I’ll start by drawing the reader’s attention to figure 1. This is the Windows 7 file properties report for the most fundamental of files stored on my HP mega-laptop, the 20″ HDX 9000 Dragon that was popular late in the previous decade.
Figure 1
As we can see from the image, the boot shell command file is the very spark and quintessence of this machine – this is the last saved “image” of the freshly manufactured machine’s on state – a recording of the device’s “soul”, if you will. And you will, won’t you, because people love to anthropomorphize everything around them, so why should a pile of various materials arranged in a particular, repeatable pattern like a major appliance be immune? But this is the digital version of the Fountain of Youth: this is a copy of the current OS-install start-‘er-up data that will, once done doing what it does, return my Dragon Lady to her original factory splendour, young and vibrant and showing-off her sexy Windows Vista operating system.
At least I think so – who really knows? (Seriously does anyone know what this file does? I’m considering upgrading the old girl to larger-yet-faster SSD drives and doing a bottom-up Windows 7 Pro installation.)
I believe that system life begins at birth, not at inception. Inception is a remote and often rather random process of collating and storing a clean-burned system image for production in a massive factory in China, when billions of renminbi are on the line and orders are pouring-in from America, Europe, Asia, India, Canada, the former Soviet Union, and Mexico but not the rest of Latin America because they’re too poor, being underpaid to produce whatever’s left-over that isn’t made in China now.
GraceLessLand 