My Weekly Rant !!

March 26th '99

Well hello again my little chickadees. Yes I know, its been a while since my last Rant, but there are reasons (aren’t there always??). And in fact, that is the moral of my little tale, the idea once again given to me by my wonderful Canadian friend Devon, just what would I do without her ?? Who knows !! Anyway listen carefully for you may learn something, and take heed from my advice lest you fall foul to the same problems as I !!! ………….
It all began one stormy night *how stormy?*, sorry I am still in Rocky Horror mode. Anyway I was cleaning up the files on my computer and managed to delete the setup for Internet explorer 4. Now the file was labeled “safe to delete” so naturally I didn’t worry about erasing the pesky room-wasting file from my computer. How wrong I was. I do believe that on deleting it, all my troubles began. Yes it was not until a few weeks after, once the pesky file was safely removed from my recycle bin that the problems arose. On attempting to scan some new pictures, my computer informed me that this was not possible as a file was missing. Oh dear, so in an attempt to repair this I decided to run to cyber-space and find a patch. Ack, my puter would not connect as the lines were always busy. It seems that a lot of people at my university all have computers and all want to connect at the same time.
Unperturbed I decided to subscribe to one of the new batch of “free” internet service providers. Then it turns out that in order to do this, numerous simple technological changes need to be done to my internet connection, the most simple way to set-up my computer is using the internet connection wizard kindly provided by Mr. Bill Gates himself. However this would not work as the one missing file appears to be the most important file in the history of computer functioning. Yes that pesky file was needed for this too. Oh boy what to do ??
In an attempt to repair this debacle, I upgraded my puter to windows 98. Maybe a rather huge assumption but hey, I thought it would work. Ahh but no. It seems that windows 98 doesn’t believe in giving away files and it was nowhere to be seen, and now to add insult to injury, windows doesn’t run properly without this file, so the screensavers crashed my puter and it was a 1 in 5 chance of it actually starting up in the first place. So it was all down to one thing, steal the file from another computer. Now the first time I tried this it all failed, but this was due to human error and me remembering the file name incorrectly. DOH !! Anyway I quickly realised my mistake and proceeded to get the darned file. It took less than 5 minutes to find it, save it to a disk and put it on my puter, and the worst thing was that my friends puter had the bloody file about 3 times, one copy was being used to play “Settlers” !!! Grrrrrr !!.
Anyway with the file cunningly placed on my disk, I attempted to put it on my puter. Nope not that easy. I had to change all the settings as my computer hid the file and wouldn’t let me see it, taunting me in a most evil way. However I sorted this, and now all is well with the world. My computer is running at peak performance with windows 98, although there is not much room left on my hard-drive, damn that windows 98 is big. My scanner is happily functioning again, my connection wizard runs and I have set up my new connection and even ICQ works once again. A nice little bonus I think !!
And that brings me up to date. I do have other things to write about, such as my little excursion to Belgium, but I thought I should share my sorry tale with you all so that you may learn from my mistake and live happier stress free lives. The moral of my tale is NEVER delete a file called “msvcirt.dll” as it is the most important file in the history of the world and deleting it will halt all functions such as scanning, connecting, working and tea making