Technidal difficulties

I came home from work this past Tuesday to discover that my old PC was displaying one of the blue screens of death, this one saying that it could not find the hard drive. Try what I may, nothing I could think of to do would work--but I'm more of a semi-educated user than a true techie.

I was faced with two choices. I could spend the money to buy a new hard-drive for my old computer, then re-install all of my old programs, or I could just buy a newer, faster computer with more RAM, a bigger hard drive, a newer, faster CD/DVD player/burner.

There was also the question of retrieving all my non-program files, including html, word processing, and database files. I had three backups. All of my photos are copied over onto CDs; my then-current comupter had a 2nd hard drive which I salvaged from the computer before that one, and I copied all the rest of my personal files over to that drive; and I also copy everything except my photos over to a USB flash drive.

I decided it would be more cost-effective to just buy a new computer, see if I could get the D drive from the old computer transferred over to the new one, hope that all my old programs (some pre-dating Windows XP) would work on my new machine, and if necessary copy all my photos back from the CDs and the rest of my files over from the USB flash drive.

It turned out that my old D drive is so old that my new PC's motherboard doesn't even recognize it; I had to order a kit to convert the drive over to a USB-readable external drive. I hope that I remembered to copy whatever I was working on Monday after work over to the old D drive, because although I remembered to copy everything over to the flash drive on Sunday I don't seem to have done so Monday night.

Most of my old programs seem to work fine on my new PC under Windows Vista. The most costly exception was WordPerfect, which I've been using since version 4.0, and still think is the best word processor on the market. At first it seemed to work OK, but as soon as I tried to save the file I'd opened and then worked on, I couldn't do so. The second-most expensive program I had to pay to replace was an FTP program, and that was about $20.

I of course had to install iTunes on this new computer, and go through my list of podcasts I subscribe to and download all the relevant episodes I wanted. This was more time-consuming than anything else, but only in the sense that I just went and did something else while iTunes was doing the downloading (I was at the Greek fair for a couple of hours yesterday, for instance.)

For some reason the new version of Internet Explorer failed to import my bookmarks from the html file I'd saved them to as backup, so I had to just go thtough that file bookmark by bookmark, create the new folders and subfolders in Explorer, and save each and every one all over again. It was a bit tedious, but I just listened to some of my podcasts while doing so. This gave me the opportunity to get rid of any bookmarks that were no longer in service, or replace them with the new, correct URLs.

The conversion kit for my old drive should arrive in the next couple of days. I hope I remembered to copy what I was working on Monday night over to it; if not, I only lost a day's worth of work. I'd been going through the separate files I'd sent myself about books by individual authors I wanted to add to my lists, and combined them into one comprehesive list. I don't have that one combined list yet--I hope it's on the D drive--but I do have all the single, separate source files.


SMC