Transition from geek to luser

I’ve been becoming more aware of the fact that I spend more time fixing my home computer than doing productive stuff on it. This in days gone by was not an issue, but I’m really getting sick of Windows doing the funniest of things. I’ll admit that I have not been inspired to cough up the money to upgrade from 2000 to XP, but I probably should (If only for Media Player version 10). Maybe I’ll wait for Vista and get a new computer to run it at the same time. The latest round of really odd behaviour is that each time I log out, my user profile was deleted, and upon next login I’d be presented with a clean user profile, very annoying. Also at times the Administrator could not delete/move files that were created by my user account, which just violates the principle of logging in as Admin.

I suspect this came about because ~2 months ago I re-installed the machine to sort out the difference between my user account and the Admin account. For about 4 years (on NT also) I had been using the Administrator account as my everyday account. Made setting up software easy, but I knew it was wrong. On the original 2000 install about 6 months ago I created a Simeon users account and started using it. Not all my apps were happy to now run as Simeon. So I moved all my important files/data onto my second HDD and reformatted/installed 2000 on the first. Both disk were NTFS, but only one was reformatted, and I changed the system name, so the second disk had files owned by some “person” that is did not know. So I ended up fighting the volume quite a bit, taking ownership etc. For a few weeks this seems to all work, but things that didn’t work were Microsoft Update and other apps still were not always happy. So last night I got sick of losing my profile and reinstalled the system.

This time I backed up every thing to the first disk. Formatted the second disk to Fat32, copied all the backup data onto the second disk. Reinstalled on the first then merged/sorted the data/files. Other than been up till 4am (take that Mayo) I’ve almost completed the install. I’ve had no user profile issues, Windows Update works a treat.

At the same time I’ve decided to stop using The Bat! as my email client and try Thunderbird. It would seem the sensible thing to-do as I refuse to go near Outlook Express.

There is still another evenings work checking apps are happy and reinstalling things like Office, Media Player, Messenger, RSS Bandit.

Sometimes it would be nice if it just worked. And it’s at this point in my though process that I realised I’ve become someone who just want to get stuff done, and I don’t really care for the sake of caring any more.