My computer is old, it was bought second hand to replace the (also old) laptop which was stolen nearly two years ago. We’ve added more memory, and upgraded the operating system amongst other things, but it is still old. The thing is, it does pretty well everything I want it to; I have Windows 7, Office 2007, I can open anything I’ve ever wanted to, play PowerPoint with video and audio, and even stream TV and videos across the globe. So for now, I can’t really see any point in replacing it.
However, since we upgraded to Windows 7, the one thing that it is apparently no longer sophisticated enough to do is play Microsoft’s version of Spider Solitaire (or any other form of solitaire in fact). Now, I’m not a computer geek, I don’t work for Microsoft and I’m never planning on doing so, but I’m wondering what sort of rubbish code-writing could possibly mean that it requires a more advanced machine to play a card game than to stream and play an hour of TV (to give but one example of the many tasks that my computer still performs perfectly adequately).
Since I’m not about to buy a new computer, or even buy any new software for this one, I’m left with a dubious freebie version of Spider that I found on the internet (the only one I could find which gave me the whole four suit game without having to pay for it). It looks naff, it has a mountain of glitches, it cheats, it hangs, and generally it does everything it can to stop me from enjoying myself. This may be good for my soul. If I’m honest, the real reason why I’m annoyed is that I just wasn’t planning for 2010 to be the year I break my harmless addiction to SS, but maybe God has other plans for my life. In the meantime, I’m sulking.