Reformatting

This weekend I took the "BIG" step. After a year or more of trying to coax my computer along because I was a) too busy to fix it and/or b) too lazy to do what needed to be done, I finally broke down and bought a removable (meaning external) hard drive. I then began the process of moving the files I wanted to keep onto the removable drive, because I was going to REFORMAT my hard drive.

While in this process, I made an interesting discovery. Granted, my computer was purchased around 2001 or so, but is still a good machine. I could stand to upgrade the memory (for video and dvd burning, etc.), but other than that, it does everything I need it to do. What I learned, though, was that the external drive that I purchased was some 80Gb while the internal drive on my computer was a mere 40Gb. Go figure. I thought I had plenty of room to back up my whole hard drive onto the new external drive. Some two hours later, I note that the back up process has halted. Huh? Argh. Seems my computer's hard drive was NTSF or NTFS or whatever while the external one was FAT32. That meant the backup file was limited to 4Gb. Oh, well. Nothing to do for it.

Anyway, I'd finished moving all the files over and now I was ready to do what I dreaded to do. As always, this is a move of the last resort. Hard drives rarely need it unless you are giving them away. I was going to reformat my hard drive. EVERYTHING would be lost. Going back to a restore point was no longer an option. I had so many extraneous, superfluous, redundant, unnecessary (how many other adjectives can I use for the same thing) irrelevant, and non-essential files on my computer that it had slowed to a mere crawl. I had trojans hiding in the corners along with a few viruses, not to mention adware, spyware, and TWO (count them, TWO) operating systems. My computer was a mess.

For too long I had let the task go for fear of losing some important piece of information. Let's face it, I had all my contacts, e-mails, training plans, pictures, and race reports stored on this computer. Having a hard copy of any of these things would be nice, but could you imagine retyping all those race reports or re-entering all the data from my training logs? The thought alone was enough to make me cringe.

However, after spending most of Sunday at the task (Thursday through Saturday were spent being mostly sick), I was finally at the C:> prompt where I needed to type in the Y (for yes) when asked the question, "Do you really want to reformat the drive." Closing my eyes, I hit the enter key, then walked away from my computer. This was going to take a while.

Wow! What a difference a few hours can make. Yes, it's a pain in the kazoo because I have to reload all my software. I have lost some data (a year's worth of diet info in Fitday), but most of my pictures, race reports, and training journals are safe. I even managed to salvage all the data in my Outlook with the exception of my rules. Already I can tell a difference. Web pages load faster, programs open up quicker, and jpeg transfers are no longer sluggish.

To bad we can't reformat our lives sometimes. Wouldn't it be interesting if we could simply wipe out all the bad stuff, the extraneous, superfluous, non-essential stuff? But what would we learn if we did. I think we'd always have to be starting over from scratch. It's okay to do it to a computer, but human beings are a little different. Ya think?