I spent several hours on Saturday replacing the CPU fan on my wife’s computer. The old one had started making a noise like a vacuum cleaner that you could hear all over the house. It’s an middle-of-the-road PC, a bland eMachines box with a ~900MHz Celeron. We talked about replacing it with a Mac Mini, but there’s plenty of life in the old system and it seemed wasteful to replace it unnecessarily.
While I was disassembling the innards to get at the CPU, I took the opportunity to clean out the dust from the power supply fan and replace the video adapter with something a little more functional. When it was all back together, I ran some tests and spent a few minutes upgrading her copies of Firefox and Thunderbird to the latest releases. Nothing earth-shattering: the parts cost about $60 at CompUSA. The biggest challenge was bending the spring clip on the fan to fit more securely onto the tabs on the CPU’s ZIF socket.
The point is, there’s no way she could have done all of this stuff herself: it’s just too complicated. A nice piece on the BBC website makes the point: “But all the people who called me had one thing in common: they were at their wits’ end because they had bought computers after being seduced by advertising into thinking that they would be easy to use and fun, but had found them to be much more complicated than they had expected. And most importantly, none of them knew what to do or where to turn for help.”
I’ve decided that in future I’ll recommend that people get laptops. Not because they need the mobility, not because it’s cheaper (it isn’t) or more comfortable (most laptop keyboards suck), but because if when things go wrong, they can simply fold up the computer and carry it to a human being, to get help.