MORE unfortunate events

Isn’t it interesting how things go wrong at the most inconvenient time? When I wrote the blogs for our latest trip to Europe I entitled it ‘A series of unfortunate events‘, because so many things went wrong. Well, it seems the trip demons hadn’t finished with me. Not all that long before we left on that European trip I’d had to restore my computer to factory settings – which means reformatting the hard disk, which means losing all your data and all your apps. And the version of Windows is the one that came on the machine, minus the hundreds of updates Microsoft made after that. It’s a bitch of a job and Microsoft hasn’t made it any easier by changing the procedure to repair a damaged system. In the old days, you tapped the F8 key as the machine was booting, which stopped Windows from loading and gave the operator a chance to run some diagnostics and repairs.

Not any more. At least a little bit of Windows loads and offers suggestions. None of the repair options worked and I couldn’t get the system to reboot from a USB stick, or from an SD card, so I had to run the factory restore. Then I had to find and download the various apps (Lightroom, Photoshop, Firefox, Thunderbird, Microsoft Office, Adobe Digital Reader… etc etc), and restore from backup.

All good.

For a while.

Then a month or so ago, not long after I got home from my week in Perth the disk failed again, and none of Windows repair options worked. But at least I managed to get into the file system and copy my latest trip photos to my external hard drive where I had the rest of my backups before (once again) restoring to factory settings and reloading apps and data.

All good. Surely.

The disk failed again a week or so ago. Once again, I had to restore to factory settings, muttering obscenities as I worked. This time, though, the machine wouldn’t even boot. To quote Doctor Macoy, “It’s worse than that, it’s dead, Jim.” Fortunately, I have a reliable laptop, so I loaded my files from backup onto that.

Then the biggest blow of all. I restored from backup – but I’d changed where I kept my photos, and deleted some files from the backup disk because I wouldn’t need them. I had my reasons which made perfect sense at the time. The end result, though, was I lost all the photos from the European trip, and from the Perth trip. Just as well I’d written those blogs. We had Pete’s Europe photos. Not as good as mine, but still… 🙂

But wait a minute…

As it happens, I hadn’t been quite as stupid as I thought I’d been. Yes, I’d deleted files from the backup disk because I didn’t need them anymore, and their existence would only confuse. But I’d deleted them AFTER I’d put the photos in those files in the right place. I’m restoring them to the PC as I write this post.

And the upshot of all of this? My hair is even greyer. I’ll be putting a new hard drive in the Dell desktop and disposing of it. A shiny new HP is due to arrive in the new year.

This will be my Last Post for this year. I wish both of my readers (okay, all three) a wonderful solstice,  however you choose to celebrate.

Apart from finding I hadn’t been as STUPID as I thought I’d been, comments from people whose opinion I respect suggest that The Last Jedi does not suck, so I’ll be looking forward to seeing it in a store near me next year.

Here’s a collection of scenes from 2017 – I promise there will be more in 2018.