Yeah, she had it all, once. The HP Pavilion Elite m9040n Desktop Computer. Daddy’s little princess. They brought in a photo so I knew what I was looking for, but I just pretended to study it. The truth is she’d never look like that. Not in a million years. Not after a refurb.

After about a week I put it all together. It was the story nobody wants to hear. Especially not her Mom and Dad. They spoiled her rotten, gave her anything she asked for. She had the Core 2 Quad Q6600 processor with four cores on one chip. Two 320 GB 7200 RPM SATA drives for 640 gigs total, and she could even work ‘em as a RAID. nVIDA GeForce 8400 GS, HDMI, S-video, dual-link DVI, it was all good stuff. But Mom and Dad weren’t giving her that thrill after a while. So she got out the TV Card with FM tuner.

Daddy’s little princess wasn’t so special now. Out there, it didn’t matter who loved you, it only mattered how much you loved them. Soon her 16x DVD±R/RW 12x RAM ±R Dual Layer LightScribe SATA Optical Drive was burning all the time. That Realtek ALC 888S audio chipset handled up to 7.1 audio channels. 3GB of PC2-5300 RAM got her a lot of attention on the streets. And that 10/100/1000 Base-T Networking Interface. Soon she was making excuses. And that’s when she vanished, leaving nothing but her USB Transceiver for that Wireless Keyboard and Mouse and two worried parents.

I tracked her to a warehouse downtown. By the time I got there you could barely tell she ever had a 15-in-1 4 slot Media Card Reader. Whoever it was didn’t want to let her go easy. Maybe it was pride, maybe in their own twisted way they thought it was love. But it wasn’t love. It was just pointless.

They fixed her up nice on Daddy’s dime. You can’t even tell… from the outside. But she doesn’t smile much now. That HP Pavilion Elite m9040n Desktop Computer spends a lot of time just looking out the window. Mom and Dad say they don’t know what she’s thinking about. But I sure do. She’s thinking about what it was like before she was a refurb. She’s thinking about how she wished someone had told her that the recovery discs weren’t included. Just like I do. Just like I do every stinkin’ day.

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