Computers, Puters and ugh…More Computers!

I have an ongoing love/hate relationship with computers. The majority of the time, I’m somewhere in between. I have a long computer ownership history to draw from and that can amount to a lot of lovin’ and hatin’.

I purchased my first home computer in 1981 from Don Trumps, my church’s secretary/treasurer. Don brought the church’s books into the digital age by purchasing a Tandy TRS-80 (better known later as the Trash-80) and when he upgraded to the next available computer model, sold me the TRS-80.

While in the Air Force, I operated a giant computer console called a “Remote Input Device” and it was hard-wired to the Base main-frame, so when home computers first became available, I just had to have one.

The TRS-80 had no hard drive or RAM and operated off a large floppy disk. The operating system on my particular model wasn’t anything like Windows 95, Vista, XP or Win 98, but something called TRS-DOS. It was all code and when you booted up the computer, all you saw was a blank screen with this: C:/> and it blinked, or something, I can’t really remember.

DOS was an acronym for Disc Operating System and back then everything a computer user did was in DOS. DOS is still handy, believe it or not and recently I had to break out my trusty “DOS for Dummies Quick Reference” book, so I could move around in the Windows Recovery environment. I shook my head and could not for the life of me remember how to back up one level in a directory (which everyone knows is CD..). Sheesh!

Since I’ve owned somewhere around a bazillion computers since my first one, I’ve become quite adept at ridding them of problems, building PC’s from components, upgrades, replacing defective hardware and upgrading software. At any given time I have a couple in the queue awaiting repairs.

Each one is unique in what it needs, but one thing can be applied to 95% of them and it’s a saying we are all familiar with: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. For every computer I work on that has a hardware failure, I have 25 that the only problem they are experiencing is infection. Viruses, malware, spyware, Trojan horses, et al - ad nauseum, are hanging out on every corner, just waiting to grab onto your Internet browsing good time and trash your machine.

To the more worldly customers I ‘splain it like this: “you can’t go downtown and party without protection and expect to walk away uninfected”. It gets the point across right quick.

It’s only been about the last 3-4 years that I ran a firewall or anti-virus protection and the odds are most geeky types didn’t either. We knew where to go and how to get in and out unscathed, but those days are so long gone I now run 3 firewalls and have 17 layers of protection… Some stuff still gets through, but none of it is serious.

Friends, family members, coworkers and referrals drop off their machines and this is where the “I hate computers!!!” (with an exasperated & whining voice) begins to roil out of me. Most infections come in through gaming sites. What? You mean it’s not porn sites??? Nope, it’s my experience they come in through the free and innocuous poker, online games sites.

One time at work, a friend asked me in front of his buddies if I figured out what was wrong with his computer. I had just received it the day before and the truth was, I hadn’t even looked at it yet, but I got a hurt look on my face and proclaimed “Wow! Your PC is ate-up with porn, dude”! He kind of looked down and mumbled “Well, I may have looked at a little”. Ha ha! I then admitted, I hadn’t looked at his computer and we all had a laugh. Maybe I should have been a tough cop.

His computer had lots of icons on the desktop, pointing to the poker Texas Hold Em-type web sites and programs and that is where he had actually became infected. Most PC’s I work on have enough infection that it takes a bit of time to straighten them out, but a few are so badly infected, I should just wipe them clean and start over…but I usually don’t; I just trudge along and clean them up. The record so far is somewhere around 1300 spybots, and viruses.

I usually work for hours pulling peoples computers back from the edge and then undercharge them. Last year I put 14 computers, keyboards, monitors and mice into the hands of folks who otherwise couldn’t afford one and it all came from donations and spare parts. I’ve set up a web site just to help people protect their PC’s and its here: http://baytownbert.us/program.html – that’s the love of computers side of me.

Remember this, if you don’t remember anything else: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.