I was just about to print out a sheet of Holly Lisle’s “Contract with your Readers” when I found out. I jogged the mouse on my desktop computer, and nothing happened. The fan was on, and the power light was on, but nothing else would come to life.
Quick aside – despite worrying about my beloved machine, the Short Story Shrine went great. I was able to print out the sheet by connecting the netbook to the printer, and I really like the 13-scene outline that I got.
But the bad news about Serena came today, at a little computer repair store along Brant Street. Her motherboard was dead, which means it’s pretty much pointless to try and rebuild her. For the time being, my two laptops will be doing their best to fill in.
I got Serena back in the winter of 2005, and named her, as I named a lot of my machines, on a character in the TV show ‘Roswell’ – actually, an enigmatic reference to a person from the future who was never shown on screen.
I’ve been through a lot with Serena. I learned to do video conversions with that machine, and made fan videos, and wrote crazy programs to spider the internet. She ran Windows XP Home, but I used a hack to install IIS from windows 2000 server and host little private websites on my home network. She had a dual-threaded 3 Gigahertz Intel processor. Last winter I installed extra RAM and a Sapphire video card for gaming, but I never got around to much other than the introductory setting of ‘Dragon Age Origins.’ The guy from the store on Brant Street extracted the video card, saying that I could transplant it into another desktop
Serena’s heart may have given out yesterday sometime between 5:30 and 6pm, but her memories are still with me as well – in two hard drives that I’ll be recovering over the next few days.
And perhaps her soul is on its way to Silicon Heaven.
The Kelworth Files 