Moving On

Its happening all around us. If you are like me you have at least three friends or aquaintances who are going through hard drive failure right now. Count me in as one of them. Why is this going on? External Hard Drives which used to be the backbone of a good back up system only seem to be able to last a year. Internal Hard Drives seem to get tired after about 2 years and lets not even talk about DVD’s and CD’s.

Then, there are the online back up services. That is a joke –almost. It takes anywhere from 6 weeks to 3 months to get that first back up made and in that time, the average designer makes enough product to fill up another hard drive and that means another long back up time. I signed up for one of those and it keeps stopping and I have yet to see it get past 11%. AND I am not even backing up my internal drive there. I am just backing up my back ups from on the Externals.

For the past few days I had noticed that something was chugging away behind the scenes with the desktop. The programs started slowing down and I was finding it hard to work in Photoshop. My brush strokes were not showing up until three or four strokes later. The Task Manager showed nothing unusual going but a huge CP use happening. It finally got so bad, I got online in a chat room with a tech support person. He was actually able to take control of my computer and check it out – really cool, like a ghost was looking through my stuff. Bad news was that there were 92 processes going on –he said that was way too many and I needed to log in as administrator to turn some of them off.

That was when things got rough. I tried this way and that way, crossed my legs, sang to the comptuer and sweet talked it but it would not let me log in as administrator or would not recognize me as administrator to turn things off. In the process of trying the computer got hung up a few times and then, then, welll then it just quit starting up. It would not even start up in safe mode. Heart in throat, I called on the phone to tech support and was taken through several different tries but it would not get past a certain point. I was sadly told to take the baby into the doc so they could transplant the data from it to another hard drive before they wiped it clean and reinstalled the system.

So, I got out the laptop and started working on it to bring it up to speed – realizing that all my passwords and vital info is on the other computer. Meanwhile I was starting the desktop to see if it could just get past that sticky spot. I finally just left it stewing in its own juices. About and hour or so later, it must have finally got tired of not getting any attention and decided to go on and start up in safe mode. What a joy –there were all my files and all my precious things waiting for me. Of couse, I have not even tried to restart it since and I am saving everything I can to the Externals. Its been almost ten hours and I still have lots to go. Those Photoshop files are huge and take a while to save. I’ve been making a list of things I want to be sure not to forget – like the fonts and the application data folders, and lets see there are all the emails and back ups from outlook. sure hope it all comes together soon.

Meanwhile, I had to get online with tech support again over the laptop – like, how in the world do you turn off this touch pad thingie? I keep brushing it by accident and losing a bunch of stuff. Turns out it was so easy, there is a button right on the touch pad that turns it on and off, but it took tech support about 45 mintues to figure it out too, so I don’t feel so stupid!

At least when this is all over I will have a clean computer! It probably will be much faster too!