Tech Support for FatherSir

[azurelunatic]

Once upon a time, I was young and impressionable and eager-to-please. So when FatherSir announced that we were switching operating systems, I was quite happy to help out. We saved all of our important files, and FatherSir told me to install Windows 95, and then put in WordPerfect and Presentations. Then he left to run some errands. Since FatherSir either was still, or had recently been¹, working at UAF's Geophysical Institute in the Space Physics and Aeronomy Group as a computer person, he was used to being on the leading edge of computers. So, of course, installing the latest and greatest operating system was the thing to do...

I happily sat there with a book, feeding Guardian² 3½" floppies when prompted. Finally, it was all installed -- and I went to use it.

Keep in mind, I was a DOS baby, and then I was introduced to Windows 3.1, and I was used to everything working.

When FatherSir came back home, I told him (with the steam visibly rising from my head) that for his convenience, I had reinstalled 3.1, and if he wanted to use 95, he could reinstall it himself.

Some years later, we did switch over to 98 successfully.

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[1] He retired at some point when I was teenage. Many of those years are blurrish...

[2] Guardian was our Gateway 2000 computer. Nice little machine. I miss him. As far as I know, he's still up and running.

Comments

[boojum.livejournal.com]

Arlo and I did a little work on the Win2000 box today. I started with DOS and such, spent formative years on MacOS, and then switched to Unix. I, err, kept falling into the UI potholes. Some of them were different design decisions which I hadn't been trained for (I'm used to cancelling a drag-n-drop by dropping it on a boring area of the screen. This has interesting effects in Windows. In the curse sense of the word.) but others were well-and-truly mistakes (I ought to be able to drag the folder into the button for the minimized explorer window. I ought to be able to doubleclick on a folder's name, not just its dinky icon.) or dumbed-down-nesses (We didn't grep, because that computer doesn't have cygwin (fake Unix for Windows), and Windows doesn't support things like grep.)

After I've gotten a job and gotten finances stable again, I'm probably getting a new laptop to replace this one. Said laptop will almost certainly be OS X. If not, it will be Linux with a secondary boot to Win 9x, because the newer Windows won't run many of the games I'm interested in. Windows is not a system conducive to my doing work.

[azurelunatic]

IIRC, with W2K, you can drag to button on bar, hold there, and window will pop up so you can dump it in there.