Byte to byte resuscitation

I had a terrible time on Friday morning as my work computer ground to a painful halt. Web pages took 5 minutes to appear and Yahoo crashed as soon as it logged on. Something, I gathered, was afoot. Now, I'm not a complete idiot with regard to computers, but I do treat them rather as I do cars and expect them to just go on working with minimal intervention on my part.

This attitude has caused me to come a cropper on more than one occasion and I keep meaning to change my appalling ways, but, I dunno, the workings of machines are something of a mystery to me, and I just expect them to work magically. I KNOW that I should backup my work and home files, especially as I have lost a hard disk and all on it more than once. I also KNOW that I should get my car serviced regularly, but had to have the Saab engine replaced 18 months ago at VAST expense because I just kept meaning to take it in...

Before you think I'm a complete lost cause, I did actually have the car serviced in December, so stop rolling your eyes and muttering 'typical woman', there is hope for me yet.

Back at the computer, I emptied temporary internet file folders and all sorts of clever things like that. Then our computer guru gave the disk a clean and set it to defragment. Well, it needed two goes before the red fragmented files were reorganised nice and tidily.

Actually, it made me wish life could be tidied up in such a way. Just press the defrag button and all those annoying bits and bobs that take up so much time would just reorganise themselves into do-able chunks.

Having done nothing all morning except watch byte to byte resuscitation, I went home and defragmented my home computer.