Lovely ladies die and go to notebook heaven

By Raymond Zhou Updated: 2007-07-05 15:00:26

Unlike the golden hues shimmering in Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs, the golden years of a computer are not pretty.

Lovely ladies die and go to notebook heaven My Sony Vaio notebook is on its deathbed. The first signal flared up a few months ago when it shut itself off without warning. Thinking the culprit must be a bad power connection combined with the drastically shortened life of the battery, I didn't cry my way to tech support.

In recent weeks, the frequency of sudden death is picking up. I still harbored the illusion that it could be a virus running amok until the master IT physicians ruled it out and zeroed in on the motherboard.

My Sony-san is four years old, which translates to 60 in human years. But I have to add another 20 years for making it toil for 10 hours a day. There are blots of smudge on the silvery cover. The palm rest has darkened to the point that it looks like the skin of a coal miner. Even the labels on the bottom have curled up into teeny-weeny rolls as if nature has been playing with them like a mischievous kid.

I would have preferred a desktop if I wasn't so into playing the intrepid reporter filing stories from the top of a karst mountain in southern China or a cruise liner that I suspect could be targeted by fun-phobic terrorists. My Sony has been with me through thick and thin.

I love my Sony. (Mr. Ryoji Chubachi, whom I interviewed last year, please give me credit if you decide to use it as your ad slogan.) It is slim, with the figure of a ballerina. Yet it packs a wallop, with plenty of power to sustain my heavy-duty word processing and well, mostly word processing and storing digital photos and video clips of my daughter. (I didn't even venture into video editing.) Lovely ladies die and go to notebook heaven

For full disclosure, it had an organ transplant at a young age. Just one year on my watch, it flashed a warning that its hard drive might be aging. Fearing data loss, I replaced it. Other than that, it did not give me any trouble, like a concubine who pushes all the right buttons.

My previous notebook was a Compaq, which I cannot describe in feminine terms. It was bulky and unreliable. I'd have to gain 80kg to make it compatible on my desk.

Before that was another American brand, which met its maker's maker even faster. I've owned or used half a dozen notebooks in my life. I was with a computer magazine in Silicon Valley before I joined China Daily, so I could play with virtually any new model I wanted.

My virgin notebook was an Apple. It looked sleek and mysterious, but it ran into fits of temper after only a few months with me, as if I had married a drug addict who had hidden all her symptoms from me.

Finally, it dawned on me that a notebook computer is like a pet hamster. No matter how much fun it gives you, it's gonna die on you. So, don't cry for me, Vaiovina.

(China Daily 07/05/2007 page20)