I woke up yesterday morning and turned on the computer like always, and I heard what sounded like a London police siren; a two-tone continuous beep and no boot-up. Not a good way to start the day.
Off I went to the local computer clinic to turn it in for examination (in line behind who knows how many others). I got no word on it yesterday, so I called the place this morning and was told "Your motherboard's bad. We've called three suppliers to try to find one that will work with this old Celeron processor, and nobody has one."
Gulp.
After all the discussion last week about adding a new machine, KVM switches, etcetera, I was now faced with buying a new machine and somehow trying to retrieve roughly 4GB of data from the two old disk drives. Well, first things first. I went down to the local Office Depot and got an eMachine with 512mb of memory, a 160GB hard drive, and a 3.0GHZ Pentium 4 processor (for $500). I got it home and started re-installing the mail program, the firewall software, the virus scan software, and the broadband software. Several hours later, I was a going concern again. Phew.
Of course, I still have to reconfigure filters for 236 mailboxes in Eudora, try to recreate my address book, download about a dozen other programs I used to have, and maybe go look at OpenOffice, since I no longer have even old corrupted copies of Word and Excel. This thing came with Works, but no WordPerfect or QuattroPro, which could have done in a pinch. Oh, and then open up the box, cable each of the old drives, and copy the old files to the new drive.
Ah well. Faster processor, lots of disk space, faster memory; I suppose it will be worth all the effort once I'm done.
Anyone who wants mail from me should send me a note so I can swipe the address from it.
Posted by Linkmeister at January 18, 2005 08:26 PM