Well, it's finally been confirmed to me. Like hairdressers, IT people are more concerned with the health of their family's (and friends) PC's than their own. And you know how I know this? Just this...
Last night, as I was chatting with my brother on the internet, and popping away for a second or two to secure a fresh gem to my party frock, I became aware that my PC was thrashing quite a lot, and was rather slow. Now, for those of you NOT styling yourselves as IT Guru's, thrashing is when a PC is swapping the contents of the memory onto the disk and back into memory again, in an attempt to be able to use more memory than is in the machine. It can also occur when trying to run programs on a particularly fragmented disk, because the software has to search all over the disk to find all the pieces of the file you're trying to run.
So, machine thrashing, very slow. I thought, I'll just see if it needs a bit of defragmentation (there's software which will put all the pieces of files back together again - quite neat really!)
So I right-moused on My Computer (yes, still XP), and chose properties. Can you imagine my horror when I realised that I'm down to the last 10Gb of disk space? This is a massive 120Gb disk, and I've manage to stuff it nearly full (oh, I remember my first ever hard disk - a whopping 5Mb, that I thought I'd never fill).
I quickly checked the size of my video folder - but this is only 42Gb - yes, that's a lot, but this is video we're talking - I'm still unsure of where nearly 70Gb space has gone.
At this point I decided to see what's installed on the machine (I hear you - since it's my machine, surely I'm the one who installed it, and therefore should know what's on it - you'd think, wouldn't you?) which is where it becomes sticky.
When supporting my father (who installs the entire contents of the PC Pro disk every month, as far as I can work out), I happily wade through his installed programs, pruning as if preparing the garden for winter. Seems I don't do this to my own PC.
Until last night - I spent a very happy, rather late, half hour divesting my computer of all that stuff I'd installed, thinking how useful it would be, but never got round to using. All I need to do now is work out how to completely get rid of AOL 9.1, which seems to think that uninstalling it means you still want it!
The Blog of a very shamefaced computer support person...
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