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March 28, 2003
Pentium Post-Mortem
My parents got their new computer today. It's a brand new Dell Pentium 4 running Windows XP, which replaces their old Pentium 120 MHz running Windows 95. The old machine had been on its last leg for quite a while now. It would receive occasional loving whenever I came home in between terms at university. Little things like updating the antivirus, or installing the latest service packs were things that extended the machine's life by another few months.
A few months ago the on-board battery died, so the system clock was permanently at 12:00am, January 1, 1980. This didn't prove to be a big problem, except that the web browser would occasionally freak out when web sites would issue security certificates dated over 20 years in the future.
Since I'll be leaving soon, and won't be back to work my magic on the computer anymore, my parents decided to get a new one. I spent all day today migrating documents, bookmarks and profiles from the old computer to the new one. The old computer doesn't have a USB port, so I couldn't hook up my external CD Burner, nor my Compact Flash card reader. I had to resort to floppy disks. Lots of floppy disks.
I expect that with this new Dell, my parents won't be phoning me up when the modem doesn't work, and I have to talk my mom through physically removing, then reinstalling it. Not anymore.