I feel so dirty…
February 27th, 2008 at 12:49pm madgunde
Today at work I had to make a DOS boot disk so I could secure erase the hard disk in a really old PC before it got disposed of. I had to call upon knowledge and experience I haven’t used in years and that I’d rather hoped I would never have to again. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, what should have been a 5 minute operation ended up wasting over an hour and a half of my time between a bad floppy disk, incorrect instructions I was given and stupidly bad source files for the scrubber utility that included a misnamed program file. So after overcoming all the other obstacles, I still had to figure out why I was getting a “bad command or filename” error in the middle of what was supposed to be an automated process.
It was really surreal, and took me back to a dark time in my life when I had to deal with those kinds of problems on a daily basis. A time I never want to have to revisit again. I feel so dirty. I’m going to have to spend an extra amount of time using my Mac to try and cleanse me of this disgusting feeling.
It amazes me that PCs still ship with floppy drives in them to this day. Apple’s first floppy drive-less computer, the original iMac will celebrate it’s 10 year anniversary this year. It’s been over 9 years since Apple dropped the 3.5″ floppy drive from all it’s products. Really punctuates the Windows PC industry’s bizarre obsession with outdated technologies, doesn’t it?
Entry Filed under: Computing, Hardware, Software
5 Comments Add your own
1. Jaish Chada | February 27th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
LOL! Dude. That was hilarious. I think you need to scrub yourself with lye to get rid of any PC virus you may have contracted in the process. I can’t say I miss the “Bad command or filename” days, let alone the “File not found” errors. Nice graphics…from Dune?
2. madgunde | February 27th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
@Jaish Chada
Actually, the nightmare graphic is an album cover from the band of the same name. Album’s called Genetic Disorder. Never heard it myself, just came across the image in a Google image search.
3. VNJ85 | March 2nd, 2008 at 1:43 am
Yep, Apple users keep saying it over and over how sad PC users still use old out dated technology.
4. pbedouk | March 5th, 2008 at 5:47 pm
Well I feel clean.
I switched to a Mac after an uninterrupted run of 25 years with a PC at home (not the same one!).
Though recently I was doubting the wisdom of my switch, having had to reinstall Leopard from scratch and hence losing all my installed applications (though not any data). I was thinking geeze, this is why I left the PC world, and it’s back! In the end the reinstallation of all those apps, though time consuming. was a trivial exercise.
So perhaps it is good to be reminded from time to time why we prefer Macs.
5. madgunde | March 5th, 2008 at 6:19 pm
@pbedouk
Sometimes things will go wrong with even the best technology. How much time/effort/expense you expend recovering from an issue is what sets the better technology apart from the inferior.
Reinstalling OS X and all it’s apps and restoring my data/preferences is so easy in Mac OS X, that I actually enjoy doing it, for instance when upgrading to a new major release of OS X or when I buy a new Mac. Time Machine is going to help make sure my data is safe too for those unexpected disasters.
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