On Tina. in Whey and Sonic Screwdrivers.

My new laptop, that is. Even after a month, I still haven’t fully explored all her settings ie fully set her up. Feel like I should have written this yesterday when it was fresh in my head. But, I promised myself I’d write today. Paused writing yesterday, as I feel I’m “writing too much”. Especially with all the BernieMemes on facebook.

And other things.

Seriously, how did I miss that video? Weird Al is my spiritual dad!

Anyway, over a year ago, I started having issues with Kelly Quark. I don’t directly think it was small child’s fault. I was always in the room when she was playing the original Star Wars Battlefront on it. Rig was on the floor, so it’s not like she could have hit it. I don’t see how she could have kicked it.

It wasn’t the boot drive, it was my storage drive. It was glitching. Thanks to partitioning, it was partially operational. I had all my passwords in a single notepad file, and I meticulously wrote them all down in the back of my journal. OH REALLY, AND IN MOVIES, THEY LAUGH AT THE OLD GUY WHO WRITES HIS PASSWORDS DOWN. I’ d rather have a clue of what email/password goes with what, rather than spend an entire day resetting all my passwords. I have at least… :: counts in head :: Six active passwords that pass the requirements of being in a foreign language, having one Klingon number, and a DNA sample from your grandma’s neighbor’s dog. No, not my grandma, YOUR grandma’s dog.

I did consider simply replacing the storage drive. See, the boot drive is an SSD, so if I had simply gotten a new hard drive, would have been fine. Thing is, Kelly Quark was getting up near ten years old. Oh, she ran just fine. Only issue I’ve had was, a few years ago, the LAN port died. Cheap work-around was a USB-LAN adapter.

So, I thought I’d rebuild her. Good case!

Maybe I should have just gone with a clean build.

It’s painful to think about, but my rebuild failed. Maybe it was the video card all along. Maybe it was the monitor. I don’t know. The CPU fans spun, the lights were colorful, but no display.

And if I were in a better mental state, I could have tried again. Take it all apart and put back together. But it hurt. It hurt a lot. Something I take so much pride in, and I failed. I just couldn’t bring myself to try again.

And so Kelly sat. And sat.

For internet things, I fell back on Ruby Red, my USS Stargazer of a laptop. Got her back in 2012 specifically for schoolwork. Got her underpowered on purpose so I wouldn’t play games, in the library. (You bet I found a way to, anyway.)

Let me give you an idea of how underpowered Ruby is, as you may take such a thing for granted.

Ruby lags when I open a new tab in her.

Yup.

It’s like living in the 90’s.

And so, last month, it had been a year since I tried and failed. I realized to just accept I wasted the money. And move on.

I was going to be alone for Christmas anyway. I decided to take a page out of Candi and Tashina’s book, and just buy a damned laptop. Oh, I considered getting a tower rig, but I felt it would be disrespectful to Kelly.

I decided to be slightly impulsive and not think too hard. If you’ve ever done a bit of product comparison on newegg.com, or looked at CPU/GPU charts on Tom’s Hardware, you know it’s a damned rabbit hole of enthusiasts masturbating over their benchmark numbers. How long it takes to render a video, or how many FPS they got in the new Crysis or something. Oh, I play games.

But really? What am I really going to use Tina for?

Oh hi, nice to be typing to you. Shit, I was never into bleeding edge games. I remember when I built Roxanne Covalent, Kelly Quark’s predecessor. That was back when the nVidia Geforce 6800GT was the video card all the enthusiasts were masturbating to. Right when SLI was just coming out. I wisely got “just” a 6600, and performance was just fine for games. What have I played so far on Tina? StarCraft2 on max settings, Left4Dead on max setting, and ha ha Plants and Animals.

Oh come on, you know it’s fun.

I kept my delimiters simple: AMD. Therefore, Ryzen 7 chip. Don’t look at the rest of the numbers too much. Eight cores, that’s fine - Kelly had four. She actually has LESS RAM than Kelly. Kelly had 16 gigs. I had a widget on the screen that always showed CPU core usage, and RAM usage. I had to REALLY try to have her RAM break four gigs. So, I just crossed my fingers that things are more optimized now. Maybe? Tina has 8 gigs of RAM.

In addition to being an AMD fanboy, I seem to also like ASUS. Only other delimiter was price. Nothing over $1000. Lemme look what I paid.... $569.99. Damn, I spent like $450 on Ruby Red eight and a half years ago.

If I haven’t mentioned, her tentative name was going to be Lucy Laptop. I did give myself permission to change it.

I don’t know whether it correlates, but. Tina arrived an hour or two after my trauma. That knock on the door sure as hell made me jump. And then the box was there. My mind was everywhere, so maybe I subconsciously channeled the character of Tina that I once wrote in “The Revenge of Youth”. (Really gotta edit that hallway scene....)

Tina. Tina Tough.

I’m still a little thrown off by the lack of BIOS and the BIOS beep. You spend over thirty years hearing that BIOS beep, and it’s gone. Naturally I repurposed Ruby’s red mouse, because touchypads SUCK. Her keyboard is “fine”. (WHO PUTS THE POWER BUTTOM RIGHT ABOVE THE BACKSPACE. Ahem. Ruby’s power button is in the upper left sector, depressed slightly, away from the F1 key. No way your left pinkie will reach that high up accidentally.

Obviously, I hooked up a formal keyboard to her. A: I like hearing the clickity clackity. 2: I like FEELING the depressing of each key. D: I’m the type of person that will use the numpad for typing numbers. Especially useful for special characters like ñ, á, or ¿. ¿Tienes un problema conmigo? To bash those touchypads again, my wrist hits it a LOT on Ruby. Nevermind that I could probably disable it manually, but well. I have a gel wrist thingie - how could I type with that on Tina?

Now, Kelly booted fast. But holy hell. Even from a cold boot, Tina up in two seconds or less.

.....

Gosh, I know there are new games and new MMOs out there, but I still have this urge to see how Everquest2 looks. This screen is.... super clear. Wow. Things you take for granted. And nevermind that my previous monitor had a vertical line of dead pixels. (You’d be surprised how the brain tunes these things out.)

Oh, here’s something for your grey matter. I must caveat that I was watching streamed from a PS3, so the quality was “only” HD, not 4k, but his point frakking stands. Watch this on a TV, if you can. Or, well, maybe his point will STILL stand. Because… Well, just watch.

.....

I wonder what my everquest2 password is..... Got so much stuff in the guild hall Candi and I grinded for ourselves. (Oh, you say, you’re not supposed to solo or duo to a guild hall, it’s supposed to be for a group. Oh yeah? Candi and I said CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.)

That said, many times I close Tina, I softly wipe my hand on the top of her lid in admiration. Been doing the same thing with Ruby for a while, though with her it’s “Dang, girl, you still got it.”

I think.... that covers it. :: hops back to duolingo :: Hasta luego, gringos.