A few years ago, it used to be a lot of fun helping friends with computers. Installing a new hard drive had some magic to it. Today, it's easy and just takes time. The last week or so I've helped friends & family reinstall windows on 5 laptops, help set up a desktop as a media share for an Xbox 360 to access movies, music and pictures and helped speed up a few machines that are getting old and are completely full of crapware. I guess it used to be fun because there was a challenge to it, where as now, a simple Google search will get you an answer in seconds. 

Setting up a new machine is probably the most boring task on the list above, since it takes so much time and very little brain power. I wish I could talk all my friends and relatives into buying the same exact machines so I could just have an image ready. No such luck. Install Windows, install all 136 security patches and service packs. Install Avast (Tell them to never install Norton or McAfee, especially on slower computers), set it up with ad-aware. Tweak for performance. Msconfig away unneeded stuff. Done. Doing 5 at the same time was helpful, but it's still not fun, simply because there's no challenge to it any longer. 

I did run into a challenge with setting up the media server, where the person who set up the computer in the first place had done a great job of disabling a bunch of services making it not want to share nicely. That took one cigarette to solve. (As in: I needed a cigarette to think through what the issue could be before figuring out where to look).

I'm not by any means saying that helping y'all out was work-work, I do it as a favor and will always help, of course, I'm simply exploring with this post why my experience of fixing/setting up computers has changed.

What changed that made this work instead of fun? It's certainly not Microsoft. (With Vista (Oh, how I hate you), they've made the user experience painful). Could it be that I used to have to figure it out on my own by testing different things instead of just looking the information up? By knowing that I can look things up at a moments notice on Google, I don't bother storing it in my memory. 

Also, It used to be plug & pray. Now it's supposed to be plug and play. But if it is plug and play, why do more and more friends and family ask for more help? It seems like by making things plug & play, people expect things to work right away and if it doesn't, they get frustrated and call for help?