Three weeks ago my computer died. Since I was heading north from the California coast 100 miles above LA, I thought I would hold off buying a new computer at retail and get a new mother board from Fry’s outside of Portland and save some money. A new mother board and CPU would give me higher speed and less flakiness as well. My old mthrbd and CPU zipped along at 1.1GHz but I was looking forward to 3GHz – 3 times faster!
I stopped at Fry’s and as expected they were having a sale on an MSI mthrbd so I had my new parts for under $100. Off I went to Corbett Oregon and a nice campground north of Troutdale. After a couple hours the new board & CPU were installed but the older power supply wouldn’t run it. Next day I head off to find an appropriate power supply for $28. With the new power supply installed, it fired up and ran, but, since I have XP Pro, it wouldn’t run because XP detects your hardware and if there is a change it decides you are trying to steal a copy of XP and shuts down. Since I had no internet connection without a running OS, I couldn’t get online and read up on a solution to my kind of situation. Turned out there isn’t one. Nothing I’ve read online since has a method of reinstalling the OS that wouldn’t ruin my files.
Finally, I just reinstalled my copy of XP on one of my two harddrives, both have copies of all my files and pictures. With that done, I was able to get online and soon had a virus! Damn! But before I discovered that, I had downloaded all the 218 pictures I’d taken from the coast up to Corbett.
But the virus was now interfering with normal activities so without thinking of all those pictures, I reinstalled XP, reformatting the harddrive in the process. This time, I did everything right, like installing SP3 right off the bat followed by AVG antivirus and Zonealarm. With those protections installed, I’m not worried about viruses taking over again, at least not for a long while.
So, all those pictures are gone. I guess I’ll just just restart this blog from the day I left Troutdale to head east to Walla Walla. I’ll be here for a week visiting family and then on to Alaska. I’ve planned out the trip and it looks like it will take at least 7 days, more if I find a nice park I like and decide to stay a few days.
Sorry to keep you guys waiting for new stuff for so long.
Jim: the epitomy of the term, “Snowbird”. Mexico to Alaska, Alaska to Mexico. Watch yourself when migrating across Arizona.
You take a lot more photos than I ever do. But I have a large capacity CF card in my camera, and a couple smaller reserve cards. That large card has a couple of years of pix on it, so I’d never have a problem if the computer went belly up (and it did last year).
I also have a WD Passport Elite external backup drive that actually holds the bulk of “My Pictures”, and have been known to burn them to disks just in case. We now have a Vista laptop for traveling in the motorhome, in addition to the old desktop, and I put new photos on both machines, not storing on CD or DVD disks anymore. With all that backup, I’ll never have the problem you did.
You should consider at least one of those options, esp. an external backup drive. The included software can automatically backup any new data (including pix) you add to your computer, or you can buy software that copies (essentially takes a picture of) your computer’s hard drive to the external one, so you can easily restore both data, programs, and configuration to the old internal or a new drive after reformatting. My WD Passport Elite’s software copies only data, not programs, so I had to reinstall one at a time all my programs when my XP went belly up last year; but the data was safe and accessible from the little Elite once the programs were active.
Can’t say I’m all that enthused with WD (Western Digital) though, for support and user-friendliness, and would consider a Seagate next time.
Good to know you’re back online.
Joel
I have a method of backup I’ve used for years, I do a ‘Files & Settings Transfer’ and a full XCopy to a 2nd HDD in my computer. Then I unplug it until the next backup. But in this case, I’d just changed mobo, CPU, and power supply, installed WinXP Home, was anxious to get back on-line, and had downloaded all the pixs. I had all my old files on the backup HDD, except those new pixs. Then over a few days the computer got slower and slower. Until out of frustration, I reformatted the HDD and reinstalled XP and SP3 in a different order (which took care of the speed problem). The pictures were the only thing I forgot to copy to a thumb drive. Nothing else was a problem. Damn my impatience!
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Sorry to hear about the pics. Maybe that means you have to repeat the adventure and document it all over again!
Boy, I don’t know if I’ll ever go to California wine country again. 🙂 But then again, not a bad idea!