Wow, that'll never fill up

I just got back from an interesting vacation, first to Lincoln to help Ryan till a yard so he could replant his lawn (my back!)...and then to Long Beach to help Jim with what I always help him with: His computer.

I had gotten Jim a receipt scanner for his computer last Christmas, but Jim let me know he couldn't install it because he had no hard drive space left. And so I came to the rescue.

I had actually gotten Jim the computer as well - a state-of-the-art Dell desktop with all the latest features...for Christmas 2002. My, oh my how time has flown! Both Jim and I had to look at the original receipt to be reminded that his machine wasn't just "a few years old." In computer years, he might as well be using an abacus.

Jim's computer sports a whopping 30GB hard drive. Yes, that's thirty. I'm certain when I ordered his computer from Dell in '02, I thought to myself "he'll never fill that up." Sure enough, with the explosion of picture and video files starting around '05 or so, he has managed to choke his hard drive almost completely full.

When I checked its properties some seven years later, I saw that I had endowed his Windows XP "screamer" with all of 256MB of memory. It's hard to remember that there was even a time when such specs were considered healthy. Ah, progress. No wonder Jim was complaining about slow loading of programs!

So we took a field trip to Micro Center and did some shopping. Mind you, there really isn't a great deal to do in order to "upgrade" Jim's current setup; I would have had to give him a reasonable hard drive, plus upgrade his video card, and so we opted for a quick fix until I can buy him a computer for Christmas 2009: More RAM.

Amazingly, this particular 2002 Dell maxes out at 1GB of RAM, but that's a heck of a lot better than 256MB, so we invested $80 to tide him over. Jim also used up a gift certificate to get a really great 22" monitor bargain, which will help him now and can be used later when the new computer arrives.

A bit of partition resizing doubled the size of his main C: drive to 20GB...which I promptly began to fill up by doing all the Windows Updates Jim had ignored over the years. (Jim is the landscaper in the family; I am the computer geek.) But it still left enough room for Jim to get his receipt scanner installed and use the beast until we can do a complete swap-out in December.

At that time, no doubt I'll spec something like a Windows Vista machine with 4GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. He'll never fill that up.