Man Versus Machine

Two evenings ago, slightly tipsy from Happy Hour with co-workers, I embarked on the quest to install new hardware in my Frankenstein shell of a computer. A half an hour later two sticks of RAM were causing all types of errors to pop up on my screens, stopping my attempted Operating System wipe from working, and even making my hard drive say it was corrupt and therefore useless.

Obviously the RAM was faulty. How it was faulty was a complete mystery to me, though.

So I removed the sticks, pondering how exactly memory could be saying that the entire system was on full alert and needed to be melted in a furnace to rectify the problems. “No matter!” I thought, “I’ll just return them to Amazon and get my money back!” No harm done. It’s not like I needed the RAM anyway; it was more of a nice-to-have that I decided to pull the trigger on because I was already undertaking the overhaul project. Plus the prices were cheap.

With the faulty hardware removed, I was sitting on my floor still. Sam Adams’ lager still in hand. My iPod was blaring from its little portable desk speakers above (which had recently been rescued from my cubicle at work since it was not being used for much more than a window ledge decoration). A CPU was mounted, whirring happily. Solid state hard drive quiet as can be. Even my brand new graphics card, longer than a dinner plate but sleek and impressive, was sitting quietly in its harness. I knew the card worked; I had already installed it and through process of elimination figured out that it was not the troublesome hardware that was giving me a full panic attack.

Besides! The device manager in Windows 8 was saying that it was identified, functioning, and up to date with  ts drivers. The card itself wasn’t sounding like a jet engine, and my computer monitors weren’t tripping out like a progressive rock concert as a tell tale sign that “Hey, I think your GPU isn’t working right.” So I was content.

Until I tried to run a video game. Blue Screen of Death popped up. I frowned. I may have cursed. Ranting and yelling for a few minutes, I realized that maybe the previous card’s drivers were interfering with the new one. But no! That can’t be it! They run on the EXACT SAME DRIVERS. Literally. File-by-file, they run on everything 100% mirrored to the other’s. That can’t be the issue. Right?

Wrong. I uninstalled everything, wiped all traces of anything “NVidia” ever touching my system, and installed clean. Boom. Works like a charm.

Overnight my computer goes to sleep. Because it’s a human likes me, and needs its rest. I wake up the next morning, and there’s another error. Screw you computer, I’m winning this fight. So I turn off the sleep cycle, and it never has caused me an error again.

I win! The machines will not take over.

Then I drop my iPad on the tile floor, tipsy yet again. It shattered. Broken. Unrepairable. I have to fight Apple’s support system, hoping I don’t pay for it to be fixed.

The machines heard me, and they fought back. I lose. I’m pretty sure I heard the graphics card whir up in laughter at my misfortune.