Some time ago I did a WordPress upgrade and temporarily lost my blog site. It took me a few days to get it back up and running. How? Was it because I just needed to make a few changes to fix a few things…..or was it just pure luck after floundering around for the time I was down? Yep, it was all about floundering.
I was totally surprised when I ‘did some stuff’ and voila! There it was again!
If you follow the blog site ‘path’ from my ‘C’ Drive, you go to another file in my site, then to the desktop to a temp file, then to a zip file, then to an outdated WordPress file, then to the upgrade and finally to my blog site. And I have been warned that to change anything now will cause me to lose it all forever, if I don’t know what I’m doing. I guess what they mean is ‘I need to ask for directions.’ Rats!
I am now having thoughts about upgrading to Windows 7. Even for a non-techie, OS upgrading used to be easy. I would just load the upgrade and wait for the endless text boxes to stop trying to get my attention. Pretty soon the new OS would begin to show up with all the old applications and away I went. This idea of making Windows 7 a non-upgradeable deal for us XP users came to me as a jolt. But I am not about to make a fuss about it all yet.
There is a thriving consulting business out there, made up of folks who are paid to help us organize our closets. You should clean out your closets from time to time, we are told.
Of course, I have my concerns about paying anyone to help me clean closets. The way I handle the issue is to move stuff from one closet to the other. My crawl space storage area….well, I re-arrange that as well. So I’m good to go….well, maybe not. I still have all my stuff but it looks like I am in control of it since I shuffled it around. For about a day or so, I even know where I have placed it all…somewhere in them boxes. Now, it isn’t that I don’t know how to find the boxes in my closet…it’s that I’ve forgotten what is in them. I don’t know if I need them or not because I’ve forgotten their contents.
I have this continuous mental drag…something keeps telling me there are files that I could use today, or might use tomorrow if I just knew about them.
That’s the way my computer has been working for me for quite a while….more upgrades equals more old junk in storage.
The stuff that’s stashed away in computer files may be of some use…but I have lost interest in it. There’s some perfectly good stuff in the boxes in my closet but I’ve lost interest in that as well.
I keep thinking that some day I’ll have a huge exciting new project to work on, and I’ll look in there and pull out some of the old stuff and use it.
Or maybe just haul it out and see if I can get interested once more.
But for the time being, it seems that the amount of free space on my computer hard drive is filling up while I don’t remember adding anything extra to cause it to fill. It’s like there is something growing in there! (I have the same sense about my closets. But dust balls are more visible!)
Around my home, if there is a horizontal flat surface anywhere, it becomes a shelf and it fills up with ‘fragments’.
I have purchased an external hard drive in anticipation of running out of disk space, while at the same time I’m being told that what is growing are fragments. I need to handle the fragments by de-fragging. Okay, so I defrag. But now I have nice neat piles on my hard drive but not much more space. Even searching for broken files and orphans and other techie-named stuff gives me only slightly less of a mess.
Can I now keep better track of what I might need? No, because I don’t know when I might need it and my head hurts in trying to remember all the little things these hidden apps can do for me.
Is there a ‘Missus’ Microsoft, a wise old lady who has been watching all this and has about had enough of our whining? Encouraging us to clean out our closets…or hard drives, has driven her to desperation!
“I’ll give you a nice clean version of my OS but you have to promise me to clean up the trash on your hard drives so I don’t hear any more complaining. Dump all your fragments and left-overs and bits and pieces! Go clean your closet!”
So I am having mixed feelings about the whole process. How great it would be to have a clean system…..for a while at least, but how much stuff will I lose that I don’t want to lose? First of all, I know I’d lose megabytes of disk maintenance apps! That would be a plus.
I don’t want to get into parallel installs or adding another hard drive. That’s just compounding the issue by creating a permanence to the straggler pieces of ‘nothing much’ that are already floating around.
There’s the untouched tennis racquet hanging in my furnace room, the 35-mm slide projector in the crawl space, the CDs of outdated audio and video software in my CD rack, steel-toed boots and fire-retardant coveralls in the closet in case anyone is hiring senior citizens to do construction work, and while organizing my computer files today, I came across some old DOS 7 installation floppies! Remember the large floppies?
Yeah, I’ll do the recommended ‘clean’ install…….well, maybe that old audio editing software? I should probably hang onto that until after Christmas in case anyone wants to record family greetings. And then there is the old picture editing application that might come in handy to fix holiday snapshots.
I’ve been meaning to get at the MIDI software that hooks up to my piano keyboards, and then there’s…….”Hey, look! A sale on external hard drives advertised in today‘s newspaper!”
Okay, I’ll handle the closet first. Wonder how my tennis game might be next summer…..
Rich
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