My oldest daughter was here for a visit last week. We had nothing planned as we did for my youngest, just kinda hung out doing whatever. Took her to see 9/11, did the tubing thing at Salt River Canyon, and just spent time talking.

There was one evening that had to be set aside for computer shit. She asked me about some things she could do to remedy problems she was having with her computer. It was most of an evening we spent on it. She decided after discussing it that she wanted to start from scratch, that it was time to start with a fresh install of Windows.

I was apprehensive about this. There is a lot involved with doing a brand spankin new Windows installation on a freshly partitioned drive. That's really what it has come to when you are working with Windows, it's much more efficient and less time consuming to make sure your data is backed up somehow and start fresh rather than mess with maintenance of the hard drive. At least that's the way it is for the average user. When I start explaining things to someone about what it will take to properly upkeep a computer hard drive, I get a pained and pleading look, usually followed by, "Can you just come over and do it?", or "Can I just drop it off at your place?" Usually, these problems stem from novice users with an older computer and a young child downloading and installing everything under the sun from the Internet they come across.

Anyway, back to my daughter. She was adamant about getting it done properly, but since I wasn't going to be anywhere near her computer, I pretty much had to tell her she was on her own, but it wouldn't hurt to try it as long as everything was backed up properly. To me everything backed up properly is having an extra partition, or more than one in my case, that has all the extra shit on it. That way, when you go to delete the old partition and install Windows, nothing is lost. She made sure everything she wanted was backed up to CD-R and was set to go.

She called today. She was working on her computer, and needed some help. Since I had her on the phone I got some info about her computer that she couldn't give me while visiting and the computer sitting in her apartment across the country. She has a 20 GB hard drive, and 10 GB of free space on this drive. It didn't make sense, she had just done a clean install on a fresh partition, so there should be more room on the drive. Turns out it wasn't a clean install, just a reinstallation of Windows over the existing installation. I had to walk her through getting her Dell into the BIOS setup so the system would boot from a CD, then walk her through setting up the disc properly. Most people just would not be able to handle this. She is fearless with the thing though. All the warnings Windows goes through during the hard drive part of the setup usually is enough to keep people away from it. Not my daughter though. She breezed right through that shit.

While I had her on the phone, I asked her to see what she could do about her sister's computer. In true geek fashion, she left setup running on her computer, and went to work on the younger sibling's machine. She asked her a couple of questions, then said, "Let me get in there, ok?" It was sooo funny! That's exactly what I say when I'm working on one of the boys' computers. I called her a geek. :)