is a poorly kept Windows machine.

I spent the day at a friend’s house, helping him with some basics of Photoshop (and drooling over his 40-inch Sony Bravia LCD HDTV … ye gods!). It’s a computer I set up for him about five years ago when he ordered it new from Dell, and while it hasn’t aged much, it’s been in use on a daily basis just about every day of those five years.

And it’s an absolute mess.

Stuff all over the desktop. Stuff all through the My Documents folder. Stuff littered through all the My [insert media type] folders. He had duplicates of files strewn across two hard drives and three partitions, and no real means of tracking what was where and what was in use.

Please understand — I use XP on a daily basis as part of my desk-jockey existence. But I do not tolerate wasted space on it. I am all too familiar with its shortcomings as an operating system, and I do not believe in burdening it any more than is necessary by accumulating leftover crud. That’s what made this experience so frightening.

No, not frightening: horrific. Half the duration of our little “tutorial” was spent bouncing from folder to folder, trying to remember where that last file had been saved. There was junk everywhere, and in the end we dumped most of our stuff on the already-congested desktop because we couldn’t find it anywhere else on the system. And even then, there was so much other cruft on the desktop that it was impossible to find anyway.

And his poor Pentium 4 is dog-slow these days. Just for fun, we threw in an Ubuntu 6.06 Shipit CD, and it booted faster than XP did, because XP was so bogged down with the debris of five years of use. I don’t think he knows to defragment, and I know he’s running about four different virus scanners and spyware scanners.

The funniest part is, he picked up a new Macintel machine less than a year ago, and just loves it. It’s so fast and so perky, he says. It’s amazing and clean and speedy and kewl, he says!

So why he spends so much time in XP is beyond me when he has that glossy 21-inch Mac in the corner, piping mp3s of his CD collection through Klipsch speakers. If it were me I would’ve kicked that Dimension 4300 out the door shortly after sinking the ~$2000 on that megaMac.

But everybody’s got their quirks. I made a weak pitch for Ubuntu, but it was a halfhearted effort … because I know if I offered to install it for him and set it up, I’d spend an entire weekend with him, making sure all the crud on that XP installation was safely backed up.

No, thank you!