2001-05-29 - 8:43 p.m.
#66: No Need for Displaying Computer Geeky Neatness
Note to self: Gwaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.... I've just had the most amazing, DELICIOUSLY prepared flame grilled whole chicken.... In my entire life. It was.... It was just.... so..... GOOD! It was nice and crispy on the outside and had oh so juicy and tender white meat on the inside.... Nando's Chicken of Botany Downs shopping mall! I declare my undying love for thee! @_@ But wait! There's more! The special secret Nando's hot sauce, also makes the chicken hot and spicy! Oh, so tasty! I cannot heap enough praise upon this chicken! I.... I must have more. There are some leftovers in the kitchen fridge for tomorrow, so that we could partake of its flavour a second time.... But... I cannot wait so long to taste its succulence once more! @_@ TO THE KITCHEN! *gets up, waddles a couple of feet, then falls down due to distended tummy full of chicken* Or maybe I could just lie here and wait for tomorrow. That would be a good idea, too. The only really bad thing I can say about it, is the fact that it costs about 17 dollars a chicken, which is kinda pricey, but well worth it! Oh the otherhand, if you have a stingy mind like ours, you'd think of buying an ordinary roast chicken, dousing it with a bottle of the special sauce (acquired from the restaurant) and then making ones own Nando's like chicken. Mmmmm mmmmm mmmmmm. Special sauce. Errrr.... Sorry about that. I get a little emotional around good food. @_@
There are times when I feel that my computer is inadequate. Well, not BEFORE when I first got it, tried running Quake 2 and melted at its positively number framerate (as compared to my old computer). But now, having it for over a year, I've started to develop a few.... "issues" with how it handles certain things. Like the CD-R drive, which has an extremely slow start up rate, and has a tendency to stop altogether if it isn't accessed on a regular basis, which means a sudden freeze in certain games that don't access the CD-ROM all the time. It's also developed a tendency to access or open and close the CD drawer by itself for no reason whatsoever, which is a little.... disconcerting. My computer is also starting to look slow in the simplest of applications, from starting Netscape Communicator (boo, hiss) to encoding an mp3 file, to processing a really large document on Word. And blast it, if I want to open Windows Explorer while lots of applications are running, it had better bring up the Start menu faster than the 5 seconds I have to wait between pressing my mouse and Win95 responding. See? Many niggling little issues....
So the best way I found to combat my issues is to work on somebody elses computer for a while and see how much better (or, if I'm unlucky, worse) my computer is. And the best person to look for whose computer is in pretty bad shape is my cousin's, who shall for the purpose of this diary entry, remain nameless. But for convenience, let's call him.... Simon. Now, Simon has a PII-233 with 64MB RAM, which is considered to be pretty wimpy by today's standards, but that's not the only thing that marks a big minus against his sytem. No, he also has a thing for downloading and keeping every mp3 he can find off Napster. And when you're into asian bands like my cousin is, there are a LOT of bands you can download from. Nothing wrong with that either (unless you disagree with his taste of music) except this guy only has 4GBs of space to play around with.... And by the time I got onto his computer to play around with it there were only 50MB free on each of his two major partitioned local drives. I say 2 major, because he has a third partition which has only 7MB of total space. I have no idea why whoever created this system did that, but Win95 keeps popping up with a "Not enough space on Drive E" warning all the time.
To reiterate, he has a bad system with hardly any space left and a system warning which will never go away unless he repartitions his hard drive. So far, so bad. So yesterday evening, being the kind soul that I am, I decided to bring over the portable backup storage drive from old computer (a Superdisk) so that he could use it to back up his exceedingly large number of mp3s. Got there, set it up for him (after trying to sort through the mess that was desktop.... oh yeah, that's another thing: his desktop is a mess, along with his start menu. Too many shortcut icons/unorganised folders in each... several of which led to dead programs. urgh....). And then decided to sort through his hard drive to see what could be saved. To say that his hard drive was a nightmare to browse through would be an understatement. Repeated folders, more broken shortcuts, and applications for which he had NO idea what were for (and weren't part of the original windows setup); needless to say, he had a lot of crap that he didn't need.
After a lot of deleting, shuffling around folders to make them neater (kinda like rifling through someones closet in a way, though I didn't feel all THAT guilty, since he was just over my shoudler and directing me on what were important and what wasn't) we discovered that he could have freed up to over 400MB on his C drive, and 100 on his D drive if he had just organised his stuff better. O.o Which is quite a bit indeed, and we hadn't even used the Superdisk drive up to that point. Gave him a little lecture on this, though considering the fact I could use the same kind of advice in terms of my room and lifestyle, I suppose I had no room to talk. ^_^ Though I'm slightly worried by the fact that right after I cleared up all that room, his first response was, "So that means I can install more games like Age of Empires, right?". Oh dear.
So anyway, if you're ever feeling inadequate about your own computer specs, just remember that of my cousins, or your cousins, or anyone whose system yours is superior to, and feel a whole lot better about it. Kinda lame advice, but hey I needed a moral at the end of this story. @_@
