of nero, joliet and all the fragments

It seems I’ve been bitten by the annual January bug to organize, as evidenced by the serious ‘chills’ of yesterday when the thought hit me to burn a CD with a backup copy of "My Documents" and then delete the folders and files I never look at any more.

Now I’ve attempted to do this before and met with serious objections from my Nero Express. It seems this CD burning program has a strange obsession with Joliet names - checking them for accuracy, comparing them with each other and using any and all variations from its norm as an excuse to sit down on the job.

Knowing I’d had this problem in the past, yesterday I first modified my Nero Express "Preferences" regarding Joliet and thought I had outsmarted the thing at last. But when I asked it to burn "My Documents" in its entirety, the same thing happened as always (it popped some Joliet problem on my screen and aborted the burn). Try as I would, no matter how many of those pesky files I thought I found and deleted, Nero always found more!

I finally did outsmart the old boy by burning the project piecemeal, though I was forced to leave out one folder that he said had Joliet file name problems I just couldn’t find. I left the computer after several hours of this with a sore bum but a feeling of elation.

Later in the evening, I gave in to the sinister organizational urge again by doing the abovementioned deletions. Then, to tidy things up finally and completely, I decided to do a disk defrag.

In the past this has worked well. Yesterday, though, the poor machine chewed and chewed but it never got past 4% completed. It would start at 0%, would grind away to 1%, 2%, 3% and very occasionally get up to 4%, after which it would go back to 0% again. (What a perfect image of ‘worry’ - going over the same ground again and again, and again but never making any real progress.) Occasionally I clicked on ‘See Details’ always to find it was still in the checking for errors mode. When I woke at 1:00 a.m. and went to check, the defrag was back at 2% -- this after six hours. Needless to say, I then put it to bed despite Window's objections that it wasn't done.

But what’s with that!? The whole defrag used to take no more than two hours. Hubby thinks it has to do with the new Symantec. He’s had the same problem with his computer and finally had success doing a defrag in ‘Safe Mode’ - though I’m wondering, is there ever such a thing with a computer.

Anyway, my digital attic now has tons of room and my computer is still working despite fragments scattered all over the place. I wonder what organizational damage I can find to do today!