"Murphy's Laws?" Who The Heck Is Murphy?

And who appointed Murphy to make laws?

Back in the First World War there were some sayings about a subject and if it could go wrong how it would go wrong. Does this make sense?

Later on they became a collection of sayings such as:

• It will break when you need it most.
• If you want it to be dry it will rain.
• Your battery in your car will die at the most inopportune time.
• The power will go off just when you are doing something very important (such as reading these laws...)

Most of these sayings are fictitious, that is if you paid attention to your surroundings and the evidence the law would make sense and the pit fall of the Murphy's Laws can be avoided.

Cases in point:

Your hard drive will fail when you least expect it.

• Your hard drive failing with out any previous indication of the pending failure is astronomical something like 1x10²⁰⁰ power. That is billons, and billions, and billons as Carl Segan would say. The mean time between failures of a mechanical hard drive is now one failure in 1 Million hours of operation.
• All the hard drive failures I have seen or had contact with had indications that the mechanical parts were going to fail.
  • not finding a file you know is on the hard drive
  • the drive is reporting full when you know there is space for more files
  • loud noises that weren't there before, and so on.
  • (Dropping the hard drive or computer (laptop) doesn't count in this case, that is self induced failure).

Second example:

Your computer is slow, time to buy a new one.

• No, the Operating System has become so full of junk, extra programs, misguided attempts at repairing the registry when the registry isn't the problem. (Even a Pentium 4 will run Windows 7 just fine if it has enough memory to operate on). For more facts on making a slow PC faster see the Self Computer Repair Unleashed! 2nd Edition Manual.

Troubleshoot, repair, maintain, upgrade & secure...     With this!

Where I live batteries for cars only last two years, three at most.

• People wait until the car will not start to change the battery, however if they actually listened to the car start they would know the battery is no longer holding a charge, the starter will not turn the engine over as fast as it did two weeks ago. Turn off the radio and actually listen to the engine start.

Fourth example of Murphy's Laws:

For a long time there weren't any gauges in cars, you had the speedometer, a fuel gauge, maybe a clock.

• All other indicators were lights (we called them idiot lights) that came on when something broke. DOH!
• So the car manufactures went back to gauges (there are still lights to get your attention). The problem is you have to train yourself to actually look at those gauges frequently! Having an indicator to tell you something like the oil pressure is low or the alternator isn't charging will not work unless you actually look at them, thus the need for idiot lights...

My favorite Murphy's Laws is: If you are on the flight it will be late, never late before, but late now ...