computers suck

I have no idea what my parents did to fuck up their computer the way it is. Pop ups galore, clicking, dragging and resizing windows is not doable, highlighting items is impossible and everything else is slow as hell. So I decide to lose my computer formatting virginity. I would consider myself somewhat technical, short of programming in anything beyond (really shoddy) HTML, though in a former life I had learned VB. So I decided to first go ahead and back up everything. Low and behold I realized that the freak who worked on my parents computer previously shoved everything into directories called "back up", instead of putting them back into My Documents and Favorites and such, and didn't tell my dad this and he, of course, had too big of an ego to ask how to find these files without using the painfully slow search function that the freak recommended. I was kinda wondering why the My Documents folder was so bare. And there in the "back up" directory this fellow made was a gigantic mish mash of files including family photos, spreadsheets, word docs and mp3s. Yes, turns out my dad didn't know how to organize things into folders and, again, had too much pride to ask. So it took me damn near two hours to sort this stuff out partially so I could burn the stuff onto CDs. I still have half of it in a directory called "unfiled shit" because I just can't deal with it right now.

Now I've got my Win 2K Cd in hand and ready to go but need to make some boot disks just in case. If things go well I'll have to go on a scavenger hunt for all the software my parents have lost and install all that, then all the bits and pieces like winzip and Acrobat. If things go not so well ie. I just screw up the whole shebang or the computer doesn't find my NIC and I can't get online... well I guess that means this could be my last blog for a little while. I really really hate doing IT stuff. I derive no satisfaction whatsoever from making computers work better, installing stuff or setting stuff up. I can't believe people do this for a living. Be nice to your IT and desktop support team at work, I'm beginning realize how frustrating their job is taming both computers and uncooperative people.