IT HADN’T been a good start to the day; the airbed had become soft in the night. There was no milk in the fridge. The flat was littered with the debris from the previous night’s party. There was no butter for the toast and as I emerged from the shower with soapy eyes, I discovered the towel I had left in the bathroom had disappeared. I had to make a dripping wet, starkers dash up the stairs in case I met one of my daughter’s handsome flatmates and put them off the female form for life.
It was impossible to leave this place as my spare set of keys had also mysteriously disappeared from the kitchen table. I’ll write a column, I thought. The laptop: my only friend in a house whose inhabitants were dead to the world. I pumped up the airbed, propped up the pillow from the pound-stretcher shop, made a face as I swallowed bitter black coffee with dry toast and pressed the ‘My Documents’ folder.
“Class not registered,” it said, like some stern schoolmaster. I pressed a key to the Control Panel. “Class not registered,” I unplugged it and rebooted. “Class not registered,” it continued. I ran the Windows diagnosis. “You have a fatal error in your C: drive,” it said.
Curiously, the modem still worked so I typed in “Class not registered” in Google. Immediately, like joining ‘laptops anonymous’ a whole list of blogs appeared of people who had discovered the same problem, from cutiegirl in California to geekgod in Chennai. And good people were giving them advice.
It was strange advice and it took me some time to write down the hieroglyphics, which involved finding parts of my computer I didn’t know existed and safe modes, and programming lots of dashes and dots and forward strokes. Each time I optimistically administered the medicine in a hope that the patient would respond. But each time I rebooted the same message would appear.
I felt like flinging the bloody thing against the wall, tears of frustration forming. Noises from beneath told me that the youth were up.
“Wassup?” they asked. I showed them. “Aaaah,” said floppy haired Tom, helpfully, “You need an Apple Mac”. “I don’t have an Apple Mac, I can’t afford an Apple Mac, I’ve got Lenovo cheapo with Vista”. “Aaaah,” said laidback Jack, “that’s the problem. You need XP, Vista is programmed to fail.”
“Grrr…” I growled, madly pressing and re-pressing keys, as if its buttons would respond to a battering.
I get a reply from Ranjit in Bombay. “I tried for three days,” he says, “Then I had to give up and clean the whole hard drive and re-install Vista and it’s just got wrong again. Then I tried Mozilla Firefox and suddenly, I could access all my documents through the new server.”
“Look,” I say to the male lazing on the sofa with my towel wrapped around his waist. “It works with Firefox.”
“Oh god,” he says with a particularly irritating intonation and world weary sigh, “Were you using Windows Explorer? No one uses that…” I felt like Pepys with his quill pen: no wonder my class wasn’t registered.
