Tom Dunlap
SemanticWeb.com Contributor

Like a lot of guys I know who work from home, I’m my house’s IT support guy. Which is a scary thing, because, like many things in life, I pretend to know more than I do.

I can defrag a hard drive, swap out a battery, download and install software (usually), run a spyware sweep, get a wireless network going (oh wait, I recently had a huge problem with that, had to get the young neighbor guy over), and a few other things. I even wrote a book about Sony laptops earlier this decade, “How to do Everything with Your Sony VAIO.”

But when I have to start unscrewing panels on the bottom of laptops I get nervous. I can be a bit of a bull-in-the-china-shop kind of guy.

I was sweating bullets the first time I had to swap out a laptop’s hard drive. What if I bend some of those little tiny gold spikes into which the hard drive snugly fits? What if I drop one of those tiny screws into the guts of the laptop?

Anyway, the issue now is random access memory (RAM). My wife’s laptop has a serious RAM deficiency. It’s beyond slow, in layman’s terms. I knew that her shiny new HP Compaq laptop, running the memory-sucking Vista, should’ve been more souped up when we bought it 6 months ago at Best Buy. But it was on sale, and I didn’t think it would be this slow. I didn’t listen to that little voice in my head. Now my wife says she feels like she’s back on dial up.

I know I could research the kind of RAM module she needs, how much she currently has, then buy it and install it myself — which I’ve never done. I’ve heard it’s a cinch to install RAM. Heck, there are undoubtedly YouTube how-to videos. But there’s a little voice in my head again, and this time it’s saying: Don’t do it. Put down the tiny screwdriver, if I can actually find that one. I recently snapped one of those opening something (refer to “bull-in-china-shop” kind of guy.)

At the same time, there’s another tech issue in the house. I’m dealing with a parental-control snafu on my 6th-grade son’s Titanium PowerBook. I installed a parental-control program called Safe Eyes a while back, but either I didn’t set it up correctly, or it’s been monkeyed with. And when I say monkeyed with, I mean that, after I got it working, I tried to make adjustments so my son could get on iTunes and I messed up the settings. And I’m NOT a Mac-head. I’m finding it a pain to get back into the Safe Eyes program to tighten things up.

After many frustrated attempts to open the program — Safe Eyes was making me crossed eyed — and curses directed toward 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, I finally took the blasted machine to the best computer shop in these parts, Dave’s Computer Services in Santa Cruz.

If any of you Apple types out there have parental control advice for an older Mac (running 10.4.11, whatever particular jungle animal that OS is called) please drop me a line. I DO know that the latest Mac OS has built-in parental controls, but I’m not sure this older laptop has the juice to run Tiger, Leopard, Giraffe, Orangutan — whatever catchy little name has been bestowed upon the newish OS.

I was contemplating my laptop struggles this morning while catching up on the news, when I saw a relevant thread on Slashdot, called, “The Hard Drive Is Inside the Computer,” which refers to a blog on itWire.

The thread is good read (although geeky at times), especially if you’re mired in another household IT support quagmire.

This article first appeared on the Datamation Blog.

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