About Thor and Laptops

What does Thor, the Norse god of lightning, have in common with laptops? Or Zeus, or Jupiter or Leir for that matter, who are his Greek, Roman and Celtic counterparts respectively. To answer the question, nothing, at least not apparently, until I delve into the story of my laptop and how it can be related to any of the above mythological deities.

As a manager at P&G, I, on joining the company, was given a brand new standard issue HP laptop. The laptop with bare minimum specs is good enough for reading and sending emails and running Microsoft Office, which is what you mostly do as a manager but given my rather geeky disposition, and my technical job descroption, was no way capable of simultaneously handling at least 20 windows for at least 20 hours a day on an everyday basis (Yes, yes, I admit, I sleep with my laptop, and that too switched on). Needless to say the poor thing started to give up in this already losing battle some 14 months into its operational life. And that's when i decided to get it sup-ed up. Major changes: hard disk from 40GB to 80 GB and RAM from 512 MB to 1.5GB. It feels awesome ^_^

However I was not satisfied with just 'back end' changes, and bothered by the fact that my laptop looked EXACTLY like at least 50 other laptops in the office (people who know me will understand my utter need to personalise EVERYTHING that i own), I wondered if I could do something about its rather drab exterior. Since the laptop is legally still a property of P&G, and under warranty from HP, which goes void if I mess with the paint job itself, I settled for a 'sticker job', i.e. drawn and painted on paper, cut out, then glued to the laptop lid, which can easily be peeled off later when the time comes to part my ways with it. This obviously brought me to the question of what exactly to put on it. Buoy-ed up that I was with the very perceptible increase in my laptop's performance, I settled for two lightening bolts, slanting inwards at the tip, in silver to go with the matte gray original color of the machine. Thus further excited, I discussed the idea with a few of my good friends, namely Saady, I-T and Basimio (their blogs are listed under More Blabbers). Got an excited thumbs up from all of them. I-T went on to Christian the 're-born' laptop "Thor's Laptop" or "Zeus' Laptop". And there you have it.

Bringing the idea to execution took another 2-3 weeks since I was traveling as well as very busy with work. Also a minor tragedy dampened the euphoria a little. I finally managed to put the lightning bolts in place on a Sunday, and the next day I had to turn my laptop in and move to a temporary laptop because I was for a few days having serious heating problems which had started to affect the hard disk. However not to be mowed down, I managed on getting the hard disk, RAM and keyboard of my old machine inserted into the replacement machine. The DVD drive and battery were already from my old machine as this one didn't have em. That took care of the interior, and left the sticker-work on the lid of the machine i was giving away. I therefore pestered our local support person till he called the vendor and I got the entire screen switched between the two laptops ... hehe. So now I'm a rather happy camper, with a machine that performs at least 20 hours a day, 7 days a week, and had a custom paint job too!

Obviously this post would be incomplete without the pictures, which I've naturally added. No comments on the dirty room!

my laptop proudly sitting at its rightful place on my bed. Usually its turned around
but here it's posing for the picture ;)

Shimmery silver thanks to fabric paint on paper. Glows in bright light.