You’ve got to love computers. Well, actually, you don’t. The PC and I have been in the worst love-hate relationship ever since about 1991. That first PC came with a whopping 40 Megabyte hard drive – and I quickly upgraded to a 70 Megabyte hard drive – a Maxtor – that sounded like popcorn popping anytime the drive was doing something. And of course I had to spend the few extra bucks to get a 2400 baud modem, rather than the 1200 baud that the PC came with. PCs were a lot about the command line back then. I partitioned that 70 meg drive into 2 partitions – C and D – and hated the fact that you could not assume that a command carried out on C would automatically be carried out on D, too. In fact, you could pretty well count on any command having to be manually executed on both C and D.
Oh and deleting files. You just hated when deleting came a little too easy and you really, really wanted that file back. It wasn’t too long before the first utility software was being released from Paul Mace and Peter Norton – that of course included an undelete utility.
Back then PCs could only do one thing at a time (or run one program at a time). Forget multitasking. A little planning was required to get things done so you wouldn’t be caught just waiting for the PC to finish doing something before you could move on.
When Windows first came with a new PC (version 2?) I just didn’t “get” the purpose. I was perfectly content doing one thing at a time, configuring batch files to accomplish repetitive tasks and setting up menu systems to make program access easier.
Now that Windows has been around for a while, it’s hard to imagine what it was like before multitasking.
But the love-hate relationship with Windows has far surpassed anything a lowly DOS based PC could have come up with.
Take for example “Patch Tuesday”. Microsoft pushes out important patches to their Windows systems on Tuesday. If you manage more than a handful of PCs, you’ve probably encountered a Wacky Wednesday. That’s when something from Patch Tuesday causes a PC to revolt at the thought of booting up and running correctly.
More than once Patch Tuesday has burned me with the antivirus software I use. It’s a major brand, and I haven’t found anything better, but I can usually count on at least one PC in the building not running correctly after Patch Tuesday. The solution is to uninstall the antivirus software and re-install it – and then all seems right with the world for a week or two.
My latest Patch Tuesday “Gotcha” involved a Microsoft Optical Mouse. Left clicking would stop working and eventually the PC would just freeze. (Clock stopped, mouse and keyboard unresponsive). I looked in device manager, and a generic PS/2 mouse driver was loaded, so I downloaded the latest Intellipoint software from Microsoft, installed and rebooted. The PC hasn’t frozen up since.
