Re: Why Am I So Damned Boring?
- From: "Derek F" <lordpilrig@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 15 Sep 2009 00:36:42 +0100
We need more boring people.
Derek
"james" <james@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:$3hgjFCSRprKFw$9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I get depressed reading this newsgroup because the problems that beset
most normal people seem to be passing me by.
My wigital camera battery pack being a case in point. Several people
have complained about their batteries being discharged when needed
whereas my battery pack gets a charge about twice a year and that's it
for several thousand pictures including document close-up.
Perhaps my 'problems' are rooted in my ability to be boring which I've
taken to extraordinary heights. I have the same phone number today that
I inherited in 1971. It's 975. Over the years digits have been prefixed
to the number but in the village directory I'm still listed as 975. The
rectory is 1. Police house (when we had one) was 2.
My cellphone number goes back to the launch of Orange and dates from the
days when Orange gave customers a choice of numbers. I opted for all the
fours and fives and I've never changed it. My grandchildren are amused
by my ancient Nokia cellphone. All it can do is make and receive phone
calls and SMSs. It can play a game of chequers but I've never really
mastered the control diamond so it regularly wipes the ceiling with me.
I've never changed my main email address. It's been the same ever since
I started with Demon circa 1992. My ES Telefonica address dates from
1996.
My workhorse laptop pooter is now older than any of my grandchildren. It
dates from 1983. Weighs about a quarter of my conventional modern laptop
and runs for 20 hours on internal battery power (four AA cells) which
means that I can use it for serious work without power station help.
During October 1987, when hurricane-force winds swept across bonus belt
southern England and knocked out our leccy for ten days, that laptop
enabled me to keep working on a novel at my usual pace of around 3000
words per day. BTW, Mr Fish was not talking cod's wallop on that evening
when he said that there won't be hurricane. Hurricanes are tropical
revolving storms that in England hardly happen. England may get
hurricane-force winds.
NB: I did try pressing an Alder portable typewriter into service
during those powerless days but years of disuse had caused the
typebasket to corrode and seize down.
What else is boring about me? Compared with my sprogs I keep cars for
silly periods. A Granada Scorpio Ghia lasted me 17 years. A Rolls-Royce
about ten years (a dangerous car that's now out of harm's way in Japan).
Our Dualite toaster was a wedding present in 1960! I'm quite handy with
Eureka wire repairs wound on mica formers. My long case clock was ninety
years old when Napoleon marched on Moscow.
But the real problem is with my PCs. They're so damned trouble free that
I'm convinced that something is seriously wrong with them, especially
the office machine which comes in for a lot of serious use. An old
friend, Richard, entered into the lighthearted fun aspect of my concerns
and launched an investigation. He switched on the office machine and
gaped in amazement at the brief appearance of a strange BIOS. "What the
hell was that?" he demanded.
I explained that the message came from my Adaptec SCSI card to which he
recoiled in horror saying hardly anyone used SCSI peripherals today. I
pointed out that my elderly HP 4P flat bed scanner of 1995 vintage was
faster than any modern USB scanner I'd tried. He agreed that SCSI
peripherals were the bees pyjamas and that my attachment to my ancient
scanner probably accounted for some of my problems because SCSI gear was
fast and efficient. Certainly Visionnaire's OCR software for the scanner
was the best and fastest because it was version 3 which came on three
diskettes. Later versions were supplied on CD-ROMs and, like so many
once fast and efficient software applications, they had been crippled by
the addition of lots of bolt-on bells and whistles features.
Richard was aghast at my Atlantis word processor because it was so small
-- written in assembler -- only about four megabytes. MS Word was a
proper word cruncher that had crash readiness built into every megabyte
of its vast sprawling high level language size. Thousands of lines of
source code just waiting to give trouble. Much the same scorn was
reserved for my Foxit .PDF reader. Another trouble free miniware mess
when everyone knew if you wanted trouble you went after Adobe's
over-complicated bloatware Acrobat.
Once he'd got over the novelty of playing with my swivelling monitor and
pressed the system box's reset button a couple of times, my visitor was
dumbfounded by the speed of the boot up. About 40 seconds after
switch-on and XP-PRO/SP3 was loaded.
"Obscene," was Richard's comment.
A quick investigation soon revealed why and exposed the nub of my
problem -- Drive C, the Control drive is small and perfectly formed. All
it contains is the operating system (Windows) and link files. Nothing
else. As a result it's a miniscule 6 gigabytes -- small enough to be
incrementally auto backed during the POST. Being incremental means it
hardly ever changes so that backing up takes only a few milliseconds.
With a mounting sense of wonder Richard checked through the rest of the
hard disc's logical drives (I dislike the inflexibility of partitions).
His discoveries made for grim reading. He used WINFILE (more later).
Drive D contains nowt but data files: Grolier, COD 11, Websters;
Encarta; Britannica; Andromedia Classic Library etc.
Drive E: Entertainment. Games and so forth. Incl Flight Simulator.
Drive F: Finance. Spreadsheets. Tax and VAT letters etc.
Drives G, H unassigned free space.
Drive I: Images. Including ghost images of all drives and image files of
DVDs.
J: Junk. Stuff I've written over the years running into millions of
words.
M: Misc stuff.
N: Norton system works and other Norton applications.
R: Radio. MP3 radio plays, features, readings etc.
S: Snaps. Thousands of .JPG files and video clips.
T: Text files. Mostly Usenet archives.
U: Utilities. Misc applications.
"It's your number of logical drives you've assigned," Richard declared.
"I know the Microsoft knowledge base releases advocated a separate
system drive for the operating system only, but you've taken MS's
thoughts on specialist assigned logical drives to ridiculous lengths. No
wonder you're not having troubles! All those files, games and
applications should be crowded together in folders and subdirectories on
one partition with interrupt timings and files and buffers given plenty
of clash opportunities." He went on to explain that separate logical
drives delayed pagefile and FAT reads for a few vital milliseconds that
prevented those much sought-after hangs and crashes which brought
excitement into so many lives.
The damning evidence of Norton's System Works showed that I hadn't
'defragged' any logical drives for months. "You're got to do it
everyday," Richard assured me. "Daily rewrites of file allocation tables
are a wonderful opportunity for things to go disastrously wrong.
Defragging doesn't do anything for non-contiguous files. It doesn't move
them. Defragging is a wonderful placebo. It's like avoiding cracks in
sidewalk flagstones. People feel better when they've done it.
My usage of Ashampoo's Windows XP enhancement program 'Power-Up' didn't
help because it neatly zaps about a hundred Windows irritations ranging
from stopping 'send report' messages to removing those annoying little
arrows on application short-cut icons. 'Power-up' stops many
crash-inducing routines and even includes a nifty registry cleaner.
'Power-Up' will have to go if I'm to maintain some sort of street
credit.
When Richard discovered the WINFILE program he was astounded. He had no
idea that Microsoft's brilliant file manager that did everything that
Windows Explorer was supposed to do but didn't was back. I confessed
that I'd cribbed it from a version of Vista owned by a neighbour. With
WINFILE it's possible to perform all manner of clever tricks. It doesn't
need any installation other than to copy three tiny files into a Windows
sub-directory. The three files are WINFILE.CFG; WINFILE.HLP and
WINFILE.EXE. They total about 500K. Richard took a copy of them home on
a diskette. I had to insist that he left my swivelling Eizo monitor
behind.
I'm still trying to make up mind about following his advice.
--
James Follett
.
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