I've discovered that modern operating systems rust. I know I'm spoiled by all those years running Unix. The system would stay up for weeks at a time. It would stumble on with the most horribly damaged filesystems. It would run with all disks 95 per cent full for years at a time. You can't say the same of Windows 95 or Windows NT.
I just spent most of the past month resurrecting Bugs Bunny, the Gateway laptop that's been at the center of my professional existence for the past year and a half. I don't think it was a carrot that got stuck in his craw. More likely, it was a Xircom PC card whose drivers wouldn't quite install — and wouldn't quite uninstall either. It could have been an inopportune power blip too, but I'll never know. In any event, Bugs started crashing one day every time I started up Microsoft's Internet Explorer. And he never got over that habit.
I tried reinstalling Internet Explorer. Then I tried one of those Windows registry editors, which pokes at the compost heap of centralized information buried deep inside every Windows system. If anything, I lost ground. For a while, Windows 95 would crash while booting up — a scary experience, I can testify, when all your work is held prisoner on an inaccessible disk. I even tried reinstalling Windows 95, but it helpfully preserved the source of all my problems.
In the end, I had to use Bugs's twin, Tazzy Devil as a kind of lifeboat. In an elaborate and perilous series of maneuvers, I sloshed data back and forth between the two computers while I rebuilt everything in sight. Both machines ended up with reformatted disks and rejuvenated operating systems.
I don't want to count the hours I spent on this exercise. But it did make me aware of the general decay of all the systems on my LAN (except the two Unix boxes, that is). I now see that the Windows NT workstation and the other Windows 95 machines also need dusting and cleaning. They've all seen too many huge compilers come and go, not to mention other products that leave dust and dirt behind.
Next year, I'll up the time I budget for systems maintenance.
P.J. Plauger