I'm a PC

by

Wilfred Bereswill

Before I get into the blog, I have to report on this news story. Stupid driver or Queen of Multitasking, you decide.

Breast-Feeding Driver Cited
KETTERING, Ohio (AP) — Police say an Ohio mother has been charged with child endangering after another driver reported she was breast-feeding and talking on the phone while driving. The caller told police in suburban Dayton that he spotted the minivan-driving mother dropping off children at a school Thursday morning. Officer Michael Burke says authorities used a license plate number to track down 39-year-old Genine Compton, who told them she was breast-feeding and wouldn’t let her child go hungry. He says the child was under 2 years old. Burke says the legal concern is that Compton had a child in her lap, not that she was breast-feeding in public. He says she faces up to 180 days in jail and a $1,800 fine if convicted of the misdemeanor.

Now back to the regular program.

How many of you reach for a pen and pad of paper when it’s time to write?
I thought so. A few occasional holdovers, but the majority use advanced technology.I’m going to show my age, but I’ve grown up with computers. In fact I can still remember my first. Well, the first computer I saw in person. It was an IBM 1620. A room full of heavy processors, tape drives, card reader, key punches and those CRT screens with the green letters. It touted a whopping 4,000 bytes of memory. OK, these days my car key has more memory, but in 1968 (I just started high school) it was da bomb.

The room was elevated to take care of all the wiring and they installed a separate chilling system to keep the room cool. I remember writing my first Fortran program to add 5 numbers and spit out the answer. I believe the actual program took 12 or so computer cards and with 4 K of computing power, the Fortran compiler (I suppose what we would call an operating system) had to be loaded each and every time for well over 100 cards. Total processing time? About 20 minutes.

It was real fun when we hung the processor in a do loop. For those less tech savvy folks and anyone too young, getting hung in a do loop was getting caught in a vicious circle that the computer couldn’t get out of. By the way, it happened all the time.

While co-oping through college with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, I got to play with a GE 6000 that was housed in a remote location at The Waterways Experiment Station in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Yes, I occasionally caught that monster computer in a do loop. They didn’t have the sense of humor my high school teachers had. Not with the entire Corps of Engineers worldwide fighting for computer time. But the ladies that yelled at me on the phone had the most beautiful southern accents.

I even got to write a program for a Kray Supercomputer, which ain’t so super by today’s standard.

Four years after I graduated from college, I received my first PC. It was 1984 and that beautiful machine was an IBM 8088, with two 5 ¼ inch floppy drives and no hard drive. You loaded DOS, (pre-windows operating system) and then slid the Wordstar disc in and you were off and running. Of course when it came time to save a file, you swapped discs and then saved. Oh, no internet connectivity way back then. Al Gore still hadn’t invented it yet.

I think I pretty much had every version of PC as the industry blossomed. Hardware drove new developments in software and then software pushed hardware development as processing speeds got faster and storage grew from K’s to megabytes, to gigabytes and now to terabytes. Somewhere in there, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs came out with a revolutionary machine called the Apple Macintosh. I remember thinking that their endeavor would flop like a lead balloon. Of course, Mythbusters proved that a lead balloon could fly and the Macintosh is considered top of the line and preferred by the journalism industry.

So these days I write exclusively on my 5 year old 17 inch Toshiba laptop. I’m running Windows XP and forbid my family from using it. They have a tenancy to download trojans and other nasty viruses. However, my display is starting to flicker, I just spent $100 for a new battery and I’m realizing, it’s not all that portable. So, I just pre-ordered a new ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook (1.66 GHz Intel Atom N280 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, 10 GB E-Storage, Bluetooth, XP Home, 9.5 Hour Battery Life) Blue. It doesn’t ship until mid-March, but for $375, I couldn’t resist.

SO what do you use to write? Laptop, desktop, Mac, PC, Word, Open Office, Wordstar, notepad?

Tech tip. (DISCLAIMER: I am not recommending this product or suggesting you should use it, but it worked for me.

Is your PC notably slower than when you bought it? There are many reasons for slowdowns, including upgrading to new products like Office 2007, but for some, it’s likely to be anything from spyware to Windows Registry problems.

I just had my desktop machine “FIXED” after my aforementioned daughters downloaded a trojan that stopped my computer in it’s tracks. The trojan un-installed my virus protection and crashed my home office. The company that repaired it for me installed a little freeware program called ccleaner. You can find it on Cnet’s Download.com if you’re so inclined.

It takes care of a multitude of issues and cleans up cookies and a host of other things that could be slowing you down. It also has a Registry cleaner. Windows Registry is the heart of Windows, so be careful when messing with it. What happens over time is that programs leave remnants in the registry that Windows has to go through every time it runs something. These extraneous lines of code just start slowing the machine down. For me, running the registry cleaner on ccleaner brought my PC and my laptop out of the thick mud and brought new life to them.