You don't have this trouble with a slate

I write this in a condition of low-level seethe. My laptop is about eight months old, and, as with all youngsters, there are teething troubles. Having bought a well-known photo editing package, I am continuing to pick up the pieces after it crashed my PC comprehensively. The latest error message is that the webcam isn't working. Tentative investigation suggests this is because the computer can't detect the webcam. Now normally I barely give the webcam a moment's thought. I don't do video conferencing or online chat or flash my mammaries at strange men in Minnesota. But I am peeved that the software is asking me to install a webcam when there is one built in to this machine.

I tried a system restore but that didn't fix it. I restored the system restore back to where I started and it almost decided not to let me open this document.

Now I'm not totally dim. I've got letters after my name and everything, and in a former life I was a scientist and an (inept) engineer. I understand the concept of built-in obsolescence and can see how it drives market forces. But I refuse to accept this as an excuse for shoddy workmanship. Why can't computers work reliably? Why must we view crashing PCs as something to put up with, like late trains or all this damned snow? And please don't sit there smugly and tell me I should have bought a Mac. Some of us are on a budget.

All I want is for PCs to be robust, so that if the user does something inadvertently unhelpful it can shrug it off and brush itself down before going smilingly on its way.

Is that so much to ask?

PS And while I'm having a technical gripe, why is Blogger reformatting my text and dropping all the carriage returns between paragraphs? No wonder I feel like giving up blogging altogether.