The FedEx man just arrived with a very tiny package for me. But it holds great promise for my computer. Within the boxes I hold in my hot little hand are two gigabytes of memory.
Yes, this week, I had to finally bite the bullet and deal with some technology upgrades. I’ve been doing a lot of work in Adobe InDesign and I realized that the new version (CS2) is almost unusable on my computer. I’ve been using the prior version (CS) because all the CS2 products (Photoshop, InDesign, etc.) take forever to load. It’s stupid. Every new version of every software product is piggier than the last. It makes me insane.
I called up the company where I bought my computer and ordered more memory. I only have two slots in this machine, so I could have just gotten one more 512MB chip to bring my current 512MB up to a more respectable 1024MB. But no. I pondered an immutable technological truth: you can never have too much RAM. So I whipped out the old credit card and opted for the vastly more expensive option: two 1MB chips.
A few days after this bold spending spree, James walked in and said, "I want a scanner." He’s been saying this for a couple years now and we’ve sort of ignored the issue. (As the president of LEI, sometimes it’s necessary to have selective hearing when the nerd wants new hardware.) However, this time, 24 hours earlier I had scanned about 30 pages, which meant I had to go through the rigmarole of getting my 10-year-old scanner to operate.
The thing is, my ancient HP scanner just won’t die. It was hugely expensive way back when, but now it’s kind of difficult to use, since HP stopped writing drivers for it about 6 years ago. It’s a painful process to get software to play with this old hardware.
Fortunately, over the last couple years I’ve written product reviews for a large Web site and I got to try out a lot of scanners. The bad news is that HP scanners are now almost unusable. The good news is that I liked the Epson scanners.
So this week when James whined about a scanner again, I found my very favorite Epson on mega sale and bought two: one for each of us. James was thrilled. You just never know when a hardware whine will happen at just the right time.