I’d like to inform you that Buster’s OK . . . more or less. It’ll take a bit to explain, so here’s the story. Sunday afternoon, I was reading manga comics on-line when I heard strange sounds. Mind you, I have absolutely hideous directional hearing, so I was having a lot of trouble pinpointing where the sounds were coming from. When they got louder, I realized that it was my computer. I immediately began shutting down programs but then decided simply holding down the power button would be faster. I put Buster back on his laptop stand and did something else for the rest of the afternoon. When Ian woke up, I informed him as to the clicking sounds coming from my laptop, and he took the hard drive out and put it in a couple plastic bags with a packet of desiccant (to prevent moisture getting to it) in the freezer for a while. Then he plugged it into his desktop and began running SpinRite, an awesome program that helps to restore damaged and corrupted hard drives when generally there is no hope. Mind you, this isn’t a 100% certainty as to retrieving lost data, but Ian has had lots of luck with it in the past. If he couldn’t get this to work, I would lose about 35k words in my fourth novel as well as a lot of images I had recently downloaded and a bunch of other minor documents and projects. Can we spell “suck?”

Luckily, Ian managed to get SpinRite to revive Buster enough to copy off the documents, images, and some other system information. In the meantime, he wiped and converted the hard drive from his own laptop into something usable for Buster. Now instead of a 60 gig hard drive, I have an 80 gig. Sure, I could have just used Ian’s laptop while waiting to save up enough for a new one for Buster, but well, I have need of a high sticker-to-computer ratio, remember? 😉 That and I’m used to Buster. He’s been my buddy for five or six years now. Not using him would be like not using my own phone for messaging and phone calls. Just weird.

So Buster’s up and running. We don’t yet know the fate of his old hard drive. When Ian was working with it to get my files off, it seemed to be running all right, but who knows for how long. We’re looking into on-line back-up sites for storage so we can keep off-site copies of things like the novels, but I’m leaning more toward simply burning it off to a CD and mailing a copy to Dad to keep in LGT. 😉 At any rate, I’ve gotta get stuff ready for crochet class tonight (we’re adding fingers to the gloves we started last week) and I think food is in order soon. I’m glad to be typing this up from Buster. I love my laptop!

Ye gods, I’ve heard Buster make modem noises. The ‘rents have dial-up here out in the boonies (because paying nearly $100 a month for high-speed is retarded if you can just check your webpages at work where there is high-speed internet). Since I’ll be here for a while, I needed to set up my internet connection, so I called the husband and he helped me figure out where I Continue reading →

Well, I came in early today to have my directed studies class with a student from Belgium. I guess one of these days I’ll get into what a mess all that was, but I’ve got far too much of a headache at the moment to care. Instead, I’m far more interested in the fact that I’ve finally gotten around to configuring the new laptop computer they gave me here at the office. It’s a Continue reading →

Brannagh’s harddrive died last night. It’s a good thing Ian backed her up last week when she started giving us grief. She’d been making some ticking noises, and yesterday, it got worse. I just left her on in EQ with my character selling in the bazaar. However, we blew a fuse (or circuit breaker thingie, whatever) somehow and she went down like everything else in the house. When I Continue reading →

Brannagh’s not working. Last night we had a really kickass thunderstorm which rocked the house for over an hour, and the power blipped once (that I know of). I was upstairs in the bedroom trying to sleep through it but since our bedroom windows no longer face a building taller than us, all of the light from the lightning coming through four very large windows is not sleep-inducing. Continue reading →