...crap... (computer woes)

[neotoma]

I came home tonight from an outing with fabrisse to the National Gallery of Art to see the Fragonard exhibit to find my desktop is saying it has missing/damaged boot commands and needs servicing.

I've got it running some diagnostics right now, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to take it in to get looked at, and either replaced or repaired at high cost.

It's the combination of the probably cost and the utter hassle of getting it over to the Micro Center I bought it from that is going to have me deciding it will be easier to chuck it and start over, except for all the files, photos, and music (45 gigs!) on the hard drive.

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Oh no! That's always so annoying. Hugs.

[fyrdrakken]

Threaten the computer with trading in for a shiny new one (out loud and in its presence), and then try rebooting it and see if it minds itself.

But, yeah. My current desktop is many years old, and I think only still functional because I went from turning it on one day a week to turning it once every few weeks. At least trading it in would be a minimal hassle, since I got an external hard drive that all my personal files (and photos, music and vids) live on.

My smartphone, OTOH, took over almost all the roles the desktop used to fill (which is why I use the desktop so little now) and last summer it bricked itself and filled me with much woe. Thankfully the Android system had so much backed up to the cloud -- the only things I had to recreate from scratch were my mobile checkbook app (my own fault, for not carrying the backup files over to my desktop in the weekly file transfers from phone to computer) and all the lists on my tasks app (which turned out to be due to a glitch in the program iteration I had been unaware of, that was corrected in the download and installation to the new phone). But that tasks app contained so much of my life -- "to do" list, budget, grocery list, gardening schedule -- that recreating it from scratch was awful.

Oh, hard drive enclosures. Once upon a time in the early 2000s I had to take a dead laptop to a hole-in-the-wall computer store that put the drive in another laptop and burned the contents of the disk to CD-Rs for me. Some years later I was able to buy a hard drive enclosure to hold the drive from the old defunct computer so the shiny new computer could directly access the old files and copy them over. Think I've done that a couple of times, actually. Total life-saver.