Talking about computer annoyances

Some time ago i started to wonder, why the free space on my Windows partition is becoming less, while the Windows folder itself grow larger for no obvious reason. I checked for the common suspects like bugs, worms and data crawlers and found nothing. I was lazy through, to inspect the thousands of subfolders for the source (remember - giving up control to gain happiness). From time to time i deleted some garbage, used the Disk Cleanup tool – one of the wonderful little MS helpers, which, after minutes of obscure hard drive activity, happily informs you, that you could free the enormous amount of 1.357 bites on your disk by compressing something. The countermeasures each time freed some space again, helping to ignore the problem for a while, but the total space still became less and less.

Last week finally the problem became severe, after my game crashed, because there was not enough space left, to extend the swap file. (For those who are not Happy-Windows-Users and hence not familiar with this concept – extending the page file is the preferred way to handle memory leaks).

Since i was not in the mood for reinstalling the OS (which is the preferred way to handle general Windows mess-ups), i decided to finally inspect the contents of the Windows folder, which by this time reached the impressive size of 7 GB. And i found it! Deep within the subfolder structure there was an "Internet Logs"-folder with 4.6 GB of crap. After overcoming the first bewilderment, i looked into it, and found the ZoneAlarm log files. Whole 4.6 GB of them. WAAAAAGH!!!!

Now i am not sure, what amazes me more. The fact that, over 2 years there were 4.6 GB-Log file (compressed, as i found out by reading the ZoneAlarm manual on this) worth of events, which the firewall had to prevent ? Or the idea to keep the logs forever, hidden in a place, where a user would never look for them ? Or – last but not least – the important security measure, to protect the files from deletion, so getting rid of them would require the user to restart in safe mode ?

I say again:

WAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!