My Neurotic Tendencies

I have a problem, which showed itself in a bad way last night.  I can’t help tinkering with computers.  I need help.

Rachel had a meeting with My Sisters Closet after work, so I was home by myself until about 8:30.  Because of the current issues with our main computer, we only have the laptop right now.  When we purchased the laptop it came with Windows Vista Home Basic pre-installed.  Neither of us had any experience with this new (at the time) operating system.

After a day or so of tinkering and trying to figure it out, Rachel decided that she wanted XP on it.  I was fine with this, as she was going to be the main user of the computer anyway.  I wiped the hard drive and put a clean install of XP Pro on it.  Not til later would I realize that doing this would void the warranty on the machine.

I went on a hunt for drivers for the many devices a new laptop has and came up short.  When I contacted dell for help, that is when I found out about a interesting clause.  If you downgrade the OS on a machine purchased from them, all support is rendered void.

At first I didn’t care at all.  Since issues have occurred with my other machine, I’ve become somewhat paranoid.  I wanted to get the computer reverted to it’s original state.  I contacted Dell again, and they sent me a set of discs that actually re-imaged the machine to it’s original factory state.

Rachel and I had talked about this, she was very hesitant about the change.  Since I have some experience with Vista under my belt now, I feel much more comfortable with it, if  you didn’t know it’s just XP of a different color.

When Rachel arrived home last night, I was about an hour away from finishing this changeover.  She was furious and actually made me think for a minute that she was packing up to move out or something.  Over the years I have done several things to computers that have hurt her.  I deleted (on accident) a majority of her papers for her masters degree and other various files that were important to her.

The sad part is that I do this with out even thinking about it, like it’s just a everyday sort of thing.  The whole time I was doing this, I thought she would be happy when she got home.

I was wrong.

One thought on “My Neurotic Tendencies”

  1. Honey, I do love you. I’m sorry that I got so mad at you. But, you have destroyed a lot of important things to me in the past :-(. It is fine now, and I know this change is for the better. I just thought we would wait until the desktop was fixed (like we talked about). I love you!!

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