Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Computer Addiction

I have been trying to curtail my time spent online of late as it is generally the least productive environment for getting anything done and I have the annoying habit of whiling away the hours exploring meaningless avenues and adding to my already bulging store of useless knowledge. But even offline computers can be consuming companions. My current obsession is trying to improve the performability of my iBook; it's a G4 so it has still got a good bit of whoomph. I have tried regular defragging, ridding applications of superfluous languages to free up space, moving to the trash all those unused widgets that I thought would be a great idea to download a year ago, sacrificing the Mac interface's cool animations such as the magnifiable dock and the genie effect so as to speed things up. And still I see that spinning beach-ball where the cursor should be.

But secretly I like spending all this time on the damn thing as it prevents me from doing other stuff and allows me to put things off. Anybody who uses a computer regularly will know exactly what I'm talking about. Apologies to the lay men and women for a boring computer post but I have little else to write about today. I may go and see The Wind That Shakes The Barley later on; it just got released over here. As they said in that awful Guinness ad of a couple of years back, now we'll have something to talk about.

2 comments:

LukeM said...

I have the Mac Book Pro, it's fucking awesome but I am ridiculously addicted to it. More RAM is nearly always the solution. How much free hard drive space do you have? If it's less that 3 gigs that might be part of the problem too.

seanachie said...

No, that has been a problem in the past, but there's a whopping 32gigs on the hard drive. All the bulky stuff has been moved to an external. I ran a maintenance workflow last night that seems to have improved things a bit.