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Call me lazy, backward, a troglodyte, whatever

I didn’t create the problem, I’m a victim like you I’m not buying a new PC. Even though the one I have is embarrassingly old, going on three years now, and even though it crashes once a day, I’m sticking with it for now. Why? Because I have work to do and I don’t have an IT staff. I’m the ...

Robert Dow

I didn’t create the problem, I’m a victim like you

I’m not buying a new PC. Even though the one I have is embarrassingly old, going on three years now, and even though it crashes once a day, I’m sticking with it for now. Why? Because I have work to do and I don’t have an IT staff. I’m the IT staff, just like everyone else around here is, and we all have work to do. And Microsoft makes that hard enough with their stupid be-smarter-than-me tricks and arcane rules to get something done. I spend a good part of the day reading emails, visiting websites, and editing. All of those operations and others require saving things. Saving them in the right place so they can be found again, and indexed. So as soon as I get to the point when it’s time to file something, which I put off for as long as possible (and hence too many apps are open, contributing to crashes), it’s clickity-click time as I work my way through the folders to get to the depository where the file should reside. And if I should need to create a new folder, well, that’s a bit like Russian roulette. I begin with opening up Explorer. And then, just as I’m about to select a folder, Windows decides it should show all the other folders on my machine and whatever I was looking at has now moved. If I happened to be impatient and clicked on something as soon as I opened Explorer, the odds are I will have clicked on something I didn’t want, or may not have authorization for, which is another time-eater as I try to back my way out of that punishment. So it’s click on Explorer, and then wait for its cleverness, and then try to do something. What was it? Oh yes, make a new folder. So I click down through the folders to the place I want to put the new one, click on “New,” and then as I start typing the name, something inter-rupts Windows’ attention and I’m no longer in the folder, which now says New. I probably lose an hour a day at the least due to this nonsense, which is one reason why I and others have to put so many hours in a day to get anything done. 

We spend more time trying to work than we do actually working. 

So it’s time to get a new computer. One with faster and more memory, and a newer graphics board. But if I were to do that, it would take me at least a day, if not two or even three, to reload all the apps, move all the files and folders, reload all the drivers, reload all the macros and bookmarks, try to find the licenses and codes, the passwords (you already know how I feel about #!#@# passwords), and one day have a partially functional new machine, which I will spend the next three to six months tweaking to get things really running right. 

There are disk-imaging programs like Ghost, Ture Image, Nitra, and transfer programs, and even iTunes. I’ve tried them, and they did work on some programs. But who has nothing but new apps and the latest upgraded apps? And that’s a failure point. That’s when you know you’ve gone to hell, and oh please flying spaghetti monster, tell me where that license is. Yes, yes, I know it’s now 7 p.m. and I didn’t get anything productive done today, but I think I almost have it this time. Damn. I don’t have it. 

So you use the new system and each time you try to load a program that didn’t transfer completely or properly according to Microsoft’s or the app developer’s licensing rules, you go through the process of trying to install it on your new machine. Or you look for a work-around using some other application, or you buy yet another one. 

I know I’m going to have to bite the bullet, but I contend that not only has Windows 10 not helped the PC slump, it and the policies within it are a bigger deterrence to upgrading hardware than price, competitive platforms, or lack of exciting new programs. Who needs the pain? s