Saturday, January 19, 2008

RIP

The signs have been obvious for quite a while now. Slow and sluggish--lacking the energy and memory of earlier days. I could see it, but I didn't want to think about it. That's how death is when it's staring right at you. You KNOW it's inevitable and yet you don't want to face it until you really have to face it. Yesterday it happened. The Samsung 80 GB hard drive on my Dell laptop kicked the bucket.

Rather than making funeral arrangements and writing an obituary, I simply went to Fry's and bought a new hard drive. This one is a Seagate 160 GB and faster--which is actually quite nice. The old one now sits in the box that the new one came in--sort of like a casket, I guess, but I threw it in my desk for safe keeping.

You might be wondering, "Did he have his system backed up for just such an event?"

YES!!!! I DID!!!! W'hoo!!!!!!

I have a 750 GB Maxtor OneTouch 4 Plus that I use for back ups and archiving really big video projects that I do at work. Right now I'm copying the contents of "My Documents" to my laptop. I've spent the past 24 hours installing useful programs like Windows XP Pro, Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, , Firefox, Powerpoint, Publisher), Adobe Creative Suite 2 (Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, Acrobat) and more. I still have a lot of work to do, but I'm glad that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel.

6 comments:

Toni said...

And I'm thoroughly impressed because the best I could do (WITH assistance from India, mind you) was to suck dust out of my hard drive.
Blessings,
~Toni~

Mr. E said...

You know, almost everything you just said, except computer drive biting the dust and having a back up file, made not sense to me whatever. I guess I just havn't interpreted computer language very well yet.
I think our computer is about to bite the dust as well.

Randy Spradlin said...

Mr. Shumway,

I'm impressed. I too, back everyting up. When I've repaired other people's computers, I can't emphasize backing up data enough. Some get bothered by the question but it's better than them losing all their precious data.

I now use a Seagate and love it. I was using a Western Digital (still a fine drive). I have one drive for use, and another one for an image backup if the first one ever fails.

Glad you have your system back up and going.

Randy

Uvulapie said...

I need to backup the home PC and my music PC... sad days if it bit the dust. I've got loads of stuff copied onto a CD-R but I hear those go flaky if you scratch them with car keys or a belt sander.

JAM said...

I have a big internal drive in my Dell desktop, and two large external drives.

Every picture, song, whatever, that I have is on at least two of my three drives at all times. I use a great, simple little program called Folder Clone to keep all my folders backed up on whichever two drives I've assigned them to.

You are veddy wise man. Everyone KNOWS to back up, but surprisingly few do so.

Unknown said...

Whew! Glad to see someone else does eulogys for their computer parts!