Computer woes

I think mum put the mockers on me. On the phone she was telling me about how her PC had died. Completely. A bit like Bob’s at Christmas but without the burst of electricity. And then, halfway through the day, my second internal hard drive decided to start sputtering and spitting and throwing up error messages. I tried all manner of IT things to fix it but to no avail. In the end it seemed that surgery was the only answer so I opened it up.

I did the usual thing of blowing all the dust out (with eyes closed) then, after washing my face, I took it all apart then put it all back together, making sure all the connections were good and firm. I turned it back on and, voila! it once more started working. I breathed a sigh of relief.

Not that I’d have lost anything because I have backups happening constantly but because it would have been a pain to get a new hard drive and then restore to it.

You see, I use the second hard drive for all my data (documents, temporary images, website files, etc) so it’s constantly in use. To lose it would be a pain.

But then, this morning, I started getting the messages again telling me it was for the boneyard. Sad, but true. I sighed with resignation.

A while back I purchased a 1 terabyte external drive which was going to be my new backup drive (the old one is only 500 gb and almost full) but hadn’t set it up yet. This was today’s job.

But not before I set off for town to shop and go to the bank. I set off nice and early so I could get back to my poor bleating computer but, lo and behold, the bank doesn’t open until 10 on a Wednesday. That’s annoying. I’d already been to Waitrose and Starbucks so was in for a three quarters of an hour wait. I decided the church yard would be a nice spot to read and wait.

On the way I passed Elphicks and suddenly remembered we needed new pasta bowls because of a strange mishap on the weekend. We use our pasta bowls for lots of meals and generally Mirinda is perfectly able to put it on the table after finishing dinner. Not this time. She missed by a good foot and it split into two all over the floor. Fortunately she HAD finished.

We saw some nice bowls the other day so figured I’d get two of them. The door to Elphicks refused to budge, no matter how hard I pushed. The sign plastered on the glass belligerently informed me that they didn’t open until 9:30. So, off to the churchyard it was.

After a lovely sit in the sun reading about early Chinese history, I wandered back to the shop, bought the bowls then headed for the bank just in time to hear the grating and screeching of the security shutter sliding inexorably up. I joined the queue for the general enquiries.

I had to pay some money into an Italian bank account (for our Como accommodation) and the tellers can’t do it at the normal windows. The guy in front of me was about 120 and desperately in need of assistance. Unfortunately, the guy in front of him was having a big problem with accessing his money and the one person on the desk was flitting back and forth helping him. He gave me a look that said sorry to which I replied that it didn’t matter.

The old guy in front of me did not agree at all. He huffled and shuffled from leg to leg, peeking at the tellers around the corner, debating whether he could get some sort of service if he left his place in the queue. Meanwhile, more people were joining the queue behind me. Eventually, worn out with waiting (it had been five minutes…literally…I was watching the clock directly in front of me) he made a beeline for the end teller. Pleased, I stepped forward.

Eventually another assistant came over and looked after me. No problem and it all took about ten minutes to move our money to Italy and I set off for home.

Meanwhile back at the computer, things were looking almost stable so I set up the new drive and began the laborious job of backing everything up on it. When you have five hard drives, this is a long job which, while being left alone for much of it, has to be checked regularly for errors or moving to the next drive. This has been going on all day.

This is a rather long winded way of explaining why there are no photographs on the blog today. I’m using my netbook and while I can upload from it, I cannot manipulate the images to the extent that I like.

It also explains why I haven’t embedded the new video of Molly singing.