After a couple of years of waiting for it to happen, it finally happened: my faithful laptop died.
By the grace of God, we had ordered a replacement laptop back in January for just such an occasion. I even got it "pre-set-up" for what I needed, and then tucked it away.
Yesterday my old laptop froze. And I mean froze. Totally dead in the water. I finally turned it off cold (which I hate doing) and re-booted. After that it worked fine. I should have backed it up at that time, but I didn't. My last backup was April 3.
This morning my laptop worked fine, until once again it froze. Again, totally dead in the water. This time I had unavoidable job commitments and couldn't mess around, so I transitioned to my new laptop immediately. We were able to get the old laptop to run long enough for me to back up my materials (writing, photos, etc.), so nothing was lost.
My dear father is one the one who spent many years hammering into my head "Back up back up back up back up." He is right.
Back up your computer. You will be glad you did.
Anything you realise you depend on not only as a utility, but also in terms of how it's put together, buy at least two of those.
ReplyDeleteI'd be a lot happier if I'd have bought two more laser printers like the one I have that's trying to take itself apart one major assembly at a time.
What's so great about the printer? Aren't there laser printers that are better now?
This laser printer doesn't print little yellow dots somewhere on the page that will inform Spook Central about the serial number of the printer.
Didn't the Soviets register typewriters?
So yeah, time machine, roll back to 2004, buy two more new, roll forward to 2014, buy all of the surplus supplies for it, so easy in retrospect.
PAC,
DeleteI was not aware of this.
Welcome to Soviet America Typewriterstan: EFF guide to printer tracking.
DeleteBought a spare cell phone and when the battery died while it sat in the bedside table, my attempting to replace the battery pulled out the connector pins to the glued in place battery, making it useless brick..
DeletePatrice, I have had the same situation happen at least twice; once when a battery plug literally broke off and I had only the battery life left, once when my computer acted like yours.
ReplyDeleteGlad you got your order in during January. From work experience, getting a new laptop can take a while these days.
This hit home because the other day my desktop started a high pitch whine. Having lost a lot of stuff due to a defective hard drive in the past, I've done fairly well keeping important things backed up, but it's amazing how easy it is to get behind in that task! It's also amazing how slow it can be to transfer data for safe keeping.
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you had the backup - I definitely need to get one - my laptop won't hold a charge more than 4 hours, and it's been screwed up since I took it in for recall work on the hard drive last October. When I say screwed up, I mean I haven't been able to access my iCloud account (with all my photos and documents) on it since the recall and update. At this point, I want to just chuck it out the window in frustration...
ReplyDeleteXaLynn
We bought a new desk top a couple of months age, and along with it, I bought a 6 terabyte external memory. Took one whole day to back up the old desktop, and take everything out of the cloud service. We are very happy that the things we want are available without being grid tied!
ReplyDelete