great post cheeky!
in addition to all the things you can learn about your puter that are of a maintenance nature, the more familiar and comfortable you become with operating your pc, the more likely you are to begin to discover features and capabilities that you never knew existed!
like the personal toolbar on my browser, netscape communicator 4.5. i just "discovered" that for myself about a week ago. and it it so neat to have icons up there now for the places i visit most often.
another example of features and capabilities is real player audio. now when i'm on the puter at night i can listen to a baseball game from broadcast.com (or classical music on KING-FM out of seattle). i used to have trouble pulling in the signal for the dodger games, but not on the internet!
so many people are afraid of their pc's... like they are being held hostage by this tempermental entity. and the ironic part is is that the puter is often misbehaving because, like cheeky says, some people have no desire or skills to go in and perform basic system maintenance. there is no feeling that takes the place of a stable or near-stable operating system.
one last thing i'll add is just an observation of mine. i said that a lot of people are afraid of their pc's. well, just about as many are frustrated by them! so what i wanted to say is that it is my belief that in order to be friends with your pc <g3> it's almost as if you have to accept that things are going to happen for which you will NEVER know the reason why. in order to be good with pc's, it seems like you have to be super flexible in your thinking process. so many people head straight for one manual or another the minute they get an error message or an alarm, and they search and dig trying to find out what caused something to happen. and in so many cases, you might just as well say it was a gremlin, cause you ain't never going to nail down the cause. yet, and this is strange, so much of keeping your pc running in tip-top shape requires excellent troubleshooting abilities! there's an odd mix of having to pay careful attention to every nuance, and on the other hand, needing to shine a lot of stuff on.
once we start controlling our pc's instead of the other way around, that's when the real fun begins!
:)
mark |
