A few of questions we’ve yet to answer…
1 Missing Hard Drive Space
No matter what size hard drive you get, after using it for five years or so, you’ll likely find it teetering at the edge of complete capacity. Somehow, that huge drive you bought has filled up full of applications, games, movies, music, photos and more. However, you can be sensible about things by keeping all your media files on a different drive, which has the added advantage of protecting those files if your operating system goes wrong. But even if you do that, you’ll still somehow run out of space, and no matter how many apps you uninstall, you can never seem to get it all back again without wiping the system and reinstalling the OS. Before you do that, though, check out the free program WinDirStat, which can help you work out what’s taking up all the space.
2 Slowdowns For No Reason
As well as leaving you nowhere to install things, having a full hard drive can also cause your PC to become sluggish and generally less enjoyable to use than it otherwise would be. But even if your hard drive is in tip top condition, you can still sometimes find your computer driving in the slow lane, chugging and churning over every little task. If you’re lucky, you can open the Task Manager and see if anything is hogging the CPU. If there is something there like that, then it’s simply a case of shutting it down and reclaiming some speed. If you’re less fortunate, you won’t find anything, and you’ll find yourself if that odd position of having a computer that’s being slow and rubbish for no apparent reason. The only rational reaction at this point is to raise your hands in the air and scream at the heavens.
3 The Emperor’s Videogame
Every year, there’s a new Call of Duty, a new FIFA game and a new edition of PES from Konami. And every year, these games are practically identical to their predecessors, save for a few tweaks here and there. Yet in spite of the startling lack of originality in these series, they still sell millions. People aren’t stupid (well, not all people); they must know these games have barely changed, but they still go out and buy them, just to get the same game as before but with different football players or different guns. Just like the famous fictional emperor’s new, non-existent attire, we just need a little kid to point at the latest EA games and say, “They’ve got no clothes on!”
4 Blue Screen Info
Anyone who’s used any version of Windows for any significant amount of time will probably at some point have experienced a blue screen of death. It was so common with certain editions of the OS that Microsoft might as well have included it in the feature list on the box. The worst thing about it, though, is how hard it actually is to decipher the information on it. Google ‘blue screen of death’ for example, and you’ll find long strings of text full of esoteric technical jargon that you need a PhD in computer science to work out, as well as messages that simply say something along the lines of ‘An error has occurred’, meaning basically, ‘We have no idea what went wrong’.
5 The Any Key
We mentioned it in a different Top 5 recently (as well as several caption competitions over the years), but we’re going to mention it again, because it really is one of life’s great puzzles. In a hundred years, when our future descendants, with their enormous bulbous heads, ESP and flying cars, have solved every problem of science including the warp drive and the secret to eternal life, there will be a supercomputer somewhere, with a team of the world’s greatest scientists working on it and trying to answer the ultimate question: where is the damned Any key?