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InterregnumNovember 03, 2006 Morgana IV has been acting a bit ditzy in recent months. This morning it was looking a lot like Alzheimer's: IExplorer crashed, Windows stalled, and after a hard reboot obnoxious Scandisk -- who's been telling me oh-so-helpfully for how many years that to avoid seeing this message again I should shut my computer down properly: You stupid little shit IF I COULD HAVE SHUT MY COMPUTER DOWN PROPERLY I WOULD HAVE! -- couldn't get past 2%. Hard reboot; same thing happened. Hard reboot again; didn't even get that far. Morgana IV turned six in early August. Only Morgana I, she of the 10MB hard drive and the 5 1/4-inch floppies, lived longer. By July I'd decided in principle that it was time to think about a new computer, but it was an expensive summer and Morgana IV wasn't dead yet. This morning I was sickeningly sure that I had waited too long. I left her shut down and went for a walk with Rhodry. Twenty minutes later, in hope and dread, I pressed the power button. She lives! First I backed up and printed out the in-process style sheets for my current job. Then I hit the Gateway website. Morgana IV wasn't dead -- yet -- but she wasn't state of the art even when she was new. Now XP is about to give way to Vista and I'm still running Windows 98? With 128 MB of RAM? And a 17-inch old-style monitor that was new in 1997? And a CD-ROM drive that reads but can't write? I surfed, I saw, I mix-and-matched. A flat-screen LCD monitor, of course. The latest version of Word, which I'll probably hate as much as I hate every version of Word because none of them are WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS, and a newer Quicken than the version I've got. I didn't know what the hell a 9-in-1 media reader is, but after chatting online with a customer service rep I added a floppy drive to the setup. He added a free parallel port adapter so I can still use my HP LaserJet, which moved into this apartment not long after I did. I decided against an external hard drive, though deep down I think I ought to be doing whole-system backups like responsible people instead of saving the important stuff on Zip disks. Maybe I'll get one of those cute memory stick gizmos and hang my novel off my rearview mirror. What I'll do with all that storage capacity I don't know. Morgana IV's 15 gigabytes are barely two-thirds full. And how about that "blazing fast" processor? I'm the one who writes in longhand, remember? I'll probably have to get DSL to keep those lickety-chips from laughing at my dial-up connection. Morgana V won't be here for a couple of weeks. Just as well. The current copyedit is due on the 14th. Replacing one computer with another is like performing a brain transplant: it's a day or so before all the fingers and toes wiggle the way they're supposed to. Here's hoping Morgana IV keeps trudging till the rendezvous.
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