Tuesday, September 9, 2008

One Toe in the Water


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I have a computer! The real wonder is that apparently I didn't lose any data. After finally getting the system set up yesterday, (until then, I had been too discouraged to get into it) I held my breath and called Dell. I was ready to get the official word on my chances of salavaging what little data I keep on my C drive and dodging the nightmare of restoring all programs (each with its multiple updates), as well as all the drivers and devices. While the first person I contacted before the moving van arrived had been extremely pessimistic and this second one was not much more hopeful, I felt strong enough to face the ordeal and we plunged into the process. The woman I spoke to was patient, thorough, and personable, but we flailed about a bit without getting anywhere, then suddenly we (as it seemed to me) stumbled into a menu and I think with a mind all its own a clean-up process lurched into full gear. Just between you and me, the gal from Dell seemed as surprised as I that when the scrubbing ended rather than having a blank drive I had a restored system. Whoopee! Ladies and gentlemen, one small step toward normalcy.

Of course since I had only been using CS3 for a few weeks and I was working on newly installed external drives with a filing protocol in transition, I still feel a bit lost and tentative. Still, I finally see a glimmer of light at the end of what seemed an interminable tunnel.

4 comments:

  1. That's great to hear, Anita! Now, you need to go out and buy Acronis True Image Home, http://www.acronis.com/homecomputing/download/trueimage/index.html, and do an image back up of your system so that if it crashes again, you can restore it to what it is today and be back up in no time!

    Free download to try it out!

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  2. Paul - I think my wallet just shuddered. Seriously—as you can see by today's post, my real problem hadn't been fear that I had lost tons of data, but that I would have to invest more hours in another thankless and non-creative task before getting back to what I really want to be doing.

    Does the Acronis restore the entire operating system? I do have Raid One set up on my computer so that if I have a hardware failure, I can simply boot to the D drive and I'm good to go. However, this was a software issue, and apparently Raid One is useless in that case.

    Thanks for the info. I will check that out.

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  3. Gordon - Thanks. It's awfully good to be back.

    ReplyDelete

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Anita