Computer Crashed, Network is Failing -- what else?

15 years ago

I hit Murphy's Law for technology this weekend. My PC crashed. I'm still trying to recover the hard drive to retrieve my 2008 garden photos. Quite a few were uploaded to Picasa, so not all are lost...if they are really lost.

I had backed up all of our travel and family photos and documents to an external hard drive about 2 weeks ago. I was procrastinating on the garden photos so that I could organize them. Duh. I should have known better! :-(

On top of the computer, our network keeps dying on us as our modem is starting to fail, too. Both were purchased about the same time... end of life! A new DSL modem is being sent to us from BellSouth.

I now have a MacBook instead of a PC. My husband and DS2 talked me into a Mac and they made it my early birthday/Christmas present. I *hated* to have this expense right now, but the guys were really excited about my getting this machine.

So... my friends... please don't wait to backup your precious documents and photos!

Cameron

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Comments (12)

aftermidnight Zone7b B.C. Canada
15 years ago
Geez Cameron, or should I say Oh Crap, I'm using one of DH's older laptops, a Mac Powerbook. It has a back up program called Time Machine built in and it automatically backs up everything every hour. You're going to love your new Mac :o).

Annette
todancewithwolves
15 years ago
Mac's rock!!! You'll love it ... and they don't get viruses.
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Nell Jean
15 years ago
Compost happens. I'm so sorry for the loss of your photos.

Nell
gldno1
15 years ago
Cameron, I visited your blog and read about the difficulties.

I recently backed up Quicken to a disc and always put pictures on one every few days. I learned the hard way!

Good luck retrieving your pictures.

I am considering an external drive...my hard drive is getting pretty full.
midnightsmum (Z4, ON)
15 years ago
Oh, I know what I need to do!! Hope you get your hard drive back.

Nancy.
DYH
Original Author
15 years ago
Today, I recovered all of my data from my old PC. Fortunately, I have 28 years of experience with computers and new what to do-- Longer story:

The reason that I thought all was lost is because .... We bought TWO different external drive enclosures so I could mount the drive onto the new Mac to transfer the data. BOTH had bad controllers!

Our THIRD external drive enclosure worked and it only took me 7 minutes to get all of my photos over to my Mac. What are the chances that we'd buy TWO bad devices? I worked for hours trying to get those things to work and they were faulty. We made the store test the 3rd one today before we came home.

I love the new Mac and Time Machine. iPhoto is great for organizing photos and adding keywords. Better organized.

Our network is still having problems. AT &T sent us a new modem that didn't work. They are coming out tomorrow to see what they can do to fix the network issues.
midnightsmum (Z4, ON)
15 years ago
I am going to stop telling people how wonderful this company is, as crap like this happens - today's message, "We apologize for the outage this afternoon experienced by many of our wireless customers. A mouse chewed its way into the back of the fuse panel shorting the system out."
How can you make this s##t up?????

Nancy.
gldno1
15 years ago
Congratulations, Nancy!

DH and I were just discussing how much stuff we had bought lately that didn't last 3 weeks...........all from China. It just makes me crazy.

Is AT&T your only choice for high speed?
DYH
Original Author
15 years ago
Much to our dismay, AT&T is our only choice. We live in a little "no man's land" where no towns want to claim us!

We are in an odd location. We're "almost" in Chapel Hill (I could just about throw a rock from our property into CH). However, the only service we get from there is snail mail, even though our little zip code isn't recognized by any system anywhere! Chapel HIll is in Orange County.

We're in the northern part of Chatham County, far, far away from the county seat so they think of us as being in Chapel Hill. Therefore, we have no services from the county.

That said, we like this little rural pocket of anonymity with our private road and 20 landowners. We wouldn't want to live anywhere else.
DYH
Original Author
15 years ago
AT&T repaired the problem. There was interference from the security system sending out packets. Why it took THREE years to manifest is beyond anyone's guess.

The gremlins are gone!

Cameron
midnightsmum (Z4, ON)
15 years ago
I thought you might enjoy this quote:

If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside.
Robert X. Cringely, InfoWorld magazine

Nancy.
DYH
Original Author
15 years ago
LOL

I just sent that to my DS2 who loves both cars and computers! He liked it!

Computer Crashed, Network is Failing -- what else?

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aftermidnight Zone7b B.C. Canada

todancewithwolves

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