Instead of writing Part 2 of my guide to trashy novels last night, I tried cleaning up my previous PC to give to my sister-in-law and niece and nephew. An hour of cursing later, I don't know whether to give up or start over — I have a fussy, Martha-Stewart's-hard-drive thing about a tidy, defragmented PC (even in the days of Windows 3.1, when you could actually uninstall stuff as long as you knew how to edit and delete directories and .INI files, I started over with FDISK twice a year), so I've been miserable ever since Win 95 and the arrival of that hexadecimal mare's nest, the Registry. Every program you (or some other program or Web-site pop-up) have ever run (even if you've uninstalled it)! Everything you've ever done on your PC, and lots you haven't! File types and plug-ins that have no purpose that you've never seen in your life! An operating system based on the criminologist's principle that no one can pass through a room without both leaving traces of his/her presence and carrying away evidence of the room!
I can never wrestle with the Registry without remembering (paraphrased) something I read at some Linux-advocate site: "A big central database that's always open, that any application can write to, and whose corruption brings down the entire system — that's elementarily, fundamentally bad software design." Remember, folks, on the all-time, embodiment-of-evil list of contempt for customers, Microsoft ranks second. Big Tobacco is first.
7:41:27 AM
|
|