Before Christmas my laptop gave up the ghost.
It would turn on and I could hear the gas running: then a blank page with lots of numbers came up with a request to boot up in safe mode. No matter what I did, or the advice I followed on screen, we always came back to the same set of numbers.
I assumed I had been hit by a virus. Just as I was about to send electronic cards, e-letters etc. etc. And my address book was inaccessible of course. No matter, I had downloaded everything on to an external hard drive for safety. Pat on the back. Good ol’ me.
Open up the external hard drive and there indeed was stuff from last year but not the most recent: no photos or videos of the goslings, no address book or notes of those to whom I had already sent Seasons Greetings. I spent hours trying to negotiate my way round the hard drive in case things were hiding.
Then I had to give up and concentrate on the task immediately in hand, Christmas. Come New Year’s Day I decided to call my local and very friendly computer chappie who lives just over the valley from us. He is an ex-physics teacher and has been reasonably priced, fast and helpful in the past. I did have the sense to wait until January 2nd though and then rang in the morning. He came round two hours later and plugged it all in to see what was what.
“No virus”, he said, “your hard drive is dying”.
He managed to get past the numbers page with a gadget of his and tried giving my laptop directions. And the laptop tried to comply, it really did. Every task took it an age and you could feel the poor thing on its last gasp, trying to give its all with its final breath. He said that it needed more support than he could give it here in the sitting-room so he would have to take it home where he could hook it up to other things to give it every TLC whilst it gave up the stored information. By this time I had tears running down my face. You could sense its pain and its struggle as it was trying so manfully to keep on going. The thought of it going away to intensive care and then dying was just too much for me.
If you had told me that I could ever cry tears of anything other than frustration and wrath at a computer or laptop I would have laughed at you: but there I was crying for my old faithful. It is eight years old and has been through so much with me. All my power point lectures have been written and delivered on this machine: all my lovely, moving images illustrating the carbon cycle, geological processes, peat development, vegetation succession, cycles of decomposition, etc. etc. have been put together on my laptop. My first ventures into blogland and digital photography – this old laptop.
My adviser said that this had been a very good laptop in its day and was not bad now, even for its age. He said that you could tell it was quality because it was made from actual metal, not plastic, and all the clasps etc. on the carrying bag were metal too!
With which, I bade a fond farewell and sent it off to its final resting place.
Not a lot of time for repining since I was off to London the next day for a final round of testing, at least for a few months.
But on my return from London there was a phone call: all the info. had been retrieved and was now safely on my external hard drives.
And if I wanted, a new hard drive
All this, plus the work already done for £130.00. I said yes. And last week my laptop came home. Not the fastest in the world but it does exactly what I want it to do and when I want it to. It has loads of RAM apparently and now contains both the old drive and the new one just in case and all the old info. has been installed too so old faithful is just the same. I am writing on it now:))
NB The man who helped me out will never charge more than the computer is worth and will monitor his time accordingly. A couple of years ago he came and spent an afternoon with my old PC but only charged £20.00 since the computer was worth no more. He also gave it a Spring Clean and upgraded various software items. But he always treats me as if I were an errant 14 year old from his class who has not done her homework properly or has not been paying attention. But a little humble pie is not much to eat when help is given so generously!
stopping by woods 