"CLEANING-UP" THE LAPTOP

Like everything else around here, this laptop finally became so cluttered and packed with cyber-dust-bunnies that I caved in and took it to our unofficial guru, Greg.
He dumped everything, reinstalled the essentials, dosed me with some encouragement and sent me home with precise instructions which turned to vague fog before I mustered the courage to began pecking away at the little tasks of restoring data for programs I had purchased over several years.
The worst irritant was the penchant of the touchpad to be wildly erratic and the cursor to jump madly about during typing. Apparently this well known phenomena has plagued others since there was a lot of advice and commentary which led to another driver download that seems to have mostly cured the problem.
The process, which some call a "dusting" others call "detox" and other terms not suitable for this family blog site, I am calling "rehab." The fix is mostly in place, but over time I will still have to deal with the erratics and minor glitches one at a time; for example, many of the windows look different in size and font than I have been used to, and some windows are different in appearance than before.
I just mention this to explain why there have been recent gaps in my blogs, e-mail responses, and follow-ups for some folk. Next week, to deal with one peculiarity which has stumped me, the computer will do another overnight on Greg's bench for what I hope will be the last necessary tweaking.
Why is it that these computers, which promised to save us so much time and effort, require so much time and effort to maintain? Why do these superfast devices consume so much of the time of our lives without improving significantly the times of our lives? That seems "oxymoronic"!!