It’s time to byte the computer bullet

When I was a spotty kid, a ZX81 was the cutting edge computing tech to have.

When the Spectrum arrived, I assumed we’d peaked – surely nothing could be more advanced than that?

Well, clearly I was so wide of the mark, I nearly tripped over it from the other side.

We carry around way more computing power in our mobile phones than my youthful self could have ever imagined.

In my teenage years, with early CD players appearing, I would sit in the pub and talk with friends about what it would be like if you could store all your music on a tiny, portable, device. Come to think of it, we should probably have copywrited that idea. Damn.

My phone can pretty much do that too. And I can watch video on it, read books and actually use it to call people. The “Frankie Says Relax” T-shirt wearing me would be very impressed indeed.

20-something me borrowed an early laptop from work – it nearly broke my arm carrying it home on the bus. It’s hunger for 5 inch floppy disks (when they were actually floppy) and general sluggishness barely foretold the speedy, lightweight machines of today. Well, almost. If you’re one of those people that applies the ‘Dog Years’ principle to their pooch, then my laptop is roughly the same age as Dolly Parton in Computer Years (but does at least still have most of its original parts).

At the ripe old age of five human years, it struggles to cope with video, adds unrequested juddery remixes to music and seems to have had some kind of cyberspace-themed spat with twitter, regularly crashing the web browser just as I finally have something mildly interesting to say, or a picture of kitten I badly need to share with the world.

As the battery on my vintage machine (Windows Vista, anyone?) gives me around five minutes life once unplugged, it has effectively become a desktop but with a rubbish keyboard and a touchpad I regularly hit by mistake.

Had I been slightly better at writing, I might have edged fellow columnist Darren McSweeney into second place in Big Blogger a couple of years ago, and bagged myself a shiny new laptop.

There was a time when ‘tower’ computers truly lived up to their name. I once had one on my desk at work and didn’t see sunlight all day, so vast was its size. Now though, they’re smaller than a box file.

So the time has come to get with I.T., and consign my laptop to that cupboard containing other old devices in that I’m not quite sure how to dispose of, or be sure I’ve erased the data from.

I’ll soon be entering the dark, puzzling, world of trying to transfer files over, work out how Windows 8 works, and swearing quite a lot whilst looking bemused.

If you never see another column from me, it’ll be because I’m still trying to work out how to plug it in.

This post first appeared as my 'Thank grumpy it's Friday' column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 4th of July 2014. You can view it on the paper's website here - once again, it seems to have been published in it's entirety.

Well actually, that isn't strictly true. This one was particularly over-long, and even after my usual poor attempts at editing, it was still a whole 15% fat. In the end, one whole paragraph got the axe, as the rest seemed to cope pretty well without it. For the sake of completeness (and because I rather like the last line) here it is. Waste not, want not, eh..?

Who came up with the term ‘laptop’ anyway? Every manufacturers manual I’ve ever seen says you need to keep the fan unobstructed, and then, for some kind of lark, they put it on the bottom, meaning it would be obstructed if you did plonk it on your lap. If your idea of fun is to have your private parts gently poached by an overheating computer, then I guess it must be happy days.

I picked up the new 'puter this morning - I say 'new'; it's had one previous owner, and is under a year old. I'm reliably advised to get it upgraded to Windows 8.1 smartish, although this presupposes I can actually figure out how to do that. I also have to install some software onto my dongle to make it wifi. Or something. This blog is therefore posted as one of the final acts of the Dell you see above, and might also be the last thing you see from me ever, depending on how badly the procedure goes.

Whilst I was attempting to sound like I new what I talking about when it came to computer tech with the seller, I realised that, having removed my shoes upon entering their home, I was wearing odd socks, one of which had a hole for bonus effect. This wardrobe-related faux-pax (in my defence, they were at least clean) rendered my limited Tech Chat centre inoperative. I don't think he noticed.

(Compilation CD on the go tonight: The Original 80s Remix Box Set, which is a bit of a fib, as some of the 80s songs involved are actually remix versions from the 90s or 00s. Still - T'Pau!)