I confess: I am suffering a serious case of envy. It’s almost like lust.
Among the clients I see in my computer ministry was a fellow with a nice Inspiron 1525 laptop — 2.0 Ghz dual core CPU, 3GB RAM, fast Intel graphics, and so forth. It’s almost as powerful as my desktop. He was griping about it not being fast enough, but that was because of spyware and a very junky anti-virus package. Having been ripped off at Best Buy, he tried to get someone else to reinstall the bundled Vista, but that didn’t go well. So he brought it to me and I got the installation cleaned up, found all the missing drivers, etc. Normal stuff I do every week.
Over the next few days I took calls from him and another visit to add a few features and explain things he didn’t understand well. He never understood, for example, the hibernate function on laptops. He’s probably doing okay right now, but I expect a few more calls in the coming weeks as I warned him I can’t make any computer meet his expectations; he has to learn what to expect from computers. And he still complains he’s not happy with it, and may be getting rid of it soon.
I told most firmly I wanted a shot at it if he didn’t keep it. I may not be able to meet his price, but boy would I like to try.
Update: Sometime after I first wrote this the man offered to trade for something I had, and didn’t know he wanted. That worked out well.
