MY LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIP WITH WINDOWS

WINDOWS IS, NO DOUBT, a very large part of my life. It’s involved with me at a personal level and is part of my career. For work, I use Windows every day— from benchmarking to testing out new hardware to playing games, everything is done on Windows. It goes without saying that Windows is deeply embedded into nearly every facet of my reality. The relationship has been long—27 years, in fact, since Windows 3.0. Both of us have evolved over time. Like any serious relationship, we’ve had our ups and our downs, but at the end of the day, it’s been there for me.

Windows does have its quirks, though. Sometimes, in the middle of a long conversation, it just ups and leaves. Sure, it returns after a minute or two, but I would appreciate some sort of heads-up. You know, like saying ,“Hey, I need a quick break, I’ll be right back.” But no, it just throws a fit, and when it does return, it’s to a clean slate—it’s forgotten everything we were talking about.

There have been years when our relationship was really on the rocks—the Vistas of our old place weren’t nearly as nice as they were supposed to be. But, thankfully, Windows has learned from some of its more grievous mistakes. For the most part, I’ve been content. More re recently, it got a major makeover, coming ng to me with new ideas. For one, it now tells me it’s more re eager to play games, and even tries to stop doing other tasks to make sure it stays focused. It brought home someme new colored outfits, and is even more aware of how important security is to me. At night, Windows is more thoughtful, too, dimming the lights to a warmer tone to help my eyes and let me sleep better.

But for all of its efforts, I have to admit, my eyes are starting to wander. I catch myself looking at others, admiring their sexy cat-print outfits. I’ve never been promiscuous, but there are things about Windows that have really grown stale.

In recent times, I’ve been going out more often, and Windows doesn’t like the outdoors. My phone follows me everywhere, and has introduced me to many more places around the city than Windows ever did—recently I’ve been mountain hiking a lot. When I look at my watch, it knows how I feel. It can tell if I’m staying healthy, and lets me know that I’m doing better at my goals.

To be honest, I’ve been seeing another on the side. It’s awful to admit, but I find this new relationship so much more fulfilling. I don’t want to reveal any identities, so let’s just refer to it as the cloud. What I can say is that most things Windows was good at, the cloud is better. It stays with me. I can go from one PC to another—even a Mac—and stay synched.

Thankfully, the game life with Windows is still great. It always shows me new ideas to keep things spicy. And now that I’ve got VR-gra, our gaming sessions last even longer.