Ho Hum. Another Lecture

As I trudge down the long corridors of this forum I notice a lot of the doors are misnamed. They general have a long, technical title, when they should say “Fiddler Inside” I am not knocking “fiddlers”. I am one of the best, or worst. If I look at my reliability score I can see all the red X’s from where I tried to overclock, tried out some new settings in bios, tried to get Vista to go faster, better, whatever. And for me and many others on this board, that’s OK. I may get spacked out when I get the dreaded BSOD or can’t reboot. But it’s the challenge, it’s why some people hot up cars, or jump out of aeroplanes. For the thrill and because we can. I know I can usually fix the thing, and I’ve treated it badly in the past. However, there are many of us who can’t. z3r010 highlighted in a recent post that Microsoft has sold 180 million copies of Vista. A minute fraction of these have serious problems. An even smaller number come to this board with problems. This suggests to me Vista, in spite of it’s bad press is pretty good. The same goes for modern hardware. It’s no longer Wright Bros stuff. Many millions of systems run quite happily, year after year, doing everything their owners ask of them. These guys have a favourite program for everything, don’t experiment or fiddle. Their important documents are pretty secure, they don’t lose all their precious memories etc. So why do others have such drama. The answer is nearly always something they have done, most times innocently, sometimes foolishly. I’m not pointing fingers here, just want to get some of us thinking. Does your system do what you want it to? Is the bigger card, extra speed actually going to provide a sufficient benefit to warrant a reformat or worse new hardware. Is the couple of minutes we save on boot up worth not having an anti-virus. Are we really too busy to back up regularly etc. I think that if for those of us who like to risk it all and live dangerously that might be fine, but for 99.9% of users the old adage, if it ain’t broke don’t fix it should apply.

This message comes to you from an aged father. “Do what I tell you and Don’t do as I do”