Computers that take hours to load. Documents that take weeks to open. Files that disappear into the ether. Screens that hang up for half an hour.
And who will ever forget the Blue Screen Of Death?
Yes, I’ve been working with the old desktop computer today. And I had completely forgotten just how unstable it was, and how unstable all computers were back in those days and how we were resigned to it.
It makes all my problems with the modern generation of computers look pathetic by comparison.
What I have been doing is (trying to) extract the files from it onto a portable hard drive. And the fact that the USB ports were on the back (they were quite a new invention in the days of Windows 98) was the least of the problems.
We had two Blue Screens of Death, a keyboard that hung up, a mouse that hung up, Windows Exploder that hang up I really can’t remember how many times. When I built this computer, I remember being proud of the fact that it had 512k of memory and 256k of video and this was almost unheard-of in those days.
But imagine that today? No wonder it doesn’t want to do what I would like it to do. I’m struggling to make 8g of RAM to work effectively. I have a feeling that this is going to be a very long process.
This morning I had a really good sleep, right the way through to the alarm. And much to my own surprise, I was up and about fairly quickly too.
After breakfast I had a pile of work to do but something made me look through a folder that I had brought from the Auvergne in August and in there I found a document for which I have been searching for quite some considerable time.
It was the date on it – July 2008 – that made me decide to look for the corresponding paperwork and that was round about the time that the desktop computer was being retired from use, so I went to have a look on one of the hard drives (there are eight in there – well, eight partitions on two drives) to see if I could find it.
And regular readers of this rubbish will recall that I have spent the last I don’t know how long looking for a batch of images that I knew that I had and couldn’t find. And there they all were, on one of the partitions in the desktop computer.
And after all of this searching over the past few years too. I was convinced that when I was up at the old apartment in Brussels in 2011 just before I sold it, I had taken all of the images and data off it. But apparently not.
There is a short-cut to dealing with the data. I could take the hard-drive out, because it’s in a snatch-out carrier, and put it in an external IDE caddy, which I just happen to have around here. But the carrier has a lock to prevent it being removed, and Brain of Britain didn’t bring the key with him, did he?
Apart from all of that, I’ve been for both my walks. And it was nice and pleasant out there. And I would have had a nicer and more pleasant time had I not run out of memory on the SD card in the camera.
For tea, I found some vegan burgers in the fridge (I’ve been tidying it out too today) that were past their sell-by date. So I made some pasta and veg and tomato sauce and it was delicious.
Another thing that I found in the fridge that is past its sell-by date is a roll of puff pastry. There’s some pie filling in the freezer so i think that tomorrow I’ll buy a couple of leeks and make a large pie.
That should keep me out of mischief for several days.
