Broken Windows

Who knows what evil lurks in what you are about to read.

So be warned, this may well be defected; could be infected; selected to be rejected since it’s suspected… Or so sayeth the oracles of Redmond. As I type I am toying with the tools of doom and had best get with the program, abandon the program, and  reporgam – or so say the well-programed.

Yup. I’m still using Windows 7. And I feel so unsupported.

It’s a remarkable thing. Just a week ago my little Dell laptop was just humming along, googling docs, processing words, booking faces, and all the other myriad tasks we’ve delegated to these digital wonderworkers that have integrated themselves into our lives like so many circuits into a silicon chip. But on Jan. 14, just like that, all that came to a crashing climax, or so we were told. The Gates of Hell were opened and a virtual cloudburst of evil would be loosed upon the laggards who had neglected to upgrade. We were, alas, vulnerable to all manner of malware, spyware, bloatware, kitchenware, and all other sorts of things to be wary of. We would be phished and dished, our data squished; our drives corrupted, our lives disrupted. Our searches fraught, we’d be distraught – but we could have the peace of zen, if we’d all just install Windows 10.

You’d have to be (Micro)soft in the head not to.

And despite my exceptional annoyance at having to pay good money to replace something that I know works well with something that probably won’t I’d probably do as I’m told for the same reason medieval witch-hunters burned their neighbors at the stake – fear and not knowing any better.

Trouble is, I can’t.

Y’see, my loyal little machine isn’t up to it. For these last years it’s been playing at the top of it’s digital game, it’s RAM is maxed, pushing it harder will just cause it mega-hurts, there is no up to its grade. It is what it is, and that’s just fine with me.

No matter what the Microsofties think.

Outdated? Well, maybe. But it still computes way faster than I can type; Googles more quickly than I can page through Funk and Wagnalls. It Gmails, Hotmails, and provides more online time-wasters than I have time to waste. In short, it does everything I need done and then some, but that’s not supposed to be good enough for me.

So I get the old heave-ho, right into the cyber-dumpster, along with everybody else who up until last Tuesday was doing quite fine, thank you.

Fine for us, not so much for Bill Gates and Microsoft shareholders. Or the folks who own stock in Dell, Lenovo or any of the other outfits peddling hardware to replace the gear that arbitrarily went belly-up a week ago.

You and I might live by “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” but that ain’t the adage that made Bill rich. As anyone who’s had to upgrade from Windows 95 to 98 to 2000 to XP to Vista to 7 to 8 and now to 10 will testify.

So, in a word, we’re stuck. Or another word that sounds a lot like that. Do we defy the software gods and keep doing what we’ve been doing, always looking over our cyber-shoulder for the digital demon about to steal our identities and take over our lives; or give in, pay up and send perfectly good hardware off to the Third World to be disassembled and disintegrated, it’s elemental constituents re-exported to be remanufactured into the next latest and greatest.

That we’ll be throwing away a couple of years from now.

For no good reason.

Seems to me, Windows is busted.