Reboot or boot out? My laptop died last week. As the editor commiserated, I felt like a part of me had been lost and I longed for the dark ages of no technology to go horribly wrong. Although I'd backed-up the system in June, stuff had been added since then andnow it was trapped in an unreliable machine teetering on the edge of uselessness. Over a period of days the machine kept turning itself off and, if on, was able only to cope with one task at a time. It became apparent pretty quickly that the one task I needed to do was to find a memory stick and copy data onto it. Where was my memory stick? Ah yes, with the family holiday photos on it in my daughter's desk drawer. It was full. Had she saved them somewhere else? Could I delete them to make room? With my daughter at a ballet lesson, there was no way to know. Off I went to find the other memory stick beside the family computer. That had homework stuff on it, but did have space. I started copying away between the computer's hissy fits although, on occasion, my own hissy fits as I ran madly up and downstairs checking whether the stick was filling to the brim with everything I needed between spontaneous shut-downs. All the while I still trying to make dinner and supervise homework. Between curses, I vowed to be devout in my electronic housekeeping from now on. I kept calling the IT guru to relay the error messages. His responses became grimmer. "Sounds like the motherboard is going.'' That would be right. It all comes down to the mother being able to cope or everything goes pear-shaped. The laptop made a last rally that even managed to get email to boot up for an hour or two, then it gave me the blue screen. "Ah, the blue screen,'' said the
guru understandingly. "That's not a good sign.'' I took that to mean impending death and, indeed, the blue screen was the laptop's last goodbye.
A week later, I have most of the documents loaded on a new laptop. Doing this involved much, much more than just chucking them on the new machine and being all set. The most disconcerting thing ahead of me is getting used to a whole new system. I know the updated 2007 version I am working on is bound to be better than the previous versions I used, but I am used to them! Now there are compatibility issues as old Excel bickers with new Excel. Then there's email. I won't burden you with that story. I need to sort my electronic life into neat, tidy places. Having ingested all the information on the various memory sticks and MP3 players I'd managed to root out in those 48 hours of impending doom, I am now embroiled in the mother of all electronic housekeeping jobs. In the first instance, I have an enormous Memory Stick folder which is being culled progressively as information is farmed out to appropriate folders. Some is already there from back-ups, some is not. Some things I need to delete, others I hover over wondering if I delete them will I then need them next week? It is a tedious job, but satisfying as I regain control. I widen the brief and gather photos from more than just my old machine: a memory stick or two, the family computer, the phone, and set up a new folder called Old Photos to sort. The digital age and a teenager with her own camera mean photos are not all neatly in one spot or backed up. So I buy an enormous back-up external drive (1TB) and the lovely aforementioned IT guru chappie links it up so that everything is backed-up every 24 hours. Ah, what a lovely, reassuring thought. No time to muse over that, though. I have a computer to sort.
