She swears the moon don't hang quite as high as it used to

[rolanni]

So!  Saturday afternoon we had a thunderstorm, a really gully-washing thunder-cracker -- a weather-changer, too, thank goddess.  Knocked the temps down 12 degrees F, and cleaned out all the gunk.  Yesterday was in the mid-70sF/20sC and beautifully dry, and today,  we have more of the same.  So, yay! liveable weather.

Sadly, we did lose power during the storm -- lost it, in fact, in two stages. The first snap-off/snap-back took out my mouse, so I had to shut my computer down by pushing the button on the front of the case.  And, when the storm was over?  You know where this is going, right?  Right.  Exactly nothing happened when I pushed the 'on' button, and nothing continued to happen during a series of restorative techniques ably applied by Steve.

This morning we took ol' Jack into the shop, and have just now received a call from Stephanie-the-tech, who tells me, yep, it was the power supply gone south, all right, and the DVD player is toast (which it has been; I just didn't want to unplug and schlepp (actually, Steve does the schlepping) an old and Very! Heavy! box down to the shop just for a DVD player when we had a USB player that I could plug in.), and did I want her to go ahead and do the replacements for an estimated two bills, parts and labor?

I did, and said so, at which point she confessed that her hesitation had to do with the age of the harddrive, which she makes to be on the order of  five years.  How time flies.  I guess there's a new harddrive/data transfer in my future, sigh.

But, not today.  Today, we will have the new power supply and DVD player.  Then, after I make thorough back-ups, I'll take it down again for the new harddrive.  Or perhaps I'll think upon making Number Ten Ox the desktop, and live out of one, easy-to-transport, but hard to fix machine. This digital age we live in sure does make all the decisions nice and easy.

In the meanwhile, I did find Ox the laptop, which had become Lost To Me.  Turns out I'd set it (in its case) beside the couch and when Someone (looks at Trooper) initiated an indoor relay race from the top of the cat tree, over the couch and back again, knocking all the couch cushions and pillows to the floor in a glorious catsplosion, the sofa cover had also become disturbed and was half-covering the computer case and I did not recognize it for what it was, because heat rots my brain.  And, also, Coon cats assisting the search tend to like to take the lead.

So, that's all the news that was and is -- oh, wait.  I cleaned the bathroom yesterday.  The things we find time for when the computer doesn't work...

Comments

[kk1raven.livejournal.com]

Hard drives can last much longer than five years. If it tests as being good and it isn't full or slow to the point of causing a bottleneck, there's no particular reason to replace it just because it is five years old. If it has bad clusters or otherwise fails hardware tests in some way, that's a reason to be concerned but even a few bad clusters aren't necessarily a problem as long as they aren't spreading. It is wise to test drives once in a while, particularly when they get older, and as I'm sure you know, making regular backups is important no matter how old or new the drive is, but drives are not like the oil in your car that should be changed regularly.