My goal was to see how much time I waste in a typical month on computer problems/maintenance. Prior to this experiment, I had a vague notion that I was spending a fair amount of time on this kind of stuff. This experiment has brought the actual amount of time into sharp focus.
Having done the experiment, it is amazing to me how many problems a tiny home network can create. Over the course of one month, I logged 21 different errors/problems/activities that wasted time.
Via The Gus [1], “Marshall Brain's Blog: Amazing Amount of Time Wasted Repairing Computers in December [2]”
I've been using the same computer now for … um … six years or so and I haven't had nearly the amount of problems that Marshall had in one month. Then again, I'm running Linux (RedHat [3] 5.2 in case you were wondering, and probably weren't) and except for the times I masochistically [4] torture myself [5], I haven't had any problems with Linux (or Unix for that matter).
To be fair, I haven't had as many problems with Windows as Marshall, but when I do, they tend to be rather spectacular and no amount of swearing, blasphomy or sacraficing small furry animals will fix the problem (even reinstalling Windows would fail—I don't mean fail to fix the problem, I mean the installation itself would fail). That's why I pretty much stick with what I have.
[1] http://www.spies.com/~gus/ran/i.php?040104
[2] http://marshallbrain.blogspot.com/2003_12_01_marshallbrain_archive.html