MazTaim's Journal: To Do Lists Suck

I am not a very organized person. I don't like making lists and even if I did, I very rarely look at them again. I have a big stack of papers that I keep on my desk at work. Each piece of paper is a todo list. Oh, I get the work done, but never quite the way I initially intended.

I spent some quality time today working on a decent Win98 machine for our Fire Chief's family. I forgot how much of a pain attempting to work on somebody else's PC is. For starters, there is no organization (at least that I can tell) as to where they save files to. The PC wound up having a bad hard drive and NIC. The time spent attempting to troubleshoot the problem was just dumb. There isn't much in the way of resource reporting. You don't get annoying console messages stating drive read/write errors without third party software. You can't get detailed NIC status information without third party software or drivers. One of the best moves Microsoft made was the inclusion of WMI in their OS products. Even thought WMI was available around the time Windows 98 was released, I don't believe WMI is included with 98. Again, the need for downloads. SO, after spending hours attempting to install Windows 98, get the old data back on to the drives, and software downloaded and installed, I finally get everything running in just under a full 24 hours. I need to build up my library of utilities for MS products again.

I would like to mention that I was still having problems getting all the data moved over until I popped a Gentoo Live CD in, mounted the drives and transferred the backups back from another Gentoo box. Maybe I don't need to find new resources to repair MS boxes after all...