So. The reason I haven't posted an update recently is because last week my beloved computer--my main computer, the mothership computer, the one where all the good stuff lives--passed away peacefully in her sleep. I was with her at the end, gently stroking her mouse and assuring her it was okay to walk towards the light, and when her BIOS screen slowly faded to black and the monitor went dark for the last time I wept bitterly. And then I tried to reboot her sorry ass but this time she is good and truly gone. She's in a better place.
Anyway, my husband who is still hyperdiligient about gift opportunities following the regrettable forgotten birthday incident last month has generously offered to spring for a new one and I, who am still milking the situation for all its worth, graciously accepted.
The problem is I can't just get a new computer and immediately hunker down to computing on a newer, faster machine like normal people do. If only. First I will have to transfer over the three hard drives from my old machine.
Because I am too lazy concerned about losing vital data, I never got in the habit of transferring the contents of the old hard drive onto the new drive when I replaced my computer. I just added the old drive(s) as a slave(s) to the new one(s) and kept going. Over and over.
For example, I still have "Piglet", the 8 gig hard drive from my old ITMG computer in my current PC. It is so old it has dinosaur dookie on it but I cling to it because I just never know when I might need to refer to spam received in 1999, or like last week, want to take a trip down Memory Lane by reading websites I published on R&B in 2000. And I have "Good Stuff", the 40 gig hard drive from the PC I bought in 2001. It stores photos I took with my original digital camera in breathtaking 1 megapixel resolution which was amazing technology back in the day. Plus it archives my vast assortment of animated gifs that were lovingly collected back in the stone age when every website needed a moving cartoon character or two. And so on. Basically important, vital, irreplaceable, earth shatteringly critical stuff.
And so like the crazy cat lady who hoards old newspapers, cardboard boxes and plastic bags until she can no longer find her sofa under the piles of garbage, I kept adding hard drives, one after another, over and over, for a decade. And the last time I went computer shopping I found it very difficult to find a PC with enough slots to house all those hard drives along with the other peripherals which I must possess in order to live another day on this planet. And now I find it impossible to find a PC that will hold it all. Gah! So we're talking custom build here, plus a weekend or three peforming ten years' worth of deferred maintenance. Also, possibly some soul searching to decide if I really need to archive cigar jokes dating back to the Clinton administration.
Point is, until I get the new computer up and running I'll make do with my laptop and the data contained on Hard Drive #4 (codename "Rodney"), a 500 gig external hard drive with back up copies of my 2,000 MP3s, my stash of 50,000 or so photos, and most of my data.
What? You think I'm nuts? Of course I backed up all that stuff to an external drive. But it just isn't the same as having ancient hard drives running Windows 98 hanging around like little tiny time capsules of ten year old emails and useless software applications that you just can't find anymore. Sheesh.
Hello, my name is Susan and I am a geek.
Bound Up
2 years ago
