Things have a tendency of getting all kinds of eventful up in here. Particularly when they don’t really need to be. If it’s not family making, breaking, remaking, switching up and then completely forgetting about plans in the span of 5 minutes, or things bouncing in just about every direction except the one you want them to go on the education front, it’s technology conspiring to do all manner of screwing with your head, and your whatever you were planning to use that technology for. And because epic failings must be had in 3’s for reasons no one can figure out, when the fun gets going, everyone gets a turn.
My warning was the laptop. I’ve had it for it’ll be 2 years about now, and the only problem I’ve ever had with it was a failing fan. I knew the fan was going for several months, but could never find a place where I had the time, the energy and the money at the same time so it could be delt with. When I had the time and/or energy, there were financial things needing to be shoved out of the way before they came round to bite us in the ass. I actually delayed my run at college by a bit in hopes I could put together all 3 in a reasonable amount of time, or that it’d sort itself out and we’d be golden in time for classes to actually start. It looked like it was gonna do exactly that, and things were falling into place for me to start the course I’m in the middle of now, so I was starting to breathe a little teeny tiny bit easier about it. It could hold out long enough for us to get hands on money, which should come just before the Christmas break, we were thinking. Which would have been amazing timing, if it had worked out that way. School’s out, send the laptop off for repairs, hopefully have it back maybe a week after school gets back in session in the new year. And just when I was comfortable with that plan in theory, the thing gave out completely. Two days before class started, and if I’m lucky I could get the thing to give me half an hour before it shut down to avoid overheating. Well now. There goes careful planning.
I should have probably taken that as a sign that I maybe aught to just back everything up on every machine I own, stick it somewhere central like, and hold out until I could replace the equipment wholesale. While I was dealing with the laptop, I was seeing signs my desktop, also known as the primary machine I use for pretty much anything heavy, wasn’t gonna be much longer for this world. It hasn’t gotten critical yet, but it’s inexplicably shut down on me a few times, I’ve seen pretty freaking unrecoverable blue screens more often than I’d like, and it’s having to work harder at doing things I know it could do without breaking a sweat not entirely all that long ago. This one, at least, I could more easily expect. It’s given me 7 years, and a lot of wicked heavy usage–most of this site was born out of that machine, for starters. It’s not completely toast yet, but I’m not liking its chances for seeing its 8th year. Plus, it runs Windows XP still and, well, let’s be honest–while the machine could probably easily run 7 instead (it shipped with Vista initially), I’d just be replacing it shortly anyway. So before it puts me in the same situation the laptop just tried to, it’s on its way out. Bright side: the machine I’m replacing it with actually has a little bit better specs. I’d be slightly jealous, if I wasn’t just told I could take it for myself.
I mentioned things happening in 3’s, and did they ever. The first sort of warning I got that made me think the desktop might be in slightly worse shape than it turns out it is had actually more to do with the external drives I keep connected to it. I do a lot of things with music, TV shows, movies and the like. So I keep some pretty large external drives around–unless you wanna get fancy, a lot of what I plan to collect won’t fit on your average internal drive. At one point I had 3 connected, and was talking about adding a 4th down the road. Across those 3, I had quite a few years of music, videos, backups from other drives, random things that I hadn’t gotten around to sort and put where they should be. So basicly a crap ton of stuff. Two of those drives flirted with failure of the highest order. And one of them needed two attempts before it finally just irreparably met its maker. I managed to pull most of what I needed off the drives before they went, and can get my hands on the rest once I figure out what needs to be gotten and then remember where I got it from the first time. But the way they were readying to go lead me to believe maybe the desktop was on its way out quicker than I’d like it to be. The drives would show up for a while, then either I couldn’t actually access one, or the other would disappear entirely. But I could plug them both into another machine and at least mostly do what I needed to. So that was a thing to deal with–particularly given if the desktop had went as quickly as I was expecting, I still didn’t have the laptop back and fixed so that might have slightly caused problems.
So now, the laptop’s mostly working as it should, the desktop’s on its way to being replaced and I’ll be needing to rebuild my video library. Again. All told, not entirely too bad for a season or two in the life of a semi-crazed geek. And I should be relatively clear of tech issues for a good while. I wouldn’t say no to another 7 years of mostly smooth operation. And hey, maybe by then I’ll be doing something that actually allows me to pull a wad of cash out of my wallet and emergency replace pretty much everything that has ever come apart on me on 24 hours’ notice. Hey, a geek can dream, can’t he? But in the meantime, I suppose I should go reformat my brain. This forecasts to be another intensely crazed week on the education front–which I should probably actually write about before I’m completely done with it. Eh, maybe in the spring.