The Dinosaur: Part II

As many of you know, the Dinosaur recently went to the "shop" while I was on vacation with the goal that it would hopefully become less failtastic while I was gone. A Herculean task, but one that my friend was convinced he could handle. I warned him repeatedly, yet he insisted he was up to the challenge. That poor, sad, naïve boy. Yesterday, after I got back from the Bahamas, I went to go check up on the lovely piece of plastic.

I think the Dinosaur broke my friend.

Let’s just say that my Facebook wall has a steady stream of wall posts from him whining and crying about my computer, which apparently is not up to his standards.

I walked into his house and saw my beloved computer plugged into a half dozen different cords and plugs. He opened up the laptop, complained about how the hinges like to close randomly on your hand (yeah, I kind of forgot to mention that to him beforehand….), and suddenly loaded Ubuntu. On my computer. After I raged at him for defiling my computer with that, I noticed something funny: the Dinosaur booted up in less than a minute. After I regained my powers of speech (and asked him if he weighed the same as a duck) we began to look at the computer, its progress, and what had worsened since it had entered his care.

As we tried to load any program we could (our goal was to back up my files) he got increasingly angry at my laptop. It took less time to boot up than I was used to, which apparently was still not good enough for him. He then raged at how long it took to load anything and insisted that because my hard drive has only 40 usable gigs what I have is not a “real computer – it just pretends.” My friend had a look in his eyes that clearly expressed a desire to get his murder on, Office Space-style.

The Dinosaur then jumped up from the table and swallowed my friend whole into a writhing vortex of wires and RAM for insulting the Dinosaur’s technological value.

The end.

Okay, not really, but whatever.

Point being, this is where the Dinosaur is: I need to back up all of my files onto an external drive so that he can basically gut the Dinosaur and reinstall all of my programs, Windows, and my old files.  Supposedly, the Dinosaur will run faster as a result. However, I have made it clear that there are two things that must be kept safe on my computer: my music and my Internet Explorer.

Don’t judge.

I will update with the Dinosaur's progress when I visit my poor computer again soon. It is so scared in my friend's hands - the Dinosaur feels threatened, and justly so. Poor thing.

I promise you, my ie7 looks nothing like this.