I Thought I Was Being Punked

Photograph by mcfarlandmo



 So yesterday was both great and not great. I got a request for some chapters -- great! 

My computer fritzed out and typed like one...letter...at...a...time.

NOT Great. It took me four hours to complete my edits on four chapters and send them to the person who needed them.

Yikes!

Needless to say I was an absolute basket case when my hubby returned home. He'd been trying to get me to do a total system recovery on my five-year-old laptop. Yes, they made laptops back then. 

I'd been resisting because I also keep all of our pictures and homeschool records on my laptop. The family computer is for games and downloading junk that will freeze it and we just do restore points and move on with life. 

But my computer has all the books I've written, the proposals, the research...everything.

Now, I've had Mozy for months now. For those who don't know, its an offsite data storage company. So my computer is backed up regularly.  Also I've saved stuff on a pen drive and emailed copies of stuff to myself. 

But unless you've met me and see first hand what a distrustful and cynical, "my glass is probably poisoned" type of techno-phobe I am...then you won't understand how after all of those precautions, I was still wracked with nerves as my husband wiped the computer back to factory settings.

Thirteen gigs gone...in minutes.  Ahhh!

So now I'm downloading everything from Mozy. Its called a Web Recovery and I only freaked out on the Help-Line Chat Dude once! Progress, people...this is what it looks like. 

I have twenty-eight dowload files to load and they each take twenty minutes to dowload. I'm gonna be busy for a few days. Also, they're zipped so I have to extract them all. I don't know what made it and what is floating in cyber la-la land forever out of my reach.  I'll keep you posted.

Anyway, I'm working off of the family computer for now. I'm going to use this writing down time to research oil derricks, tensile strength, and sand boiling under levees. If you don't hear from me soon the FBI probably took me in the middle of the night. 

Until next time...Go Write!

Do Laptops Mutiny?

Broken Message
Originally uploaded by lrargerich

I am a gleeful techie. I love gadgets, and software, and all the wonderful ways they enable creativity. My computer holds a special place in my day-to-day life because not only are my manuscripts on it…so are all of my children’s grades. So suffice it to say, that even though all my important documents, pictures, and information are backed up…it drives me crazy that my computer is beginning to mutiny.

It started with random shutting off, usually in the middle of grade submissions. Argh! I have a cooling fan under it, I periodically use disk cleaner, registry back up, and I delete my temporary files regularly. So why is the portal to the written world fighting back…more importantly…is there a sale on computers coming up?

I took typing in high-school. It was required and we used actual typewriters. In fact, we fought over the new electric ones because you didn’t have to manually return the carriage. I remember that white typing correction film that never quite did the trick. How far we’ve come, and yet, when things go awry with my laptop, I start to wonder if old school isn’t the way to go. I mean, if something goes wrong with a typewriter, I break out the screw driver and fix it. I don’t have to wait for a guy in a bug to show up, pocket protector and all.

I’m going to take another look at the hard drive and maybe run some more diagnostics on my precious laptop before I start to panic. I wanted to give a shout out to my daughter for getting off the family computer long enough to let me post this. Until next time…gulp…hopefully…rb