House call

House Call

In a pretty small community where everyone knows everyone, I thought it would be OK to make a house call. As a side job I do a bit of house cleaning. And the guy I do this for needed some help with his computer. It’s an old computer, big heavy tower, as old as a dinosaur and as slow as a snail. It was simply not performing as some of the newer, faster computers of today. He and his wife also have laptops but he prefers to work on his old desktop PC. So he had gone out to a computer store and bought himself a new one, brought it home and tried working with it. He found it didn’t work so well for him because it was not compatible with the older programs he was using. You see, he’s working on his family genealogy, which goes way back to the 1600’s. This is important family history information you don’t want to lose. He brought back the new computer and hooked up his old one again and came to ask for help. He wanted me help him organize his folders and programs. He wasn’t sure what was wrong, but he knew his computers were a mess.

I went to his house thinking I could show him how to create folders, drag and drop files into them and he would be on his way. But when I took a look at how he had his folders sorted out on his laptop, it was perfect. They were very organized, so I didn’t understand why he thought it was a mess. But when I looked a few things that might make his computer slower, I saw that the virtual memory was getting a little low and his hard drive was getting really full. And I couldn’t seem to find out how he could have filled it up so fast with what seemed to be so little on his laptop. But as we looked even deeper and he showed me the program he was having trouble with, we noticed that there were duplicates of certain files. So we figure that was the problem that was confusing him. Duplicate files in different or the same folders.

On his old PC though, it pretty much was a mess. There was maybe 500mb of free hard drive space, virtual memory was running really low and there were tons of old programs and software he never used anymore or didn’t even know he had or what they were for. So we started clearing out old programs like that, and updating his antivirus program. This took the better part of the afternoon. As for homework, I asked if he could work on organizing his files on the old computer, just like he did with the new one. Create folders, drag and drop the files, and delete duplicates.

I also recommended that he get himself an external hard drive to keep all of his family photos, scanned funeral cards and genealogy history as a backup.

He seemed a little overwhelmed, but very happy to know that he doesn’t have to lose everything and start over and that with a little maintenance, everything will be just fine.