Open Writing

Well all has been quiet on the western front for a couple of weeks. Has he stopped writing I hear you wonder!

Well the answer is far more serious, I have had a small disaster at home. Nothing physical and both myself and my wife are in the best of health. No, this disaster was in the virtual world.

Recently we decided to buy ourselves a Webcam, join the Skype community and start video phoning our families back home. All simple enough. We bought an inexpensive camera and connected everything up. Downloaded and installed Skype and arranged to contact the in-laws, who we knew had already got a camera.

We found that the connection was not very good. Our machine ran so slowly that whenever we tried to make an adjustment to the sound or video the whole thing froze and took forever to start up again. Eventually we gave up as it all seemed to be too difficult to actually run Skype through our connection.

I began to think about what could improve the speed of our machine. Initially I removed some of the software we never used anymore. Cleaning off old phone manager packages and utilities for digital cameras we no longer own. It took time but I managed to free up quite a lot of hard drive space by cleaning off things I no longer used. Still the machine was slow, I have to point out that this machine is approximately six years old and is laden with specialist web development tools such as Photoshop, Illustrator and Flash Authoring software. Thousands of pounds worth of specialist software actually.

So after cleaning the machine up as best as I could it was still running a little slow. I thought again about what I could do and remembered the disc defrag tool. During the day to day use of a computer files get split up and spread across the hard disc. This tool pieces these files together and clears up the hard drive, thus speeding the computer up.

I tell the wife I have a solution to our slow computer and start to navigate to the Defrag tool. On the way though I notice another utility listed “Disc Clean-up”. This is even better! This sounds like exactly what I need, so I open the tool and tell it to clean everything I no longer use. Remembering that the defrag can take hours to complete I set the utility going and return to drinking beers and watching Aussie TV. Several hours later the computer switches itself off and we go to bed, me and the wife that is, I don’t sleep with the computer!

Next morning Moira wants to check Facebook and so starts up the computer. Well, tries to start it.

“Disk read error, press CRTL, ALT + DELETE to restart”

Except that it doesn’t,restart. We have a serious problem. I even try turning it off and on again. Same message is burned across the screen. My IT skills may not have been spot on yesterday, I think to my elf. Trying to boot the computer from a different drive has no effect and when I try and list the contents of the C:drive in Windows there is the message again. This really is serious!

I start to look through the few discs we remembered to bring with us, “Beatbox creator”, no! “Video director”, no! “Drawtool”, definitely not! Windows! YES! There in the pile of old discs is the windows install disc that was supplied with our computer. I tentatively place it in the CD drawer and close it. The computer then promptly tells me there is no windows installed on my machine, what the hell did the utility clean, everything apparently, even the operating system!! Why would Microsoft write a utility that deletes everything on the disc?

I stare at the message for a few seconds, know what little I do about computers I now realise what is about to happen! Click here to install windows, I really appear to have no choice. So I click and see the message I was dreading.

“Drive not formatted, Format drive? Y/N”

Everything is gone! Wiped, I have no choice. To any tech head out there who is saying “Before doing that I would have tried….”, just button it OK.

So our computer reformatted its hard drive and installed Windows and I realised just how hard it is to get a computer back to the state it was when it was alive. Norton let me download our virus protection again without having to pay. Drivers for sounds and printers have to be found and installed. Luckily there are utilities that you can get that will assist in this process. Slowly everything is getting back in order.

When we shipped the computer over we took no chances with our personal files and backed them all onto disc. In addition we also put all our digital pictures onto a USB drive to show on our Digital Photo Frame, so between the USB drive, three discs and the Camera we actually have all our files safe. Even Itunes lets you copy your bought files from your I-pod onto a machine authorised for your I-pod so we are not losing everything.

Well that’s if you do not count all the web authoring software you mentioned, I hear. Gone I am afraid. As is Office 2000, although this isn’t a big shame really. The discs for the software are probably in the loft in London, we only brought a few with us. I thought if the computer was damaged during shipping then having the discs wouldn’t be that much use anyway, it was a simple miracle that I brought the windows disc.

The upshot of my tinkering is that we now have a very clean machine which runs quite fast compared to how it used to. We are now going to be using Star Office from Sun Microsystems, as it is about one tenth the price of MS. We have Skype, and we spoke with in-laws yesterday over video phone with no problems

Just don’t ask me to build you a website!