![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I'm even busier now
Mar. 11th, 2015 04:48 pmI posted a picture of my new computer with a lot of its guts hanging out a few days ago. Unfortunately, my old computer chose that very time to have a CPU-fart.
I was eating dinner on Monday evening, with the computer on in the next room doing mostly nothing. When I returned to the computer, the login screen was showing. And just as I went to log in, it disappeared and the computer restarted. This happened several times so I turned it off and booted into safe mode. When I logged in, I got nothing in particular. My email had disappeared, and the profile I logged in to was temporary. OMFG!
After turning the air blue, I decided to turn the thing off and think about it overnight. When I got to it on Tuesday morning, I had no more success, although I found my email profile file and copied it off onto a memory stick just in case. Turned the air blue some more when the profile was still "temporary".
I also found that my backup, while it contained my Users folder, wouldn't let me look at it. So that was useless too.
Then my DVD-drive, as it sometimes does, began cycling. It opened, then shut, then opened again, then shut again. I don't know why--some have suggested that it's haunted. I'll just buy a new optical drive for the new computer, in case it is occupied by something other than a DVD disk.
This morning, while struggling with that, I thought to myself: "Why not just rename this profile to "xxxChris" and rename the Administrator account (which wasn't temporary) to "Chris". So that's what I did, and it was a success.
I recovered my emails into Thunderbird (horribly complicated, as is Mozilla's wont), recovered Live Journal, the Book of Face, Google in its various incarnations, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc. and so on and so forth. I haven't tried for iTunes yet as I understand there's some kind of worldwide outage. Spotify won't let me install it on my desktop, God only knows why. But other stuff seems to be here.
I won't be doing more work on the new computer until I get this one mostly fixed. I have been urged by a friend (you know who you are, Brett!) to get a Mac, but I'm not made of money. I have also been advised to load Ubuntu or some other flavour of Linux on the new computer. I probably won't do that, but I'm keeping that up my sleeve, so to speak.
The next task is to make a system recovery disk.
The moral of the story is this: no matter how much you back up (or don't) or how much you try to protect your computer, when it decides to screw up on you there is NO way to fix it easily.
I was eating dinner on Monday evening, with the computer on in the next room doing mostly nothing. When I returned to the computer, the login screen was showing. And just as I went to log in, it disappeared and the computer restarted. This happened several times so I turned it off and booted into safe mode. When I logged in, I got nothing in particular. My email had disappeared, and the profile I logged in to was temporary. OMFG!
After turning the air blue, I decided to turn the thing off and think about it overnight. When I got to it on Tuesday morning, I had no more success, although I found my email profile file and copied it off onto a memory stick just in case. Turned the air blue some more when the profile was still "temporary".
I also found that my backup, while it contained my Users folder, wouldn't let me look at it. So that was useless too.
Then my DVD-drive, as it sometimes does, began cycling. It opened, then shut, then opened again, then shut again. I don't know why--some have suggested that it's haunted. I'll just buy a new optical drive for the new computer, in case it is occupied by something other than a DVD disk.
This morning, while struggling with that, I thought to myself: "Why not just rename this profile to "xxxChris" and rename the Administrator account (which wasn't temporary) to "Chris". So that's what I did, and it was a success.
I recovered my emails into Thunderbird (horribly complicated, as is Mozilla's wont), recovered Live Journal, the Book of Face, Google in its various incarnations, Twitter, Instagram, etc. etc. and so on and so forth. I haven't tried for iTunes yet as I understand there's some kind of worldwide outage. Spotify won't let me install it on my desktop, God only knows why. But other stuff seems to be here.
I won't be doing more work on the new computer until I get this one mostly fixed. I have been urged by a friend (you know who you are, Brett!) to get a Mac, but I'm not made of money. I have also been advised to load Ubuntu or some other flavour of Linux on the new computer. I probably won't do that, but I'm keeping that up my sleeve, so to speak.
The next task is to make a system recovery disk.
The moral of the story is this: no matter how much you back up (or don't) or how much you try to protect your computer, when it decides to screw up on you there is NO way to fix it easily.
