Taking a deep breath and diving into gigabytes of dustbunnies.

I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna take the plunge.

I'm going to wipe my hard drive.

Every so often I notice that my computer is not the lean, mean computing machine it used to be. I usually notice this when I am playing World of Warcraft (which, by the way, I have been away from for days now--though I do intend to go back--so I can't be a totally lost case kind of addict ;)) when my character suddenly pauses about every 5 minutes or so in the middle of running around and simply freezes on my screen, leaving me to wonder what monsters are tearing me apart during this lag spike where I cannot control my character nor see what is happening to her and am thus totally helpless ("Monsters don't kill people...lag does"). This is part of what has spurred my latest "well, I guess it's time for a wipe" decision. I want my computer to be faster again.

The other thing that has spurred my decision is that I have a lot of stuff (files and programs alike) on my computer that I really don't need anymore. This does contribute to the lack-of-fastness (otherwise known as slowness, I guess) mentioned above, but it also leaves me scratching my head and thinking, "Well, yeah, I did want to respond to that posting that Jehovah's Witness guy put on the religion area of ScriBE back in high school, but I never got around to it, I no longer have access to ScriBE, and that was ten years ago now...do I really need to keep his original message on my hard drive?" I am also now completely finished my undergraduate degree, so keeping copies of old assignments from high school, Bible college and even my B.Sc. on my hard drive seems a little unnecessary. I have actually gone back and looked at some of these old files at times, so I will be burning myself an archival CD rather than getting rid of the files completely...but when it comes to the hard drive, it's time for a wipe. It's time for my computer to get ready for teacher's college with a metaphorical clearing off of the desk. It's time for my computer to be clean again.

The next paragraph is for the uber geeks out there. The rest of you can feel free to skip it.

This time around, I'm not just doing a wipe...I'm also becoming a switcher! No, no, no, I am not switching to a Mac from a PC or anything else that drastic. However, after having been a loyal Netscape user for years and years, I am jumping ship. No, no, no, I am not becoming a regular Internet Explorer and Outlook/Outlook Express user...I am not so foolish as that. I am instead switching from Netscape Browser to Mozilla Firefox, and I am switching from Netscape Composer to Nvu. In other words, I am supporting open-source software. My decision on this has come about mainly because I am unhappy with the way I have had to operate since Netscape moved away from having a complete suite of programs (known as Composer) and decided to only continue producing a browser. I understand their reasoning in a way; Netscape looked around, saw that even Mozilla had moved away from the "package deal," and decided to do what everyone else was doing, which was producing only stand-alone products. However, when they went from Netscape Communicator 7.2 to Netscape Browser 8.0, I was suddenly without a mail client. Thank goodness someone on the Netscape communities forum mentioned Mozilla Thunderbird (which I immediately switched to, found to be exactly the same as my old Netscape Mail client but without the Netscape branding, and loved). When Netscape went from Netscape Communicator 7.2 to Netscape Browser 8.0, I was also suddenly without a WYSIWYG web page creator that I liked. I do know a fair bit about HTML (or at least "old school" HTML) and can produce a web page using source code if I really have to, but it's so much easier to use a WYSIWYG program for the bulk of the work and then just go in and "tweak" the code the way I want it (and the reason I liked Netscape Composer was that it had tabs you could use to switch quickly between the HTML code and the WYSIWYG versions of editing your webpage). So I ended up keeping multiple versions of Netscape on my computer: Netscape Browser 8.0, the entire Netscape Communicator 7.2 package (because I didn't know if Composer would run outside the package), and both entire packages of Netscape Communicator 7.1 and 7.0 (I think...the install/uninstall thingy in Windows' Control Panel wouldn't let me get rid of them even though they continued to be listed on the uninstall list, but it is possible those packages got overwritten when I upgraded to 7.2). That is a lot of extra weight to keep on my hard drive simply for the sake of having a WYSIWYG editor that I like. Someone on the Netscape communities forum mentioned Nvu back when I "upgraded" to Netscape Browser 8.0, but when I downloaded it and tried it back then, I didn't like it. I just downloaded and tried it again, though, and I don't see anything I can't do with it that I can do with Composer (either the one thing that I think bugged me about Nvu has been resolved with an add-on package or I never saw/tried that add-on package the last time I tried Nvu), so there is now no reason for me to keep Netscape Communicator 7.2/7.1/7.0 on my computer. I'm making the switch. Furthermore, Netscape Browser sometimes gives me problems with little fiddly things here and there; I always thought that this was because its being mostly based on Firefox technology was making it disagree with certain web pages (despite the fact that changing Netscape into Internet-Explorer-emulating mode didn't help some of my problems and that even using the actual Internet Explorer program didn't help some of my problems on my computer but did fix the problem if I went to my husband's computer, which doesn't have any Netscape products installed on it), but I just found out today that Mozilla Firefox doesn't give me those same problems. Okay, so it's not Firefox that's the inferior product--it's Netscape! Partly because of this, and partly because I have always wanted to make a switch (that wasn't to Internet Explorer) ever since Netscape Browser 8.0 came out (I was a little cheesed by the dropping of the Communicator suite, can't ya tell :)?), I am making the switch away from Netscape and towards open-source (mostly Mozilla, but Nvu isn't made by Mozilla) products. Thank you, Netscape, for cheesing me off sufficiently that I was driven to find better products, which I will now enjoy greatly (new toys? hooray!).

Alright, that's enough blogging for now...I have backing up of files and burning of CDs to do to prepare for the wipe. Hopefully this time I can avoid wiping the hard drive only to fill it back up with the same old junk again.

If you don't hear from me for a while, just assume the wipe went very, very wrong ;). Wish me luck!