No political correctness (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

No – not political correctness – personal computers. Like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead, when they are good they are very, very good; when they are bad they are horrid! (Incidentally, how PC is this old nursery doggerel today?)

Our more frequent thunderstorms saw the need to replace my desktop tower recently. Ten days after purchase it was flashing red lights and beeps and refusing to start. Pulling out my oh – so- slow laptop, I was able to check some online forums and ascertain that the sequence of beeps meant an overheated CPU.

I rang the helpline and confirmed that this was so – they would arrange for a technician to visit and fix it. Oh but the part would have to be ordered first. Eight days later the technician arrives with the wrong part – the interstate helpline had sent different instructions to what we had discussed. “Sorry, the part we need is not in stock. I’ll put through an order and it should be here in five days.”

That was yesterday. Already the PC has been acting as a paper weight for longer than its lifetime crunching 0’s and 1’s – and it’s not even a month old. I am assured by the technician that the replacement part is superior in quality to the original and that this problem should not recur- which kind of begs a question, doesn’t it? Why not install the better quality part before sale in the first place?

Why didn’t I insist on a complete PC exchange? A cross between dealing with the devil you’ve already got to know to some extent and forbearing to upload all your custom software again.

The days of the stylus and clay tablet combined with the neck-top computer are attractive right now!