and was never able to activate Windows Vista and could therefore never even get to the desktop of his $650 machine. Poor guy – an octogenarian, but I don't think it would have made much of a difference if he'd been thirty years younger – got so frustrated that he sold the virtually unused machine to us for $200. I discovered that Vista needed to go online to assure its corporate overlords that it was genuine, and because Ed (the old guy) didn't have internet at home, it locked him down. Indeed, when I booted it up for the first time it displayed a message: “This copy of Windows is pirated.” But it wasn't.

I ended up calling MS and getting Vista activated, but it was neither intuitive nor effortless. I offered the machine back to Ed, but he wanted nothing to do with it. He took our two hundred bucks and went to Vegas. I respect his priorities.

I have often complained, “I never wanted to be a PC hobbyist!” I never did. But I wanted to own a PC, and it seems like the one follows the other. I don't understand how so many people own and use PCs when they have no idea how to solve their myriad problems. I imagine they must just yield to frustration, which I suppose may be a good lesson in Zen or something. Mom's friend Michael bought a new PC a year or so ago and impressed me with his ability to set up its DVR capabilities, to burn DVDs, etc. Then one day when he booted up he got a dialog box containing an error message of some kind. It didn't seem to cause any trouble, but it was annoying. He couldn't figure out how to get rid of it. I suggested googling the text in the box and seeing what resulted. He did (so did I), but no easy answers were to be found. As far as I know that same error message continues to annoy him to this day. As minor problems like that pile up, as his registry gets fouled, he's going to need to do a clean install. Then what? Either take the plunge himself, as I did one terrifying day years ago, or pay somebody hundreds of dollars to do it for you and continue to regard your computer as if it were the Ark of the Covenant – a magic box of terror and wonder.

Clearly, PCs aren't refrigerators. Our loyal Whirlpool has been chugging away, doing it's job, for three years without requiring any attention whatsoever. And it was used when we got it and is probably ten years old or more. I expect that kind of ease of ownership from my major appliances – stove, washer, dryer, microwave.

Perhaps cars offer a model of ownership that is more comparable for PCs. Cars need regular, expensive maintenance – brakes, belts, tires, etc. Buyers of new computers should budget for the $300 worth of yearly Geek Squad bills if they're not willing to sink dozens or hundreds of hours of their lives into learning about these irritating but seductively empowering devices.

Or just make friends with someone who has done so, which, come to think of it, is probably how a lot of PCs are maintained. Which is why last time I saw Gabriel he was wearing a t-shirt that read: No, I will not fix your computer.