Down. But not out.
Jan. 14th, 2011 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
captainsblogI've occasionally commented on the secret inclusion of "stress detectors" inside technology items, which can sense when you're particularly in a hurry to finish a project and therefore overload their circuits and break on you. Xerox machines are notorious for this feature. And, I learned today, so is at least one Toshiba laptop from the late 2008 production run. As in mine.
This baby had always run like a top. I bumped and bruised a couple of corners, but it always did what I wanted, when I wanted it to. Today, though, I was preparing to do battle on a brief for Tuesday, which, I realized earlier today, therefore had to be finished and delivered today because of the holiday on Monday. As I got ready to head off for a final round of research, I made that one fatal error- of stalling and watching that one last stupid Youtube- when, instead of the online audio coming on, the sounds of Solas did. My iTunes had spontaneously turned itself on, and when neither the stop button nor the "close program" box did anything to change that, I did what I know not to do and always do anyway- I hit the off button and held it down until it stopped playing, so I could reboot it.
Bad move.
Various system repair and restore routines, which have always worked in the past, didn't. I let the longest of them run while I did my Law Library run (and don't get me started about the security restrictions on THEIR computers) and emailed copies of all the cases to myself. When my laptop remained mostly dead on my arrival home, I cobbled together a lifeboat of machinery- composing the documents on this old Compaq XP machine, saving them to my flash drive, then converting them to Open Office and printing them through Eleanor's machines, while resurrecting the Internet on this one to receive and paste the passages of the cases I'd emailed (which, fortunately, I could forward off my phone to my Gmail account on here).
As I finished the final delivery step downtown around 3, I got a call from a client, anxious about a hearing next week. Only then did I remember- duh. He's a computer consultant, too. (I'd called my regular Rochester guru, but there was no way they were gonna be able to give me hands-on help until tomorrow at the earliest).
By 5-ish today, my Toshiba was in the client's hands, with a plan to do it the way I'd done it the last two times this majorly happened (once a bit over two years ago, the other not quite two years before that): he will install a new hard drive, convert the old one into an external, then reinstall Vista on the new one and bring it back to me in the morning for the marvelous-fun process of me reinstalling all my software, and then copying back the data files, onto it. On the bright side, I will get about as full a backup of my as-of-this-morning data as I could possibly want. I will also make a mental note to expect this to happen yet again, sometime between my birthday of 2012 and Valentines Day of '13:P
This baby had always run like a top. I bumped and bruised a couple of corners, but it always did what I wanted, when I wanted it to. Today, though, I was preparing to do battle on a brief for Tuesday, which, I realized earlier today, therefore had to be finished and delivered today because of the holiday on Monday. As I got ready to head off for a final round of research, I made that one fatal error- of stalling and watching that one last stupid Youtube- when, instead of the online audio coming on, the sounds of Solas did. My iTunes had spontaneously turned itself on, and when neither the stop button nor the "close program" box did anything to change that, I did what I know not to do and always do anyway- I hit the off button and held it down until it stopped playing, so I could reboot it.
Bad move.
Various system repair and restore routines, which have always worked in the past, didn't. I let the longest of them run while I did my Law Library run (and don't get me started about the security restrictions on THEIR computers) and emailed copies of all the cases to myself. When my laptop remained mostly dead on my arrival home, I cobbled together a lifeboat of machinery- composing the documents on this old Compaq XP machine, saving them to my flash drive, then converting them to Open Office and printing them through Eleanor's machines, while resurrecting the Internet on this one to receive and paste the passages of the cases I'd emailed (which, fortunately, I could forward off my phone to my Gmail account on here).
As I finished the final delivery step downtown around 3, I got a call from a client, anxious about a hearing next week. Only then did I remember- duh. He's a computer consultant, too. (I'd called my regular Rochester guru, but there was no way they were gonna be able to give me hands-on help until tomorrow at the earliest).
By 5-ish today, my Toshiba was in the client's hands, with a plan to do it the way I'd done it the last two times this majorly happened (once a bit over two years ago, the other not quite two years before that): he will install a new hard drive, convert the old one into an external, then reinstall Vista on the new one and bring it back to me in the morning for the marvelous-fun process of me reinstalling all my software, and then copying back the data files, onto it. On the bright side, I will get about as full a backup of my as-of-this-morning data as I could possibly want. I will also make a mental note to expect this to happen yet again, sometime between my birthday of 2012 and Valentines Day of '13:P
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no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 03:44 am (UTC)You might want to check out Dropbox - it lets you put things in a virtual drive "in the cloud", that can be easily recovered from any other computer and many smartphones.
Good luck!
no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 03:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 03:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 07:03 am (UTC)The upgrade to Windows 7 can make a world of difference. My mom was complaining about her computer being a lemon for months; after I upgraded her laptop's OS to 7, she noted that it was running much smoother, like a new machine.
And if you've got professional stuff on that machine, you may want to consider investing in a decent-sized external drive and doing not just data backups, but image backups - most backup drives come with software for that, and Windows 7 has that function built-in as well. I had a disk crash on my desktop machine last year, and while restoring my image to the new disk took several hours, it didn't take much effort on my part; just start the restore procedure, go about my business, and a few hours later, my machine was just as it had been before the crash.
And hey, if you use the machine for your work, can't you classify an OS upgrade and a backup disk as business expenses?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-15 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-16 05:14 pm (UTC)If you like things to just work, it's hard to beat MacOS X.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 05:32 pm (UTC)