I name my computers. The Powerbook 2400 I got in January 1998 became Candiru. After the parasitic Amazonian fish from William S. Burroughs. Tiny, tenacious, gets under your skin. Seemed appropriate for a laptop.
I know I named it Candiru because an IT guy at a credit union in St. Paul recognized it. He was a Burroughs fan and clocked the machine name on the network when I logged in. We had a moment of genuine human connection in what was otherwise a pretty grim week of database installs.
The other machines were Tamarin and Yikes (the Mac server at work that I got secondhand and named after the sound I made when I saw its spec sheet). You don’t need to anthropomorphize the thing, you just need some way to talk about it that isn’t “the computer.” “Tamarin is doing the overnight sync” is a better sentence than “the computer is doing the overnight sync.”
Candiru I dropped three days after buying it. Waist-high, from my bag, onto a hard floor, no padding. Dented the case, two keys popped off, broke some connector plastic. The hard drive survived. The screen survived. I took it as a sign that the machine was fundamentally sound, not that I should be more careful.
I was neither. But Candiru held up.