I bought a slightly outdated computer through eBay last Christmas. It was actually a steal: 3.2GHz Pentium 4 with a 250GB drive and a gig of memory for $100, and while you won’t find it featured in Best Buy, it was a great machine. As a matter of fact, I don’t think you’d find a mousepad for under $100 at Best Buy, but that’s neither here nor there.

Now you might have noticed that this wonderful computer I’m bragging about lasted less than three months. In computer years, that’s about twelve minutes, thirty seconds. Five of those minutes were used while waiting for it to turn on, and I haven’t calculated wasted time during random crashes and reboots.

I suspect the eBayer bought it in 2006 and sold it to me in 2007 for a newer computer. It only lasted three months after that before finally falling apart while I was using it. And I didn’t even know Ford made computers!

Anyway..

I’ve put some parts of the broken computer into a new one that I now use for web design stuff, and that required me to reinstall Windows XP because all the new hardware configuration invalidated my XP license. In doing so, I was forced to use Internet Explorer 6 before updating to IE 8 and FireFox. I was surprised that most of my site looked normal in the older, unsupported browser, however certain elements were rendering so incorrectly that I actually felt stupid for even creating the design in the first place.

For instance, look at that ‘paging’ bar at the bottom..

This is how it’s supposed to look:

However, in Internet Explorer 6 (or every default XP computer) it looks like this:

It wasn’t designed to look that way, but I’m going to keep it because it looks like a staircase - and every click lowers you deeper into the basement of my brain until you reach a single post where I cry and blame all of my problems on other people. Also, I figure that even though a hundred-million people still use IE 6, exactly none of them will ever view my website.

So yes, I took you through three months of nonsense just to say a really old software program doesn’t work anymore.

You’re welcome.