THE SPECIALIST WITH A UNIVERSAL MIND

ANDREW VAZSONYI, Feature Editor, McLaren School of Business, University of San Francisco

The Lethargic Computer, Home Therapy and the Computer Doctor

by Andrew Vazsonyi, University of San Francisco, McLaren School of Business

Compie, my computer, has been spiritless for the last few months. Real trouble started when I loaded WordPerfect for Windows. It was awfully slow.

Compie is only two years old, in human terms this would be 50 years because one computer year = 25 human years, so she is really in the prime of her life. Colleagues tell me that Word Perfect for Windows is slow and my problem cannot be helped. I am also told that 4 megabytes of memory is just not enough. I also have Quattro Pro, and 1-2-3 loaded, so it is just too bad that Compie is so slow. I decided to call the computer doctor and tell him I need more memory. "How do you know that is your problem?" he asks. "It could be many other things." Fortunately, the computer doctor, unlike human doctors, makes house calls, so I ask him to come and talk to Compie.

The doctor arrives, not with one, but with two black bags, and starts talking to Compie. I cannot understand the dialog, my pidgin DOS is just not good enough. "Compie is very unhappy," the doctor says. You talk to her in the language of ToolKit and that really screws her up. (I have changed the names of software packages to protect the guilty and the innocent.) "Compie wants you to talk DOS". Well, that is hopeless--DOS is beyond me. The doctor asks Compie about using the program ZTree and she says that would be okay, but we must get rid of ToolKit. How to do that?

The doctor says that will be hard. ToolKit has infected the nervous system of Compie, spread like cancer, and will be very hard to remove. The doctor suggests major surgery; reformat the hard disk, reinstall all the programs and all the data. "You have only 150 megabytes on the disk, it doesn't look too tough."

This scares the living daylights out of me. Of course, all doctors are surgery-happy. I am paranoid about losing data, and my manuscripts. I don't want to live without Compie even for a few days, and feel we must find another way. The doctor says he can try to take off ToolKit, and see what happens. But how would I talk to Compie after he removes ToolKit? I am only a Ph.D.--learning DOS is beyond me. The doctor suggests using the program ZTree; he talks to Compie and she thinks that is okay.

So the doctor installs ZTree, and after a few days I learn to speak ZTree. In the meantime, the ToolKit cancer spreads throughout Compie. DOS tells me that partition C is full, which is nonsense, I have only 18 megabytes on it. I create a new directory with 100 kilobytes on it and Compie takes it without batting an eyelash. Now DOS tells me that I have 25 kilobytes available. Then I discover, that there is a hidden file with 19 megabytes on the disk. How did it get there? How do I get rid of it? In the meantime I can do my work, but Compie is getting really anaemic.

I confer with the doctor and come to the conclusion that surgery is really required. I make a complete backup on my tape, which takes six and a half hours, and I feel safe. I am ready. But if we do surgery, why not go all the way?

How about a hard drive replacement? I have a 210 megabytes hard disk, but it is getting full. It's time to do the change. The doctor suggests 340 megabytes. We might as well put in another four megabytes of memory, to be on the safe side.

Then comes D day. Surgery takes four hours, and Compie is quite happy, the doctor tells me. But now comes the "black soup" (the Hungarian way of saying trouble). All my batch files (about 30) and macros (about 70) are sick. It takes me about four hours to heal them. So now I have a rejuvenated Compie. Or do I?

The acid test is the tape back-up. What took over six hours, before surgery, now takes less than one hour. WordPerfect for Windows is perfect.

So what is the moral of all this? When you are sick, get a good doctor. When you have car trouble, get a good mechanic. When you have computer problems, get someone who knows the business. The age of the do-it-yourself is over. If it ain't broke but performs poor: fix it.