People thought having a Acer Aspire T180-UA380B Desktop Computer meant life would be easy. Maybe they’d make a crack about being refurbished now and then at worst, but this is America, so that doesn’t really matter. What matters is what you make of yourself. But what if what’s inside doesn’t match what’s outside?

It was in school when I started having… different feelings. I could run Vista just like everyone else, but it was… different. It just wasn’t me. I wanted something else… but how could I tell people I had 1GB of RAM and an integrated graphics card? How could I tell them that my AMD Athlon 64 3800 2.4 GHz processor had a different path to follow?

By college, I was a mess. Running Vista everyday, keeping up the facade? It was shattering me. I was the ideal system with other people, but at night I would sneak out to the Linux clubs. I felt free there. I even began to experiment. Soon my 160GB 7200rpm SATA drive was full of ISOs I downloaded with my Gigabit LAN and modem. Knoppix, Debian, something a guy wrote in his basement to pay tribute to Dragonball Z, I tried anything I could get my hands on. I should have just reinstalled, even if it cost me the use of my built-in Memory Card Flash Reader. But I wasn’t ready to admit it to myself. So I kept using Vista, and kept wondering, why me? Why was this burden put on me?

Finally it was just too much. It was the day I was burning with my DL DVD±RW Optical Drive. My pre-installed Vista was so slow, and I could hear everyone else laughing. I told myself they were just jealous of my front and rear I/O ports, with USB, PS/2, Serial, VGA, Firewire, Mic, Headphone and RJ-45, and tried to drown them out with the six audio channels coming through my speakers, but that only made things worse. Before I knew it I was standing, my chair on the floor, and shouting at them, the words coming like a torrent of freedom, the words “WHY IS VISTA EVEN ON THIS THING?”

And suddenly, there I was. The person I had always been too scared to accept.

Now I live in the Village. I’ve got a poodle and visit my friends at the bistro near my townhouse. I work as a stylist on Thursdays, just for fun. And I’ve accepted my Acer Aspire T180-UA380B Desktop Computer for what it is. Because it’s the hardware that matters, not the software. And there’s no reason to be stuck with someone else’s programming.

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