Megahurts: Sicilian defence

Protecting your PC and losing your mind go hand-in-hand, as Lincoln Spector discovers.

Things looked bad for me. The IRS was making nasty noises about my tax returns. I felt like I was coming down with the flu. For some reason I couldn't quite explain, I was getting threatening letters from the Mafia.

There was no question about it: I needed protection.

I went out and bought myself the most comprehensive protection I could find - McNortnix's Monolithic Whole Deluxe 2000 Professional, the ultimate suite of utility programs. It wouldn't protect me from the Mafia or the IRS, but at least my data would be safe.

Monolithic Whole Deluxe 2000 Professional is so big it comes on two CDs - Monolithic Whole and More Mono. I installed the first CD, and never quite recovered from the experience.

When I rebooted, up came Monolithic Central, a front-end program for launching and controlling all the other Monolithic Whole programs, pointless considering all the programs were launched on startup anyway. To make defragging, saving lost clusters and editing the Registry easier for novice users, Monolithic Central uses a simple, intuitive interface modelled after Macy's on Christmas Eve.

The most important part of the Monolithic Whole suite is McNortnix's famous Battleaxe Utilities. This perennial bestseller gives you defragging, drive scanning and diagnostics, unerase and many other useful capabilities already found in Windows. It is available as a stand-alone product for only £70. The Monolithic Whole suite, which contains 36 other programs, costs about £60 in stores, or you can buy it online for £50 plus £35 postage.

Shaken and stirred

Since my system was running a little sluggishly, I tried out Monolithic Whole's bag of speed-up tricks, Earthquake 96. Earthquake examined my system and decided that the modem was my bottleneck. To fix the problem, it started caching the entire Internet to my hard drive. If I wanted to download a file, either I already had it or I had no room for it anyway.

With all those downloads, virus protection is important, so it's a good thing that Monolithic Whole comes with Auntie Em Anti-Virus. With Auntie Em operating in the background, I was as safe as safe can be. In fact, Auntie Em didn't allow any program to change anything on my hard drive, period.

After I found and set Auntie Em's 'allow yourself to use computer' option, I tried the NeedaFix Wizard, which examines your system for problems and potential problems. After asking if I wanted to check the Cmos, Bios OS, Registry, and oil pan, and then examining my system for 45 minutes, the program gave me a concise summary of my system's problems: 'All of the errors on this computer can be attributed to your use of Microsoft Windows.'

Next I tried running the Empty Head Wizard to reclaim hard drive space.

This program offered me lists of potentially expendable files in suspect categories, such as 'temporary files created a week ago last Thursday' and '.xls files containing the word "bonk".' After I'd checked the files I could live without, Empty Head Wizard provided me with a list so I could delete them manually.

Time to turn to plan B

It was clear that the Monolithic Whole CD was chock full of badly-thought-out software. There was only one course of action to take: install the second CD in the Deluxe 2000 Professional package, which is designed to fix the problems introduced by the first disc.

More Mono contains 63 unrelated utilities and lacks a centralised installation program. McNortnix apparently decided it was best to keep these programs as separate as possible, so they wouldn't kill each other until they got on your hard drive.

I started out by installing the Vicious Brute security program. True to its name, the first thing the program did was crash my system. So I rebooted, relaunched Vicious Brute, and watched it crash my system again.

Four attempts later I decided to look at the Readme file. 'Under no conditions should you ever use Vicious Brute on the same computer as BattleAxe Utilities or Auntie Em Anti-Virus. Doing so will void your warranty, your Bios, and your digestive system. If you purchased Vicious Brute in a bundle with either of these programs, we cannot be responsible for your shopping habits.'

They were right. I was being irresponsible. In fact, I had too many programs on my system. So I turned to the More Mono Unutterable Uninstall utility.

I launched the program, clicked the Uninstall button, and it uninstalled itself!

Maybe it was time to just delete a few files. In good old-fashioned Windows Explorer I selected a file and pressed the Delete key. As Windows moved the file to the recycle bin, Auntie Em Anti-Virus conflicted with Repair Wizard and Disk Clean Wizard, causing Earthquake 96 to launch BattleAxe's defragger, which wiped out my entire hard drive.

Well, at least I got rid of those Mafia email messages!

Lincoln Spector is a freelance writer living, or at least scraping by, in Berkeley. You can reach him at [email protected], through his web site at www.dnai.com/~lincoln, or care of Computing. Megahurts is a satirical column loosely based on computer industry events, trends, and people. It is known as Gigglebytes in other parts of the world.