Keep it Clean:
The family computer of an old friend had been acting up, and I ‘volunteered’ to take a look at it yesterday. Whenever you offer to do this kind of thing of course you need to prepare yourself for whatever you may find. I don’t have a problem with old, sluggish hardware, it’s the plethora of utterly useless system tray applications, broken shortcuts, and poor file system organization that gets my goat up.
I can live with someone having a k6-400 - after all, they only need the PC for e-mail, web browsing, excel, word, and winamp. When you browse to “c:" and find five folders, and a thousand files, instinct kicks in and you close the window immediately, and then try again - hoping that you didn’t really just see what you think you saw. When you see it again you list the partition contents over and over, dazed, staring off into space, eager to follow another instinct put the drive out of it’s memory.
It was horrifying I tell you! The c: root was littered with executables, saved game files, word files, temp files, html files, mp3s, and DOS files that I last saw when I used win 3.11. Just about the only directories present were ‘windows’, an empty ‘my documents’, ‘program files’, ‘need for speed’ - containing 3 failed installs of the game, and a ‘backup’ directory that contained backups of backups - all of which were identical.
Fixed everything in the end, but I’m slated to ‘take a look’ at another friend’s computer on Sunday: “Oh! The Joy!”
