My days of trying to fix other people's computers is over. I'm swearing it off. I will never touch anyone's computer with the aim to fix anything. It just isn't worth it.

Case in point: I needed to use my dad's computer to do some research about the MacBook that I wanted to buy, but his PC is just dog ass slow. It's not just the dial up connection, which is bad enough. The machine is just a total dog. It's a Pentium III with only 128MB of RAM and he's trying to run XP. It's meets the minimum requirements, but just barely. Then his 10GB hard drive has less than 100MB of free space, which means you've got no room to breath. There's no place for a swap file or for temp files and you can't defrag the damn thing.

So like a dutiful son, I started trying to optimize it. I deleted every temp file I could find. I downloaded a few programs to remove spyware and was in the process of creating some space when the whole system crashed. Blue Screen of Death. I couldn't get it the PC to restart. The OS was annihilated. Fried. Wiped out. Gone. History. I'd adios'ed the OS.

This was on New Year's Eve day. So what did I do on New Year's Day? Did I relax in front of the TV and watch bowl games until I blissed out in an EPSN induced narcoleptic funk? Nope. I went down to Fry's to get a new hard drive. That was around 1 o'clock. By three o'clock I'd given up trying to get the PC to read the new drive and headed back to Fry's. Turns out they sold me the wrong drive. It was too large (300GB) for the Pentium III to handle. I'd either need to get a controller board for it or get a smaller drive, which they weren't sure they had.

I've never dealt with a controller and didn't really want to so I forced them to root around in inventory to find a sufficiently small enough drive for dad's PC. They found a 20GB drive and only half the price of the 300GB drive. What a bargain.

Back to the house, I hung the drive, reinstalled XP, reinstalled all the applications. Then came the fun part. My dad uses this computer as his business computer. His entire business is run off this machine. Much of it was backed up, liked his Quick Books and other essential documents, but his Outlook files were not.

I had to install his old hard drive as a slave and hope I could recover the data. I had to muck around the jumper settings, which for whatever reason, are never as straightforward as they should be. But finally, I got the old drive hung and migrated all the data over to the new drive. I found the old PST files and backed up his email. I got everything but the last month. I'm sure it's on there somewhere, but I didn't have time to find it. For some reason, the OS stopped recognized the floppy drive, and I couldn't figure out why. I tried half a dozen hardware configurations, tried to install and reinstall the drivers, but I never did figure it out.

I was up til two o'clock in the morning on New Year's Day night after being locked out of the house. Then I was up again at 5 to finish up. My flight left at 7:30am back to Oakland, so I didn't really have much time. It's amazing that I got it working at all.

I barely made my flight. I had to beg the skycap to the let in front of the long line at Burbank and was the last person on board after squeaking through security. On the flight home, I swore to myself that I would never touch anyone's computer. I have enough opportunity to fuck my own computers, thank you very much.