At the start of the month, my trusty old desktop
presented me with a blank screen and a very weird bleeping noise. I consulted a
techy friend and received the confirmation I suspected...a crashed hard drive!
The computer is about 12 years old and well past its 'sell by' so time for a
replacement.
Fortunately a member of the family had recently
acquired a new laptop and I have therefore inherited the 'old' one which is a
Dell Vostro running Windows 7.
Next step would be to transfer my files from the
backup disks...unfortunately it turns out I have not been following the correct
procedures and the disks appear blank!
The local computer shop had a look at my crashed
hard drive and is unable to recover the files as the 'arm' seems to be broken.
He says he can send it off to a specialist but may cost a 'few hundred £'....so
that's the end of that!
I have therefore spent the past couple of weeks
reconstructing some of my old files from scratch which has been rather time
consuming however many of the basics are now back and updated. At the same time
I have been finding my way around the new operating system and also the newer
versions of Word and Excel so just about ready to resume with the blog.
The files are now backed up to Google Drive and I
will probably also invest in a cheap external hard drive so I am hoping I will
not be caught out again should the same thing happen to my laptop.
Apparently all hard drives will crash in time and I
should have double checked my backup system worked before I really needed to
use it for real...lesson learned.
Leave a comment below if you have any unfortunate computer
experiences to share.