Computers save time

They stash it somewhere at the end of the universe. With the missing socks etc.
I know this cos I've seen them - millions of socks orbiting around a gigantic black hole. Made of lint.

This week I have a strong suspicion I've offended the god of computers. Every computer I touch seems to have errors and issues, which stresses me out so much I actually hyperventilate. I deal with all computer problems like it's a battle of wills, and I hate losing. A lot. It doesn't happen very often, as I will spend as long as it takes hunting the problem down, tracking it as it tries to escape, then BAM! I nail that sucker.

But this past week has seen the computers taking the upper hand. I blame it partly on my use of Macs. My MacBook Pro has only had a couple of minor issues, and I've only had to turn it off or on a dozen times since I got it, so I've become weak in the battle against computers.

And in all the "ra-ra-ra!" of how Windows XP is so much better than Vista, I've forgotten how much of a dog XP still is. Have you ever tried repairing Windows XP with a hacked bios that allows your computer to boot off your SATA drive? Fiddly is not the word. I started the installation over 30 times in the weekend, with NTFS errors that wouldn't even allow me to access, never mind reformat the drive. (Translation for non-tech heads: blah blah blah computer shit blah won't work gargh I want to smash you!)

Now fair enough that it's not quite your nicey-nice hardware setup that would make it extremely easy, but how stupid is an operating system that crashes completely when it accesses a corrupted hard drive, rather than give a polite error, like say MacOS or Linux? Yes, thanks Microsoft for such a shitty installer.

Okay - so I was beaten by this, despite reformatting the drive on a Mac at work. In FAT32 format instead of NTFS - thanks again MS for not letting other people use your precious file system.

As if this was not bad enough, my sons' PC was infested with five different trojans/worms. These had infected very single executable in the system. Nice. Trying to repair this was like trying to plug a collander with your finger. Luckily Microsoft had some easily-understandable instructions for stopping the spread of worms in the operating system. Not.

A whole day of researching MS info sheets/battling worms left me depressed and tired. Eventually I gave up and made one of my boys reformat the entire computer and reinstall Windows. So it was a good learning experience at least.

Now i'm just waiting for the chipset fan to expire on my own computer - it's chuckling away like a midget clown as I write, eventually to go the way of the last three fans on my graphics cards - dangling melted from their power leads.