So I've fallen back on Samantha, my Compaq Presario 5WV270 desktop computer. Her monitor has been at death's door for about three years now. See, her screen has grown very dark over time: there's no more brightness to be had, plus the saturation is way overboard and can't be turned down. Add the fact horizontal bleeding from dark to light areas is pronounced and you've got yet another near-useless monitor.
It's the pits, because at least half my fun in hanging on the Web has consisted of looking at images. Now, stuck with Samantha as I am, it's akin to seeing the cyber world through welder's goggles.
Plus, Sammy is way slower than Barry; and, because I thought it a good idea when her Windows Millennium Edition operating system died, she's running Ubuntu which (like all Linux systems) is less a viable tool and more a geek's play toy - with all that no-interface, command-line bullshit Linux true believers fixate upon.
(For example, the morons at Linux couldn't even bother installing "unrar" by default. No, that would make things much too customer-friendly! So I spent a couple of hours mired in the trendy Linux command-line hocus pocus - flailing about with "Are you root?" and "Are you root?" and "Are you root?" - just to install SOMETHING THAT'S ALREADY THERE but is purposely not activated. Grrr...!)
Thankfully a guy named Phil, whom I know from Anime Council and who fixes computing systems for a living, is lending me a spare monitor; so once it arrives I'll at least be able to see the Web properly once more, albiet via Samantha the Slow. Poor Barry, though: his motherboard needs replacing, but Phil offered to fix him for the economical cost of a used part - which will be cannibalized from a second-hand laptop of Barry's species.
=^..^=
