Do not turn off your computer, updating....

I'm typing today from my newly re-organized office, on my brand-new laptop. I should be very excited by this, but instead I'm fighting the urge to toss the laptop out the window into the lake.

A little back story. I went to journalism school as an undergrad, where we used Macs for all our writing and graphic design work. I loved them, but as soon as I graduated, I went off to business school, which is total PC-land. It took me 10 years to get back to a Mac. Last year, I purchased a bright shiny new iMac with a 20 inch screen, wireless keyboard and mouse. When I got home from the Apple store, I opened the box, plugged one cord into the back of the iMac, and turned on my computer. It worked perfectly then and it still works perfectly now. It has never had a virus, it has never crashed, it has never given me the blue screen of death. I designed more flyers, pamphlets, letters and postcards on that in a year than I can count, and it did a beautiful job on each one. Not to mention writing emails, communicating with my mom on the Webcam and all the other fantastic things I did with it.

But like all good things, this had to come to an end.

Three days ago, I went to Best Buy to get a laptop. Tony and I are actually going to be starting our business, or at least a truncated version of it, much sooner than we thought, and I needed to have a computer that would run Quickbooks and some other software that hasn't been adopted for a Mac. BECAUSE THE WHOLE WORLD CONSPIRES AGAINST ME!

Anyhow, I got this lovely Gateway laptop for the rock-bottom price of $499, which is truly much less than I ever would have paid for any Mac. Now I know why.

For a day and a half, I resisted turning the thing on, feeling like I was betraying my beautiful iMac, which, I might have mentioned, still worked perfectly and had never let me down. Finally last night I cracked open the box, inserted the battery and turned it on. Five and a half hours later, it finally booted up. I had Vista Home already installed, so I went out to the Microsoft site and downloaded the updates. (I knew that even though I just bought my laptop two days before, undoubtedly there were 32 new viruses written by schoolchildren in Nigeria with the specific mission of destroying my laptop. I was right.)

After downloading 39! updates, installing them and restarting the computer, I installed my Office software and then downloaded another 12! updates for Office. And restarted the computer. Then, I installed Quickbooks and then downloaded another 15! updates. AND RESTARTED THE COMPUTER. Do you know how many updates I've downloaded for my iMac in the year and two months I've owned it? NONE!

For six hours last night, my laptop was unusable, busy as it was downloading, installing, restarting, installing, downloading, installing, restarting ad naseum. I sat there the entire time, giving it the finger.

This morning, I woke up with one intent. To get through a day without swearing at my new computer and to accept its limitations and love it nonetheless. That lasted until I booted up, and saw that I had 9 new updates to install.

Obviously, the Nigerian schoolchildren were busy last night.