Winnage!
Have spent a profitable evening making backups of my old Seagate HDD to the new one Bryn gave me. Mostly, to be honest, it’s old document files from the incarnation of Windows that used to exist on there, and a small cache of Ability files (Ability Plus 1.0, mind you, not this Ability Office 4 stuff…), but there’s a couple of directories of interesting things on there as well…
Hillsfar, for example, which will become playable again once I’ve got the damn copy-protection codewheel, if it still exists, back from home (there’s some seriously tiresome copy-protection on these old games: Death Knights of Krynn asks you for words randomly picked from the Adventurer’s Journal every time you load a game, and from the Rule Book every tenth time you save, which doesn’t half get in the way of re-doing bits you ballsed up before…), and I still hope to get After Dark running again, as soon as I’ve got a copy of Windows 3.11 on there.
So I’ve had a satisfying evening, all things considered, and worked out how to stop idiots getting near computers, in an only slightly fascistic manner: forbid people to run anything other than Linux, Unix or DOS 6.22… If you can manage your regular home computing needs from those for, say, a year, without making a proper mess of it, then you can have something more beefy and more user-friendly.
Thus only those who can cope with writing “copy d:\old folder\oldthin~1.wps c:\backups\seagate” at the command propmt get access to the “highlight – ctrl+c – ctrl+v” method of copying. Likewise, anyone too dense to manage a “deltree c:\dos /Y” command stands a far greater chance of keeping their work than they do if they’re given an OS which lets them go online without a decent firewall and with pants anti-spywave and anti-virus protection.
*sigh*
Frankly, you could achieve much the same thing by giving people DOS and then forbidding the ownership of computers to anyone too dim to either work it out or type “help,” but it wouldn’t be as entertaining as making tech support guys take calls from people wanting to know how to balance cups of coffee on the floppy drive…
O – and on the vague subject of knackered old computers, anyone, nee Dan, know where my bloody PSU is yet?