I bought my current home computer in 2016

She inherited the memory of my previous computer

She has a huge display and proudly sits on my desk

Every morning she woke up instantly

Her memory was always sharp and her brain was super fast

She helped me generate almost 1000 poems and short stories

Her spreadsheets tracked our finances and kept us out of the red

She entertained us by streaming live sports from over the pond

We had wonderful video calls with distant family and friends

She catalogued the 34,000 digital photographs we had taken

Then all of a sudden this week she refused to wake up

I ran some diagnostics and concluded a hard drive error

Basically she had a stroke and was in a coma

Unable to communicate wirelessly at all

I hard wired her to the internet and plugged in an old keyboard

She was in ICU on life support

I had backups of all her memories and data

The first delicate operation was to completely erase her hard drive and fix the damage

This is like performing computer brain surgery

After a few hours I was able fix her hard drive and install a 2016 version operating system

She woke up smiling and talking to me but with one huge problem

She had serious computer dementia and could not remember anything after 2016

My word processing and spreadsheet software could not run on her old operating system

As a last resort I decided to force a 2023 operating system into her aging body

This is like doing a heart, lungs and brain transplant with 8 pints of new blood on an 85 year old

The operation lasted 9 hours but did not go well

She crashed multiple times and eventually expired

I pronounced her dead at 10.46 pm on May 23, 2023

She had a good long very fulfilling computer life 

5 year old computers are considered vintage

But 7 year olds are classed as obsolete and no longer able to run current software

Imagine if your 7 year old car could only drive down old narrow roads

Or your 10 year old washing machine could only clean very old clothes

Or your house would not let anybody under 21 through the front door

Inbuilt obsolescence is the price we pay for continuous technological improvements

RIP old lady computer