Is That the Way You Like It, Mr. Beeblebrox?*

When my desktop started crashing last week, I did what any smart person would–I went directly to Dell to purchase another. I surfed through the Outlet until I found what I wanted–small, powerful, NOT Windows 8–and I snapped it up. A happy ending, yay!

The next day the desktop crashed for good, so I started using the little netbook to get by. The tiny, deliberately low-powered (so all I could do on it was write), running-XP netbook.

Didn’t take long for the poor thing to BSOD on me. As soon as I...