Actually, my old computer didn’t die, but its replacement did.
That was a year ago. I needed to upgrade my old faithful PC, as it was beginning to struggle with a lack of memory. I suppose that comes to us all eventually. For several years it had done a good job, but time had arrived to upgrade to something that didn’t take thirty seconds to start a YouTube video.
Enter a new Dell, Windows 10 PC. Well, a new(ish) refurbished Windows 10 PC. All was well until it wasn’t. After three months it developed a clunking sound at start-up, only running silent after a restart. It sounded like something was going to fail, so I took it back to the shop.
“It’s a noise from the fan.” Said the shop assistant.
“No, it isn’t,” I replied. “I took the side off, and the noise is near the start button. A component part is going to fail.”
“I’m afraid you will have to bring it back when it fails, as the PC runs perfectly on a reboot.”
Customer service.
I took it home, but one day three months later it made a clunking sound for the final time. I looked at the monitor, and it was like a scene from The Matrix. The picture was breaking up, Matrix-style, numbers falling down the screen. Except this was the PC wallpaper image making a pretty pattern of broken pixels.
I took it back to the shop, and as it was still under warranty, I got my money back. Once bitten, twice shy, I went back to my old and slow faithful PC, while looking out for something else.
When the replacement PC “died a death”, it was both sudden and frustrating. It reminded me that I didn’t need to rush. I returned to using slow, Old Faithful as it struggled to open a memory-sapping website, like YouTube or anything that Microsoft or Google filled with unwanted cookies.
But buying a new machine after a failure was a moment to step back and decide what I actually needed.
And that was how it was until a few weeks ago.
For some while, I had been keeping watch of a seller on Gumtree. He specialised in refurbished PCs, mainly self-built gaming machines with enough power to run the matrix, but there were others. So, I made an appointment to see him and told him the spec that I was looking for.
The day arrived, and he showed me several models, all in good condition, but more importantly, all in my price range. There were HP and Dell models, but the latter I was weary of after my previous experience. HP I had used before, and a couple looked just right. But then I saw a Lenovo PC. The spec was good; the PC looked new.
We did the deal.
I took it home and began to set it up. I set Old Faithful to one side, now in the role of being a backup. I might try to revive it with a Linux OS. See if that helps to speed it up. But in the meantime, Lenovo was the shiny new toy, full of speed and raring to go.
A few days later, I was making my way home from a shopping trip, taking a shortcut via a route that I rarely took. At the end of the road, I noticed something ahead of me. It was outside a local church, a modern building. In its car park stood a recycling bin, and near it a box. It was the box that had drawn my attention. On the side of the box, in big black letters, it said one word.
Lenovo.
I had to look. Would there be a PC inside it? No, the box was empty. Someone else, maybe the priest of the church, must have bought a Lenovo PC as well.
How strange.
Meaningless, but strange. It was as if the universe were having a joke at my expense. It’s not like every day of the week that I come across a box with the name of a computer on it that I have just bought. Or at any time for that matter.
A series of coincidences perhaps? Or it just might be that whoever, or whatever, is in control of the simulation was having some fun with me.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
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