Near Death Experience

Sam's laptop has had a nervous breakdown this evening, it had been asked to do too much, remember too much and store too much – I know exactly how it feels!! The computer just shut down and refused to respond to anyone. Sam was in the lounge sitting next to the computer looking totally distracted and touching the computer from time to time in a forlorn attempt to coax it back to life. Robbie took a different approach he swore at it menacingly until he finally got it to open in safe mode. It took forever but finally the disk clean up announced that there were 7,479993.00 temporary internet files to be deleted! Once that lot was gone the computer was a little more responsive. I had never seen so many programs installed on one computer! Robbie helped Sam to delete all the unnecessary programs, you could almost hear the computer sigh with relief! He still has a massive (and weirdly eclectic) collection of music, 4645 emails to be deleted, and other assorted junk to be tidied up and removed. When you think of it like that it sounds like the virtual version of his bedroom!!

Never Underestimate a 12 Year Old Boy! 06.03.07

At the weekend Sam’s laptop spluttered, produced a few last words in what appeared to be Japanese and then turned up its toes. Between us Robbie and I tried everything we knew restore or reset it, but ‘the computer said no’ and the hours of tlc proved fruitless. As a last resort Robbie posted on one of the computer magazine websites to ask for advice. The replies he got made us even more convinced that it was serious and we were thankful we had appropriate cover (we hadn’t bought it from those well known high street cowboy’s!). It was only 2 months old. The next day Robbie decided to have one last try, and to everyone’s astonishment the thing booted up, it was incredibly slow but it did it. I suggested we should try to delete all the temporary files, recycle bin, cookies etc before attempting a full scan. The recycle bin was empty and he couldn’t download anything because he didn’t have administrator rights. However he had more than half a gb of temporary files – quite an achievement in two months! It sprang to life after we dumped that little lot, we then did the usual adwear and spy sweeps as well as a full virus scan. Finally I got to do my favourite bit, a full defrag, there is something especially satisfying about that. Normal service has now been resumed and more frequent ‘housekeeping’ has been scheduled to avoid any further problems. The moral – never underestimate the capacity of a 12 year old boy to accumulate junk! There again I know an almost 35year old who does a pretty good job of hoarding junk too!!