For the second time in less than 10 months I managed to kill my office computer (and it should be noted that I have been away for about 7 of these months). Towards the end it will just randomly restart, often when I am in the middle of a text document making me lose precious work and of course time until it reboots. This time it was nice enough to just act weird, like not wanting to wake up after hibernating (yesterday I had to pull the power plug to get it to turn on again, not very healthy) and freeze for extended periods of time.
The downside is that when I go and exchange it on Monday I'll have to spend half a day reinstalling all my little programs that are not standard on the ITU image. Programs like Firefox, winedt and winzip. I used to have personalized settings such as color scheme (something fancy like red and grey) but after experiencing this disposability of computers, I don't think I even want to bother. Which brings me to the real point, because the system administrators reassured me long ago, that it is the hardware and not anything I did wrong that made them die (bad IBM model, they got a discount and only gives this model to non-complaining PhD students who spend most of their studies outside the country): personalization gone bad. When the personalization of a device seems to require continous work, it weighs out the advantages the user get and it looses its value. It was fun the first time and even perhaps the second time, but now I am so tired of installing, configuring that I just go with the default; in essence this answers the question and outburst of horror when my friend saw that I still had Mozilla's page as front page in my browser. Well, this is why, life is too short for personalization.
Posted by Louise at June 11, 2004 11:56 PM