What’s the matter with the OS I’m using?
“Can’t you tell that your Window’s too wide?”
Maybe I should buy some old Sidekick?
“Welcome back to the age of hive.
Where have you been hiden’ out lately, Sam?
You can’t throw trash till you spend a lot of RAM.”
Everybody’s talkin’ ‘bout the new GUI,
Funny, but it’s still NT to me.
I took an extra long vacation this winter, from Dec 22 until Jan 4. I needed that many days so I’d have some undisturbed time to reinstall XP on my home computer. This is just one of the normal rituals necessary when using the world’s most popular operating system. Historically, I’ve done it every year or two, once the computer gets painfully slow and unreliable.
I managed to go almost 3 years without having to do it. My machine just got slower, and slower, and less reliable. I couldn’t hear sound on YouTube (big loss, there), the slot wouldn’t read CF cards from my DSLR, a couple peripherals wouldn’t work in some USB ports, strange install scripts would kick off for no apparent reason. It’s a weirdness that gives Microsoft products their own special random charm.
A reinstall is when you hope you know where you’ve put everything on your PC, you open up the box, you hose out the 2 inches of dust that the 4 fans collected, you put in new drives that will hold another 6 months of RAW files, you reinstall Windows, and then you do your best to restore all your data (neatly ruining useful meta data). Once you are sure it is running correctly, and is faster and more reliable than it has ever been, you spend a solid two days carefully reinstalling all your software, just to slow it all back down again and introduce random errors and internal conflicts.
Then you spend a couple weeks reinstalling the stuff that you didn’t know you didn’t have.
Windows is especially challenging because you can’t just pick up stuff and move it. Unlike Apple’s OS, Linux, Xenix, Unix, and other efficient, reliable, and easily-administered computer operating systems, Microsoft consistently avoided design facilitating intuitive decisions about system operation. With a normal OS, if you want to move somebody’s files, you just pick them up and move them. If you want to move an application, you pick it up and move it. If you want to delete temporary files, you delete them. Windows just throws all that stuff together–in three entirely different places, one of which is not visible to mortals. You can’t just move it–you need to do a planned migration.
How did this happen, you might ask? Well, it is actually very simple: (more…)