For Whose Computer the Bell Tolls

Yes, I think we're all glad that's not how John Donne wrote it. The fact remains, though, that my computer is about to be retired. After I finish this post, I'll turn it off, tell my dad I'm ready, and we'll open it up and salvage what we care to salvage. After that, we'll mix the few useful old components with the new motherboard, processor, video card, tower, hard drive, and just about everything else to create a new entity. In fact, I believe the only chunks of metal we're going to end up using from this computer is the most recently purchased hard drive as a supplement, the DVD drive, the 3 1/2", and perhaps a fan.

I sorted through all my crap and figured out what files I actually want to save. I put all those on one spot on the hard drive we'll be yanking out. Then I sorted through that, decided what would induce a heart attack were I to lose it, and put that onto my flash drive. That last category is under 300 megabytes, and even some of that is just padding because I had space.

What I feel most right now is relief at letting the entire thing wash away into uncomplicated newness, and trepidation at the fact that I'm just going to start accumulating again. I would imagine that these are not the feelings most techies would feel before a major upgrade.

~Paul

Computer=Evil

My harddrive is pitifully small. Once upon a time, I wouldn't have thought of 40 gigs as pitifully small. After living with it for so long, and dividing those 40 gigs across three partitions, and letting said partitions become horribly disorganized, I now know better. I bought an 80 gig harddrive last week with money that could've been spent more wisely. Still not a huge drive, but adequate for my purposes, especially as I'm simply adding the new harddrive in next to the old harddrive--a convenient 120 gigabytes when all is said and done.

I am convinced that Murphy coined his law while upgrading his computer.

After spending a ridiculous amount of time to turn a new partition on my new harddrive into an exact copy of my C boot drive, my computer suddenly refuses to look in its direction at startup. Doesn't matter how many settings we screw with, or if we completely disconnect the old harddrive and then go into the BIOS to convince the computer to look at the new harddrive as the system drive. The computer has designated my old harddrive as the Magic System Boot Drive and
refuses to boot on anything other than its beloved.

So. At this point, it looks like I'll end up sorting through about 35 gigs of data to see what I want to preserve, backing it up somehow, reformating and repartitioning the entire thing into something simpler than the five partitions in the wrong spots that I have now.

I
Hate
Computers

~Paul

Short for My Convenience

I really hesitate to call this a game, at least in the traditional sense, but go play it anyway. It'll only take a few minutes.

~Paul