Technical Difficulties

The laptop I brought to England was never particularly good. My parents got it for me as an emergency backup when I was still at USC and had the desktop as a primary computer, and it was only supposed to be good enough to take notes in class and play movies to entertain me when I was trying to draw (why yes, I am horribly spoiled, why do you ask?) If I had needed a new laptop to be my primary computer, they would have gotten me a better one, but this one was never supposed to be more than a glorified typewriter.

Then, this whole England thing happened. They didn't really see it coming. Neither did I. But I couldn't bring the desktop, and my other laptop is 6 years old and was starting to show signs of computer senility about three years ago (my parents brought it over in December, to be an emergency backup in case this one died, but I'm kind of afraid to turn it on at this point). So I brought this one and I'm stuck with it, and it's beginning to act eccentic, which is never a good sign when you have a dissertation to write.

I keep Skyping my dad to beg for help, because the laptop only has half a gig of RAM, and playing music while running Word is at the very limit of its capabilities, and it's beginning to develop bizarre issues, like its recent refusal to insert more than one image into any given Word document (images are slightly crucial to my dissertation) and its inability to work with the software for my printer. (Also because I have a degree in art and I'm finishing up a degree in archaeology, so clearly computers were never my top priority.) And I have to give him credit. All his answers have been helpful, like "Why don't you try reinstalling Word, and installing Open Office if that doesn't work, and how about seeing if the computer stores in town have a scanner you can buy for under 50 pounds so you can at least grab all the images you need for your dissertation?"

As a totally random aside, he has done a good job of educating me about computers against my will. Last September he handed me a box and said, "NewEgg was having a sale on DVD burners. I got you a new one. Go install it in your desktop." And I did, because I knew how to, because he had made me build my desktop from parts he gave me, and I knew how to hook a DVD drive up. I was actually vaguely creeped out by the whole experience. I suspect, however, that if I ever get my desktop over here, he will amuse himself by giving me upgraded hardware "only if you can install it yourself," so it's good that I actually learned. He is, much like my mother, secretly evil.

Anyway. I feel it would be well within his rights for him to exclaim "Hey! I wrote both my master's and PhD dissertations on a typewriter! And I didn't like it, as a matter of fact, but by golly you can use the school's computers and stop whining to me about how you can't play music and run Word at the same time!" I am, in fact, very fortunate to be the offspring of a man who thinks that the perfect afternoon is an afternoon spent trying to reconfigure an obstinate hard drive to run with his operating system (as this is what he spent yesterday doing.) Still, I think I'm going to ask for a new laptop for my birthday in two months.