The Six Million Dollar Bore

I have a shiny new laptop, which arrived today.

The old Inspiron was suffering from weeping glands and boiler fouling and it was becoming dangerously unreliable. It was modified a few years ago to run on a mixture of crushed brown coal and fish oil (part of Springheel's "Solidarity with Cuba" initiative) but the stench had become almost unbearable and the clouds of dense, sooty smoke produced blinding headaches and crippling respiratory problems, especially amongst the dozen-strong team of stokers required to power the hard disk.

Of course, Dell would not touch the old girl after modification and, whilst Indian State Railways were kind enough to provide support at their Bangalore depot, poor day-to day maintenance by the Springheel in-house team (handicapped as they were by migraines and emphysema) led to serious leakage of oil and rusty water, and allowed rodent infestation to become a serious problem. With heavy heart, I began planning for a replacement.

The new machine is a revelation. It is clear that the use of electrical semiconductors instead of a system of brass valves and boxwood shutters dramatically increases processing power and speed. Windows Vista is very different from XP, although strangely reminiscent of the operating system on the memsahib's Mac. Co-incidence, I daresay. Obviously, I can't actually work the damn thing, and it has vast areas of functionality that are of no interest whatsoever to me...Games playing and so on. I see no point in all that nonsense. A good steam iron function would be useful, or a usb kettle. But attentions of the laptop industry, being dominated by Johnny Foreigner, are focussed elsewhere. It beggars belief that in the twenty-first century, it is still necessary to have a laptop and a digital ukelele tuner...

But I digress. New technology is the order of the day and here I am, rebuilt (in the manner of the bionic man) to be faster than I was before - better than I was before. Still the same old tedious guff, obviously, but it's more efficient guff.