The American Frank

Be Aware!

Here’s a letter from CNET Community Newsletter and my response, with image from FineEye who captions it ‘Somber wife and my PC’ (flickr.com/). :

Dear CNET members,

What’s the worst thing a family member has done to your PC?

Here is a good reason why my wife and I don’t share a computer today. It all started when we first moved in together. I was always very meticulous about keeping my computer squeaky-clean and secure, but my wife, well, that’s a different story. She was the click-happy download fanatic–if she saw a cool-looking free program, you can bet it ended up on our PC. This drove me bonkers!! Bloatware, spyware, adware, Trojans, and viruses–you name it, we had it. And if I didn’t keep on top of the antiparasite preventatives, we’d be formatting our hard drive pretty much every other week. Today, we are still happily married (although after she reads this, maybe not). Why? Because we don’t share computers anymore, and never will (exaggerated, yes, but you know what I mean). OK, enough of my little story. In the latest CNET Download.com How to family-proof your PC column, we asked our members, “What’s the worst thing a family member has done to your PC?” And many members have already posted their stories, ranging from the perils of being a great-grandmother to the cat that killed it. I really got a kick out of reading many of our members’ stories, and if you’d like to share your story about the worst thing a family member has done to your PC, come join in this discussion and share it with us. This is truly a fun discussion to read and be part of, so get in there and participate and enjoy!

Cheers!

Lee Koo, Manager
CNET community

Mr Lee,

I want to be clear at the outset – I’m writing against the husband who knows everything about computers and for the wife who knows nothing.

Between you and your wife regretting sharing a computer, with you having been meticulous and your wife having been perilous, I blame you. I don’t think you have a good excuse for blaming your wife for all those bloatware, spyware, adware, Trojans, viruses whatever. I don’t blame my children – I blame me. I pity your wife. Between her heavy ‘Just do it!’ and your weighty ‘I knew it!’ was missing an ounce of prevention. If you were the know-it-all and she was the do-it-all, by all means you could have used your knowledge to prevent disaster. If you couldn’t prevent catastrophe from happening, you weren’t doing enough. And in any case, you know that if anything can go wrong, it will. I know that from experience setting up and/or restoring to life myself again and again about 100 different desktop computers at different times and under different circumstances since about 1987 when the first affordable PC clones came to the Philippines.

Instead of eventually going your separate woes, you could have anticipated tragedy and taught her the use of shortcuts, to click on shortcut icons that you created: say, one for Ad-Aware, another for Spybot, another for Norton Fast & Safe Cleanup, and everything would have been alright for a thousand days, or at least a hundred – she could have done that herself everyday. You could have done the optimizing of the hard disk yourself every week, or taught her to click the shortcut. And you could have told her not to click on all those tempting offers for all those free PC checkups and any free offer at all. You could have simply configured your PC so that it scanned every diskette, CD, DVD or flash drive for any virus. You could have made it easy for yourself – and for her. And if calamity strikes anyway? Nobody’s perfect! Certainly not Windows.

It was not necessary to make your PC family-proof; it was only necessary to make it fool-proof – and if you didn’t do that, since you were the know-it-all, I know your wife was not the fool.

In my big family, we have only one PC with 2.4 GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512 MB RAM, 120 MB video ram, 120 GB hard disk, and wireless Internet. We are 10 users in all, with 5 heavy hitters, each of the 10 set up as an individual Windows user – and so to each his own cluttered or clustered desktop! Like, I like my many shorts in a shortcut folder. Like I like Maria Sharapova as my wallpaper, and nobody can touch her. We have been doing this for about 8 years, starting with Windows 97. We can forgive Windows for its weaknesses.

I also have seen to it, as the PC Administrator, to partition our 120 GB hard disk into many drives, six in all: drive C is for Companion files (such as Cliparts, encyclopedia, publishing software) plus the Windows & related files, drive D for Documents (Docs and images and Downloads), drive E for Electronic media (each user has his own audio & video files), drive F for user Files & the Family Font collection, drive G for Global installs and setups, and drive H for Hot Mix (anything goes in). So everyone has a good idea where to look for files or installers right away.

Not only that: The Hilario PC has a dual boot, both Windows XP, the exact same version. I figured it out and did it the first time myself, not asking anyone, about 5 years ago. It works! (I haven’t tried Linux.) As backup, I have also taught my son Edwin, who is 18 years old, how to do the setting up when Windows needs repair or a new install. No matter what care you exercise, you have to clean up your drives at least twice a year, virus or no virus. That is why I have our hard disk partitioned, so that I can easily erase files in drive C and set up the first Windows there, and then erase drive D and set up the other Windows there. With a dual boot, why can’t a husband and wife go their separate waits and use the same PC?

For file backups, I have bought flash drives for each of my children earnestly using the family PC and who are in school. Me, I also use the Briefcase feature of Windows, whereby, before logging out, I can easily back-up any number of files I have just finished working on with only one click of the mouse: Update.

All in all, file (along with fool) management is a splenderous thing! I highly recommend it.

Frank