Beef Up

Oh no, not dear. I am still your lovely little sunshine boy who greets you a broad smile in the morning, who listens to your complaints when you are in trouble and nods agreeably to what you believe is right, who, like a next-door big brother, gives you every support to shout against the bitch (or witch?) who picks on you in the school.

No, I am not beefed up. It is the computer. Then why am I writing the first paragraph? Of course, everything has to do with myself. Wahaha.

Not sure from the perspective of business, if the trip to Israel is a successful one or not, but at least I got my computer beefed up. And it is really hard to say if this process is an upgrade or a downgrade. The reality is, I had our IT downgrade my windows system to XP and install Office 2003 instead of latest 2007, and my system has a huge boost of performance, which I would describe as an upgrade.

Enough is enough. That’s what I said to myself when the last straw on the camel’s back happened. I had tolerated with slow system performance of Vista ever since I was on board with this company. I found myself losing my patience waiting for the system to respond in the office while I was just trying to do a few clicks. Few days ago, in the Tel Aviv hotel, I was talking to M via Skype, the whole system crashed on me after few minutes.

Is it ok to have the conversation interrupted? A few cell phone carriers provide some promotion packages for users to sign up. If they sign up a more expensive monthly package, then they can have free call to people within the same mobile network for the first 5 minutes, less expensive package then for the first 3 minutes. So what happens is many couple would sign up and take advantage of the first 5 free minutes, then before the 5 minutes are up, hang up and then dial again.

Of course I am not sure how lovely they are, and how their conversation goes, however, I think phone conversation is just like making love. When it is good, you really don’t want to hear the phone ring, not sure if that would be an emergency call, so pick up the phone only to hear voice recording from the other end “this is xxx. I am running for the position of whatsoever and need your support blah blah blah”. You furiously hang up the phone, and find the passion gone, and it’s too late anyway, there is an urgent meeting early tomorrow morning. Ok, go back to the phone conversation. When the conversation is interesting and good (mostly sharing deep darkest stories), I don’t want interruption. So when Skype lagged, and the system crashed, I was so pissed, and was so determined to have the system changed to XP.

IT said he does not have any problem do that for me. It took a while, although he has a ghost image of XP (wanna hear my successful story of how my new iMac recovers all the files and programs I installed in my old iMac within an hour?). Well, there was some problems when I got the computer back and ran it at night in the hotel. There was no sound, and whenever the system popped up a window to remind me of something and there was supposed to be sound to accompany the message, I heard loud loud loud alarm from the mono speaker. What? I have not heard such bad mono sound since the age of windows 98! And the loud noise did get a lot of attention the next time at the office where I had to use other coworker’s office.

Anyway, I went back to the IT. He spent almost 3 hours trying to update anything he could think of, and finally solve the problem at the very last hours of my staying in the Israeli office. While we were chatting over the overall horrible experience we have for Vista, he asked me, out of nowhere, if I have the extra cell of battery. I did not have that. My computer is a very plain one, without anything additional. Normally such extra batteries are very expensive. I could not make a case to our manager to ask for one, and I really do not think he has one, although he has to travel much more extensively than I do.

Well, then the magic happens. IT said he has one extra such battery, and no one is using it. If I want it, I can have it. My eyes were open wide, if not popping, moist if not weeping, I can’t such luck (er, that would be another story) was happening to me, like a prince waiting to kiss Snow White and live happily ever after, I said “Yes, I do” (er? That would be a strange occasion when the IT is not even cute.). He pulled out the extra battery, and put my laptop on top. SNAP! That is the sound I heard, and it sounds better than the wedding march.

However, I want more than that. Greedy, huh? Yes, that is what I was, anxious for more and more. I asked IT if he could possibly have an extra Bluetooth module? Ok, here comes another complaint. How can an expensive model (2000+ USD) like this Lattitude XT does not have built-in Bluetooth? I cannot imagine how smart those marketing people are, but I know they really make me angry. So IT said, he does not have one, but another FA guy might have it, since we have received many samples of the products, and he may have salvaged some.

Dang dang dang, that’s another wedding march, and more. I hurried to that guy’s office, got one, and hurried back to IT, and IT installed it in no time! It was 6:05pm when everything was done, and the taxi driver was supposed to pick us up to run back to the hotel at 6pm.

So the original battery could run as long as 2 hours (I doubt if it could be this long), and the add-on battery is good to sustain another 5 hours. As I am writing this post in Bangkok airport waiting for my transit plane to Taipei, the battery has become as low as 55%, but it is still good for another 2 hours and a half.

I know I won’t live happily ever after with this ugly black thing, however I know I can live with it and happier than before. It was really a nice beef-up experience, and I love every bit of it.