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Siddhu Warrier |
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The exact date is hidden in the mists of time, but I remember the year was 1994. My father had always been interested in these contraptions called computers. Till that fateful day, we ran an IBM PC, one of the first batch, I think, with 256k RAM and no hard disk. But that day I lugged home my cousin's computer, which had become ours. I was getting a brand new 486 DX to play with! Little did I know that this piece of machinery, in its various avatars, would torment us all for many years. Initially it behaved well. I think that was its honeymoon period. Apart from the few blue screens of death that Windows 3.0 (later Windows 3.1) was wont to produce on its bad days, we got along fine. The trouble began in 1995, a year in which the only other major catastrophe was four Australian kangaroos (suspected Christian missionaries) being arrested for jaywalking in Nigeria. A family friend gave us his old 486 DX 2 processor, a CD-ROM drive, and some old VESA local standard cards. My father enthusiastically tore our computer apart. He placed all of his new toys in. I do not recall whether he had an excited grin on his face. It was then that father learnt a fact of life -- putting ISA and VESA cards together is akin to placing Pervez Musharraf and Nawaz Sharief in the same room. The computer behaved, for most of the time, worse than me in one of my temper tantrums. In anger, it would reboot itself, give errors every 15 minutes. And then finally, in 1997, it passed away noisily, while other 486s frolicked on the green grass. It was then that my father met a man in Bombay (whom I call either Discount Harry or Dirty Harry, as the mood suits me) who I am sure will go down in history as the most notorious chiseller. Father managed to obtain a discount from him in exchange for the remains of the 486, when he purchased a supposedly brand new Pentium with MMX technology. The 486 left, unwept for by all. The Pentium took its place in the same cabinet, leaving all of us hopeful of a fresh beginning. With a colour monitor, 32 whole megabytes of RAM, and Microsoft's new Windows 98, it looked more promising than Priyanka Gandhi's political star. But alas, it was not to be. It began misbehaving worse than the old 486 as soon as my father left for Bombay. My mother, and I, then an untried boy of 13, were introduced to a new friend: the illegal operation... The next three years were indeed most trying. Not because I had to write my board exams, but because I had to troubleshoot a computer, whose second name was trouble, every time my mother asked me to. I put all the blame on Bill Gates. I concluded, with logic born of sheer inexperience, that Windows 98 was a half-baked operating system. So I replaced 98 with 95. But when 95 behaved worse than 98, I returned to 98. My mother, a journalist, became used to the idea of the computer restarting itself -- as a result of a private joke, I am sure, between the CPU and the RAM -- every 30 minutes. Writing the same article twice became second nature to her. To this day, she hopes the editor saw an improvement in the quality of her work, thanks to her rewriting each article. In 2000, after replacing the RAM once and the hard disk twice, my exasperated mother, disregarding my father's pleas for thrift, bought a new computer. Not from that rotten blighter, Discount Harry, but from a much more reliable and estimable source. The old Pentium, along with its mouldy cabinet, was shrouded and removed to a dark corner. In 2001, father returned to Madras after three-and-a-half years of outstation postings. I still retain the strong belief that the blighted computer squeaked in joy when it saw its protector. Father decided to resurrect the computer. He was determined about it. I tried to persuade him not to use the Pentium because it was worse than its demented predecessor, the 486. But father was adamant. Though he listened to my ramblings, he systematically let it go, so to speak, through the other ear. Well, to cut a long story short, overcoming his rather expensive taste for thrift, he bought two NIUs -- for the uninitiated, network interface units -- and 30 metres of coaxial CAT5 cable. But the computer still misbehaved. So father replaced the motherboard with the only motherboard of that type still in stores; one that even in 1997 was an underperformer. The computer was stable, about as stable as it could ever be. It crashed only once every hour. Wow! When I finished the gruelling torture of my standard XII board exams, I found to my dismay that the mouldy old Pentium was my computer, and the good computer was my mother's and my mother's alone. I discovered that not only was the computer unstable, it was painfully slow too. I tried installing Windows NT 4, which I had heard was stable. But to no avail. It took three minutes to start up, and did not shut down, unless I switched the power off. I loaded Windows 2000, the most reliable Windows ever, according to the gurus at Microsoft, but then the computer was walking, not running. I loaded Windows Me, and learnt the art of meditation, as I waited 45 seconds for it to start. In the end I deleted all Microsoft products and loaded the famed 'uncrashable' Linux, courtesy RedHat Inc. I even purchased a book to learn all about it. But, alas, the computer dragged, and managed to crash while running Gnome, KDE, and the Bash Shell, all in the space of an hour. Right now, I think Windows 98 Second Edition is loaded. But the comp refuses to shut down or recognise my hard disk.
I think I need to switch it off once and for all.
Illustration: Lynette Menezes |
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