things falling apart

it’s one thing for a pc to stop working catastrophically. hard drive failure, bad ram, fried motherboard. this happens with macs too, and is something of a fact of life. a fact of life that sucks.

but there’s the other mode of failure, the soft failure, the slow onset of morbidity that resembles nothing so much as our own end-of-life. stuff just stops working. network connections drop out, programs suddenly just won’t start, or crash whenever you try something, or behave unpredictably.

of course, where the analogy ends is that it is a machine that plays by a defined set of rules, and that software doesn’t actually degrade. its performance is what degrades due to numerous and unpredictable interactions that allow one set of instructions to walk all over another, and over time, you’ve unwittingly done things that wind up breaking stuff. fundamentally, it is a certainty that whatever’s happened is my fault. but given that i haven’t really ever asked that much of this machine, and haven’t abused it excessively, i’m going to just say that it’s broken. it’s stopped doing some of its job, and now i’m using my laptop to do a simple task that it now can’t manage.

windows sucks, and people should stop using it.