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March 21, 2005
Can't open mails in Outlook Express
This is an actual case.
A guy had an older laptop with about a 6 gigabyte hard drive.
He phoned me and complained that his machine had crashed, and as it was rebooting, it checked the hard drive and found errors in the File Allocation Table. I guided him through that.
Then he told me that he couldn't open mails in Outlook Express.
Since it had crashed while he'd tried, I played it safe and told him to close the computer and NOT use it anymore until I could have a look. Just in case the computer had locked up on one of the OE files. You see, he hadn't done a backup in five years...
You know, he WANTED to install adaware, and thought that was why his computer was so slow...
So he asked me if he could do a backup to another laptop, this one with a slightly larger hard drive. I told him to forget about it, he'd have the same problem with that one (if not right away, then surely after a while).
I told him a laptop has a finite life. The first to go is usually the hard drive. Because of the mechanical jolts a laptop will experience throughout its lifespan, the hard drive WILL stop working at some time. And recussitating it is not an option if the heads go out of alignment, which happened on a few I've seen. It's way too expensive.
During all this, he mentioned that he'd downloaded pictures from his digital camera unto the laptop (turns out it was about a gigabyte worth of pictures), and I was pretty sure of what was causing his immediate problems: Not enough space on the hard drive.
I must have mentioned the possibility of using a separate hard drive. He'd never thought of that, but a local electronics chain had one of those with a discount, so he went there to buy one, happily. You see, this meant he could extend the life of the computer.
By this time he didn't trust himself, so I did the honors. By that time he'd deleted the cache and tmp files (in c:\windows\temp), so he was up from 40 megabytes to about 60 megabytes of free space.
And the mailbox he could list but not open mails in, weighed in at 407 megabytes.
So tell me, you expect a mailbox measuring over 400 megabytes to work on a machine with 40 megabytes free space?
Pfffft!
Rule of thumb: For a windows 98 machine, you need at least 500 megabytes free space on the main hard drive, otherwise it will grind to a stop and crash frequently.
No buts about it.
You know, his USB CD-burner had stopped working, you'd think that would have tipped him off? It requires much more than 500 megabytes free space to work properly.
So if you're in the same situation, think about getting a separate USB hard drive to load some of your pictures and whatnot on to, then deleting them off the hard drive.
You'll see the speed of the computer will perk right up!
The reason I'm writing this out, instead of not saying anything, is that I expect this story to be VERY common. I think a lot of people don't understand why their machines are crashing and unreliable and slow. Yes, spyware can have a lot to do with it, but NOTHING helps if your machine doesn't have enough free space. It NEEDS that space, especially since older machines (especially laptops) frequently don't have enough internal memory to avoid swapping to disk.
Posted by Ann at March 21, 2005 06:48 PM
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Comments
Here is a question that I ponder: "How much time do technical people spend maintaining computers for non-technical?"
I spent 8 hours getting a infection of spyware/adware/ and viruses off of my dad's computer. I was at a party with a bunch of tech folk, the amount of computers we supported from family and friends ranged from 8 to 12.
Computers are still too hard to maintain for most people. Yes strides have been made, but I'm kind of tired of having to clean up after the messes that Microsoft allows.
For example, it's one thing to have to deal with viruses. The creaters are usually kids who want to feel powerful. But they often don't have any assets and aren't making money off of them. But Adware and spyware products are made by people who have money and are trying to make money. They have assets that can be siezed and they should be forced out of business.
Posted by: spocko ![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.annelisabeth.com/blog/nav-commenters.gif)
at March 28, 2005 06:33 AM