Goodbye, Mr. Chips...

This computer has a case of electronic Parkinson's disease. It's slowly but steadily worsening: I expect the situation to be critical in a few months. Luckily, we'll have replaced it long before then.
Our first and probably worst problem is that we're running Windows ME. You tell that to a tech guy and he'll wince as if he's just found a nasty worm in his Apple. It seems that Microsoft rushed this operating system out on to the market before it was fully debugged...and every new patch seems to cause a rip somewhere else. I've been told that previous configurations of Windows--95, 98--were far preferable, and I'm inclined to believe it: this damn machine crashes while it's trying to figure out how to crash, sometimes.
I don't know much about other operating systems. I've never touched a Macintosh and you'll never read an ad for a new Pentium 5 running Linux, will you? Gates has the market pretty much cornered. It's too bad his operating system is such dreck.
People below a certain age won't believe this, but computers weren't always this dodgy. Before the IBM PC and MS-DOS began their codependent evolution, things were vastly different.
For one thing, computers booted up in seconds. This one takes a good two minutes before it can remember who it is. Okay, in the days of cassette storage, things took a good deal longer to load than they do now, but at least there was only one program running at a time! With this computer, you hit ctrl-alt-delete to determine what's going on, and at any given time you'll find 25 or 30 programs running...none of which are spyware, apparently, but all of which bear indecipherable names such as hpwuscd and fckusr, so you can't be sure.
The old sytems--the Commodores, the Ataris, the TRS-80s--did force you to learn some kind of intermediary language to talk to the computer. Often it was some variant of BASIC. Not many among us will remember--or care--that BASIC stands for Beginners' All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code. The fact I do shows...no, not what a geek I am...how much I miss those days. Back then, if you couldn't get the computer to do what you wanted it to, the problem was yours. It could be hard to discover just what that problem was, of course, but the solution was always accessible.
Nowadays, it's not. The computer does what it does and crashes when it crashes, and you get a nice error message like "wuauboot has caused an error in unknown. Wauauboot will now close."
Gee, thanks. An error in unknown. That's kind of ominous, isn't it?
I found BASIC (and C, for that matter) much easier to learn and understand than Windows. After all these years, I still detest mice (mouses?) They're oversensitive...and counterintuitive. Consider: you're using a word processor. To do anything other than type words in your document, you have to remove your hand from the keyboard, grab the mouse, locate the mouse cursor (which is NEVER where your keyboard cursor is, and seemingly NEVER where you thought you left it last), move the cursor to the top of the scr...oops, don't bang against the top of the mouse pad, let's recalibrate...okay, move the cursor to the top left of the--shit, now we've run off the side of the mouse pad, try again...you get the idea.
I deal. I have no choice. But I miss the olden days....