patience is a virtue

My Black Friday gift to myself? (Well, besides season two of Psych, which I got for $13.88 at Target!) A new monitor! Three years ago, I needed a new computer monitor, so I went to Best Buy on Black Friday. The crowd was insane, they were out of the monitor I was looking for by the time I got there, so I just gave up. Days later, Lisa gave me her family's used-but-still-in-good-shape monitor, so I quit looking for a new one. That monitor has been dying a slow (and annoying) death for the past four months, so I finally decided to splurge.

Staples had monitors on sale on Friday and Saturday. Because I don't know much about computers, I wanted my bro's opinion before I purchased. He talked me into a more expensive, yet probably more reliable, model . . . which arrived today!

I love assembling things, so putting it together and hooking it up to the computer was no big deal. I turned the computer on and tried to change the resolution like the instruction manual said . . . and found that I couldn't do it. This is a widescreen monitor, and I guess my video card (or something like that) needed to be updated. So I called Andrew. He spent like an hour walking me through various steps to update my drivers and such. Nothing worked--everything on the screen is slightly wider than it should be--but he told me something else to look for (the brand of motherboard, whatever that is), and if I can't figure it out, he'll try to fix it next time he's home.

Never once did he express any frustration with me--even when he had to repeat steps over and over--he just tried to help. Then, to top it off, he apologized to me for not realizing that this might happen when I asked him for advice on monitors. What a catch my brother is . . . Susan's a lucky girl!