5 Bucks a Day

I haven’t written for a few days. It was a long weekend, it was a holiday, the weather was awful, but that wasn’t the problem.

I came home Saturday, all geared up to finally add some power to my home computer, an old Dell T550 that was sorely in need of more horsepower. I figured adding some more memory would do the trick.

Memory upgrades are simple, I’ve done it several times before on various computers. So no problem, I opened up the box, inserted the chip, closed the box, plugged everything in, and powered up.

Windows came up, started to draw my desktop, and then crashed.

I tried it again. It crashed again.

I went into safe mode, I got the desktop no problem. I even was able to confirm that it was recognizing the extra memory. And then it crashed in safe mode.

So … I took the memory out, powered up, and my heart stopped. It booted up fine, but it couldn’t find my user profile. Sure, I could have started from scratch, reloaded all my favorites, installed all my programs (I could fortunately find everything, but I’d have to reinstall into a fresh user profile, I think).

So, since I was all hot to improve my computer life, not work on reconstructing it only to be back at square one, I decided to buy a new computer.

Fortunately, I was able to find everything on my old computer somewhere and transfer what wasn’t already there, to my external hard disk. Then plugging the external HD into my new computer was a snap.

But … if I would have had a worse problem, it would have been a nightmare. The lesson is in the title of this article, don’t forget to make backups!

Assume that tomorrow your hard disk will fail.

Assume that as early as next week, you’ll have to recover all the work you’ve done in the last year.

Assume that it isn’t a matter of if you’ll have a problem, it’s a matter of when.

If you do all that, you’ll be fine.

I was lucky this time, but it was a warning which I hope I’m smart enough to pay attention to, and why I’m writing this post, so that it will get further burned into my subconscious.

The good news is, this computer flies. The bad news is, I sure haven’t gotten used to Windows Vista yet, which isn’t quite ready for prime time, IMO.

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