Reformatting

So, over the years Santiago, my computer, has performed wonderfully. He's helped me on compose my papers, take notes, study for my exams, listen to music and read my favorite books. He's has played everything from Jeffery R. Holland devotionals to youtube cat videos with efficiency and a non-judgmental attitude. I've dragged him to and fro, slumped in my backpack. The jostling has dented his corners and scraped the silver sheen off, but Santiago has remained faithful as ever.

Unfortunately, although the spirit is willing, the hard drive is weak. The incessant barrage of small installs and uninstalls demanded by different classes and projects have each done their part in eroding Santiago's ability to think. As he grew slower, videos lagged, then skipped. Music would generally play, but if you asked him to open a word doc, he'd start to stutter and stammer uncontrollably. Eventually he became the digital equivalent of a college graduate who would go into a coma if you asked him to hum a ditty and open a briefcase at the same time. Defragmentation helped less and less each time. Clearing up memory, debugs, registry cleaner, and virus scans failed to fix him. His antics were starting to make trouble at work, especially when he got in a fight with the Mac server at the office, and went all blue-screen-of-death on me every single time I tried to transfer files from it (kind of a big deal, since at that particular moment, my entire job was those files on the mac server).

So I decided to reinstall windows.

Backing up all my files in case of failure was expensive (external hard drive) and time consuming. But lo and behold the final product is a lovely newly installed operating system, and Santiago back to his old self again.


I wonder how often we need to reinstall windows?

Sometimes, our set of worries just seem to pile on like an infinite list of registry bugs. Anxiety bubbles constantly on both back burners, and the list of incessant tiny popup demands and programs that we don't really need or want drain our processing power, time and memory. Bad habits hedge us into the same rut, and all we want to do is feel like we used to. Back when you were a kid and the desktop was clean. When the animation was smooth and your backyard was a jungle to explore. Back when the challenges you faced didn't end in an Int32 ERROR_INVALID_OPLOCK_PROTOCOL = 301; and a futile 3 hour forum search for the fix.

Sometimes, we just want life to be simple and clean again.

What are our debuggers? What is our spybot, regclean and virus scanner? And what do we have when those aren't enough?

When a day is going bad, you can go to sleep and maybe wake up better. But that's a restart, not a reformatting.

I think we do have a way to get a clean slate. To pull out the master boot disk and see what the perfect exemplar looks like. And by studying our perfect example, we can model our lives after it, working until we are remade in His image.
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We may need to dump a lot out, delete our hurtful memories, clear the cache, uninstall the useless actions and bad habits, and just go back to the basics.

But as Santiago could attest, it feels good to be born again.