Losing My Inner Geek
After working in the I.T. industry for about 15 years, doing everything between PC repair work, programming and software development, and network/systems administration, I think I'm losing touch with my inner-geek. Maybe some of my experience in that industry has been helpful, but the last two days have been difficult for me with my home computing habits. My desktop PC is about 5 years old, so I decided it was about time to replace it. I picked up a new off-the-shelf desktop computer from Best Buy on Thursday and have spent the better part of the last two days getting all my data and applications moved onto the new system. Every time I upgrade or replace a home computer system, I usually get easily amazed at what you can have for the price these days. My first desktop PC was a PC XT clone that ran at a whopping 8 megahertz. It had a 20 megabyte (yes... MEGAbyte) hard disk drive, which would be difficult to fill up at the time. It also had 5.25" 360k and 3.5" 720k floppy disk drives. The monitor was a simple amber monochrome display with no color. I was also fortunate enough to have a 9-pin dot matrix printer. After some serious saving, I was able to afford a 2400-baud internal modem so I could connect to the few local computer bulletin board services in my area. It was quite an undertaking in 1987 to shell out $2400 for all that stuff.
My current desktop monitor smoked itself last week, so I went out and found a huge deal on a nice Viewsonic 19-inch widescreen LCD for $115 on sale. This week I spent $479 on one of the new Acer Aspire desktop boxes that has quite a few bells and whistles for the money. It has the AMD Phenom X3 triple-core processor running at 2.1ghz (262 times faster than the old XT.) It doesn't have any floppy drives and it has a 320gb internal hard disk drive with 4gb RAM and the Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit edition of the operating system. It has 9 USB ports and one firewire port. It also has a multi-card reader that will read the various memory card formats I use in my digital camera equipment. As I write this blog entry, I do think I have just about everything up and running the way I want it. I can start to settle back into my normal routine now rather than the get-it-running routine of the last two days.
This new PC had one 'feature' that I hated right out of the box. That 320gb hard disk drive was partitioned into two drives. I simply think that's a bad idea and it's not the way I like to work. Fixing it was going to be no easy task. With the 64-bit operating system, I could only find a couple of software options to correct that issue without having to re-format the disk completely and start from scratch. After a little research, I found a software package called Partition Manager by the Paragon Software Group. For $39.95 I got a tool that would allow me to combine the two partitions on the 64-bit operating system into a single partition without having to start from scratch. It did, however, take me multiple tries and a lot of head banging to get it to work. The documentation that comes with this software isn't the best, and re-partitioning drives in a 64-bit system isn't something everyone should try just for fun. In a nutshell, I finally got it to work and if you want to know the details of HOW, just ask and I'll fill you in with the geek detail.
As for losing my inner geek, I find myself not on the cutting-edge of the PC computing world anymore. This is the first time in a LONG time that I have had the latest and greatest version of any operating system on my home PC. I had Windows 95 when it was fairly new, but I skipped over Windows 98, Windows ME, and Windows NT completely. After Windows XP hit the streets, I did upgrade to Windows 2000, which wasn't the newest. I couldn't boast the latest and greatest to the other kids in the neighborhood, but what I had achieved during these times was unparalleled system stability without the hassles of constant upgrades and bug fixes. As I mentioned earlier, the computer that just came off my dekstop was five years old. That probalby also tells a real geek that I'm not a gamer. Since I don't play computer video games anymore (haven't in the last 10-12 years), I don't have to keep the hottest and fastest computer on my desk all the time.
Maybe the loss of the inner geek isn't so bad after all. That geek is high maintenance.