Ghost Hassle

I updated Norton Ghost and it required 50 MB! That's more than a lot of full programs. Talk about bloat ware. And the damn thing rebooted without permission. I was lucky I was running Firefox and could restore the session but that's not the point: it's my computer and my decision when to turn it on and off, not the decision of some lazy programmer who can't be bothered to program in a cancel button. And I'd just spent some time pruning the hard drive of unnecessary programs before Ghost ran its weekly backup. Took off a few programs including PagePlus 9; it's a great and simple to use program but I installed it in April and never used it once.

I tried my old Windows 98 computer a few times this week just to see if it was still going and it seems to be on its last legs. The CMOS battery has gone; the time and settings are no longer accurate. The memory counts up to 64 MB on start-up but Windows sees 200 plus. The graphics card seems to be on its way out too. The screen freezes or the computer reboots. After around ten minutes and half a dozen re boots it seems to be ok.

There's nothing of value on it - I actually used Ghost to create a backup of the drive and can run it on my Vista computer within Virtual PC - but there's a fair bit of hardware in it. Sadly there is little that is of use. The computer was built about eight or nine years ago. It's not even a half decent system nowadays. 1.3GH processor, 240MB of ram ( after an upgrade one of the chips never read properly from the start but worked ok) and 30 GB hard disk. It's great for Windows 98; it would probably run XP okay but would cough and splutter if Vista was installed on it. None of the components would be able to be reused; the memory is really old, ditto the processor. I could use the hard drive in some way but that would be about it. The graphics card is PCI which isn't supported much nowadays.