Inevitably, someone out there somewhere is making our desktop even more obsolete than it already is. This isn’t something that bothers me. As long as I can use my word processor, surf the internet for various unnecessary purposes and upload my photos off of my digital camera, I’m good.
My husband, a diehard PC gamer on the other hand, doesn’t take it quite as well as I do. While I sympathize with his situation, as a somewhat newly graduated person with debts to pay and this strange desire to eat three meals a day, I have a really hard time thinking that buying a new $300 video card is a good idea. Now my husband would be the first to say he knows logically in his Vulcan like brain that a video card is not a necessity and not in the works right now, but I bet given the opportunity to go buy one, he’d be happier than a zombie at a brain buffet.
First and foremost I know that he wants the video card so he can play the newer faster better games that our computer just can’t handle anymore. I’m sure he reminisces back to the days when his beloved desktop could run just about any game on the market with ease, but now thanks to some partial upgrades, I think our computer is suffering from an identity crisis or a split personality. While it’s got a new sound card, a new operating system and a terabyte of space that I don’t see how we’ll ever possibly fill, our processor and our video card are lagging back in the stone age of electronics circa 2004 or so.
Unfortunately I didn’t help the situation with buying my husband a computer game for Christmas. Now our poor video card apparently can’t keep up with the new operating system due to the lack of proper drivers and it’s causing some visual glitches which are making the game play not impossible but annoying.
However annoying that is for him though, I think there are two deeper issues and they both link into my husband’s pride. The first problem is tied inherently to the fact that there is in fact a problem in the first place. My husband is a smart man and while I pride myself on having a good general computer know-how, maybe even a bit more knowledge than the average person, when I am stumped I call him in to fix the issue. There have been very few computer related issues that we’ve had that he has been unable to fix. And while his sisters swear up and down that at one point during high school he managed to completely kill their family computer, he has also fixed it and various other laptops for them on a number of occasions.
This however is a problem that he has as of yet been unable to fix-and this is a big problem to him. I’ve lost many evenings to that computer lately only to pull my husband out of the computer room bleary eyed and incredibly grumpy. I’ve even had to resort to making him promise NOT to work on the issue any more until the video card moves its way up in the priority list and moves WAY down in the price list. But I know it’s still grating on his nerves. It’s the problem that’s taunting him down the hall that won’t go away.
The other problem is perhaps more simple but yet comes with its own set of complications. My husband, as you might have gathered is not just a generalized geek he’s a computer geek among the other various strains of geekiness that he exhibits. He prides himself in knowing what’s happening in the world of technology and is often drooling over the latest and greatest gadgets, even those he doesn’t really have any use for. He wants caviar; even if he knows that at this point in our lives he’ll have to settle for bologna. He’s very good about this too I have to admit. I don’t have to worry about leaving him alone at home and finding that he’s gone off and bought the latest top 10 must have items from his computer magazine. For this I am very thankful.
I know eventually I’ll have to cave and we’ll get a new video card and my husband will skip home and happily install it and I’ll once again lose him to the computer room for evenings on end. He’ll still come out bleary eyed but at least he’ll be happy. Of course, inevitably, by then something else on our computer will then no longer be compatible with the video card causing more problems and frustrations. I guess there’s just really no way for us to keep up with the Gates’.
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