<corruptmemory>

Being one of the more prominent computer geeks in my extended family I get a lot of requests for “tech support”.  Recently, I replaced a hard drive for my father’s PC and recovered his XP partition from his old drive (dd is just a wonderful tool).  After getting the disk image restored on another drive and fortunately getting the new drive to boot up and run a chkdsk, I managed to get the machine booted with a minimal loss of data – the computer was merciful this time.  Once booted I took the opportunity to do some much needed house-cleaning: updated FireFox to 3.5, installed Google Chrome so my Dad can play around with it, updated flash and OpenOffice, updated to IE 8 (blech, but needed if going to minimize security problems and to access Windows Update), finally I started Windows Update.  For me, since this has become somewhat routine I understand all the jargon that gets thrown at me during all these crazy uninstall/update marathons, but it is amazing how intractably and irreducibly obtuse computers are for the average person.  The average person thinks of computers like a TV – turn it on and choose a channel and everything just works from there.  But computers, like life, are a sublime combination of possibility, power, wonder, frustration, and heartbreak – computers don’t work like the TV, there is no program schedule to tell you what’s up next.  Every time I have to jump into XP, or Vista, or even OS X to do computer surgery I’m constantly reminded as to how intimidating these devices must be to the average person.