Is it Gerbil or is it …

I know, I know, how could anything about a computer be funny? Actually there is nothing funny about a computer. However, sometimes as a computer tech, there arrives a moment with a computer user that simply screams out for something truly silly. This is my story, and I am sticking to it.

Several years ago, visiting my wife’s sister and her family, they decided that since I was there, they would purchase their first computer. I went with them to a store selling computers and we picked out a very nice IBM model. This was a top of the line, 486 processor, (I always wondered 486 what?) We added a mammoth 14” monitor that took two men and a small pony to lift, and of course the flagship Microsoft Windows 95.

Once we got home, we opened the box and there it was in all its shiny glory. We carefully began to attach all the cables and surprise, surprise, didn’t end up with any extra cords. Now the moment of truth. I let my sister-in-law push the power button and viola, lights came on, the monitor glowed and there in front of us was the Windows 95 desktop. (OK, there might have been a three or four minute gap from pushing the button to seeing the desktop but you get the idea.) It was a glorious moment. In one $1700 movement of cash, my sister-in-law’s family had leaped into the high tech age. The world of surfing the net, email, blue screens, lockups, and an investment that in four years would be worth nothing, assuming it still worked. But then…..

My sister-in-law picked up the mouse and said, “What is this?” Now a sympathetic human would have begun the explanation of exactly how this human-machine interface device worked and why it was so important to the ease of using the computer. But a computer technician sees the world through wavy glass. “That is a gerbil,” I said.

My sister-in-law was born at night but she wasn’t born last night. Boring into my soul with her “You had better not be messing with me look.” She proceeded to tell me that the people at her work were referring to a “mouse” that they used to control the computer. What to do, she obviously had some points of reference that had her pointed in the right direction? So, I did the only thing a good husband could do, knowing full well that anything I said would be immediately reported to my wife. (I was treading on very, very thin ice.)

I then related how, Xerox had actually developed the mouse and given it to Microsoft, (She certainly wouldn’t know any better.) And that IBM used a proprietary device for moving the cursor and couldn’t legally call it a mouse. Consequently, since IBM was bigger than Microsoft, (at that time it was) they called it a gerbil.

Sometimes when you tell a story like this, the person listening looks around for confirmation. My sister-in-law looked around and saw my son who also dabbled with computers at the time and she asked him if it really was a gerbil. Usually at this point life ends and you go home. But, my son simply nodded his head and said it was true. So for the rest of the weekend, I helped my sister-in-law’s family learn how to use the computer, always referring to the gerbil.

Fortunately, we left that Sunday night and headed home. Monday my sister-in-law went to work and told all her coworkers about her new computer and the gerbil. Monday night our phone rang. It wasn’t pretty.

If you would like the true skinny on the evolution of the mouse, go to http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/. There are pictures of old gerbils; I mean mice, and their predecessors.

I wonder if she wants me to help with the next technological marvel?

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734

No, not a wedding registry.

I was struck with an interesting phenomenon the other day. Riding my bicycle along a section of US41 and because of the amount of traffic, traffic lights and maybe some other issues I couldn’t see, I was actually traveling faster than the cars trying to get to their destinations. County and state spend millions of tax dollars on computer controlled lights, intersection control islands, stripes, arrows, signs and driver education only to watch traffic grind ever slower and slower. They even hire more consultants to suggest improvements that ultimately lead to… longer commute times.

Computers are similar to highways. It seems that the longer we have a computer the slower it gets. Like our roads, the obvious answer reminds me of the question about ducks flying south for the winter in the familiar V pattern. . Why is one side of the V longer than the other? Because there are more ducks on that side. Why does traffic move slower? More cars. Why do our computers run slower? More programs.

How can we improve performance? The answer seems self evident. For roads, remove cars. Computers, remove programs. But even this solution poses its own problems. There is an area just north of Veterans Blvd that was platted many years ago. Roads were put in, but nothing else. There is virtually no traffic but it is used to illegally dump, and off-road vehicles tear up the landscape. We could resolve some of the issues by tearing up the roads and returning the area to its natural state. The same plan can be used to clean up our computers by removing unused programs and files. But a magic bullet would be faster, so we hire more consultants for the roads and we download Registry cleaners that promise to speed up our computers after only a few minutes and $49.95.

What is the registry? The registry is a system-defined database used by the Windows operating system to store configuration information. More simply, it is a road system that the computer uses to find everything loaded on it and make use of it. It also stores the settings we tell a program to use when we install it. It makes sense that if parts of the road become unusable, or go to dead ends, our computer will slow down as it navigates through the maze.

Many folks have downloaded purported registry cleaning programs that promise to instantly remove dead registry entries and thereby speed up our computers. With flashing screens and impressive looking charts they boldly declare our computers are riddled with registry errors. Errors? What they are locating are leftover registry entries that are tied to nothing. Cleaning the unused entries from the registry would at best speed up any search for information within the registry which almost no one does. Oddly, if it were this simple, one wonders why Microsoft, the creators of Windows, does not provide a registry cleaner. They should know the ins and outs of the registry better than anyone. Perhaps a clue comes from Mark Russinovich, Ph.D. Computer Engineering, Microsoft Technical Fellow who states "A few hundred kilobytes of unused keys and values causes no noticeable performance impact on system operation. Even if the registry was massively bloated there would be little impact on the performance of anything other than exhaustive searches."

Registry cleaners, while apparently having no effect on performance, do allow us to perform registry hygiene by cleaning up dead entries. Generally these dead keys and values are created by the removal of programs via the Add/Remove feature in Windows. The problem with the $49 registry cleaners is that they have an automatic feature that most of us use. This automatic feature does not discriminate; it just removes keys and values. To demonstrate the danger of the automatic feature, I recently tested one of the “leading” registry cleaners on my test PC. It ran a scan, found over 400 registry “errors” and then removed them. I restarted the PC and it would not boot up. Apparently some of the registry “errors” were critical to the operation of Windows. The moral here is that if you must use a registry cleaner, find one that can be run in manual mode, has a backup feature that allows the restoration of entries removed from the registry, remove only those entries left from program removal and is FREE such as Piniforms CCleaner or included with a leading antivirus suite such as Norton’s PC Tuneup.

McAfee and Norton Security Suites along with most major antivirus programs provide a registry cleaner under the tools section. Another FREE cleaner can be found at www.ccleaner.com that has a backup mode just in case. Before taking any action regarding the registry be sure that you only change values in the registry that you understand or have been instructed to change by a trusted source. Be sure to back up the registry before making any changes.

Keep that traffic flowing.

Speaking of Bicycling, Check out www.peaceriverridersbicycleclub.com for the upcoming Wheels and Wings IV bicycle event. It’s a Bicycle Ride an event and a party!

Grumbles From The Keyboard: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love My Computer: Courtland Nederveld: 9781467985895: Books ISBN: 1467985899 ISBN-13: 9781467985895

Epicuria: An Adventure That Really Cooks!: Court Nederveld: 9781456561734: Books ISBN: 1456561731 ISBN-13: 9781456561734