Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Computer Woes


Yesterday afternoon my 5-1/2 year old desktop computer crashed. It's been showing signs of aging so it wasn't a complete surprise. I've been trying to squeeze every bit of life out of it. My laptop is a Mac and I prefer using the Mac operating system. The catch is, my employer's platform is PC based and even though the Mac can operate on Windows there are some complicated issues that are to boring to include here.


I spent the day working from home trying to patch the PC back together. Today brought back the adage of how the thought of losing something that has become such a part of life makes you appreciate it a whole lot more. That's the second time I've written that recently. I've got to stop and appreciate things more.   

In my work I do a lot of searches on Google to research maintenance parts for customers. I relied on it today for help with the computer. A couple of weeks ago in a post I asked the question, "what did we do before cell phones?"  It's also hard to imagine life without a computer.

I wish your computer input/output operation well...

6 comments:

  1. Mike:

    I have established a baseline for computer life. Laptop = 3 years for sure, 4 years most likely, 5 years you are on borrowed time. Hard drives have a life of around 3 years, then replace. My laptop will be having its birthday in January. 3 years old. I am looking for a new one, perhaps after Christmas sales . . .
    I have to have a PC, I don't understand Macs. Most of my data is on external drives. I keep current photos on them for perhaps 3-6 months depending, then I archive them to DVD.

    My desktop crashed around 3 years ago and I do everything on this 14.1" laptop, even video editing. I have a small Acer netbook for the bike

    bob
    bobskoot: wet coast scootin

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  2. They always tell us to replace everything every 3 years, a practice I have been able to ignore a bit. We will be stretching out 2 of our office computers through one more tax season. The good thing is that the cost is way less than it used to be.

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  3. Bob,
    Your system of rotating your computers sounds good. Mentally I've converted to Mac so I've been reluctant to buy another PC, although yesterday I was looking online at Acer notebooks. Macs seem intimidating at first but they're more intuitive than PC IMHO. Thanks Bob - take care.

    cpa3485 (Jim),
    I was amazed yesterday looking online how the cost is lower than before. I hope you can get one more tax season out of those.

    Take care,
    Mike

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  4. my wife's pc's hard drive crashed this week, pc is over 6 years old at least....luckily, I had recent images of the failed drive so not much reconstruction once I got the new drive put in.....

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  5. Been there, done that. I am now religious about backups! I actually like the Mac OS but our whole business structure is Windows PC.

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  6. Charlie6 (Dom),
    Sorry to hear about your wife's PC crash. I'm not so sure now that mine crashed. When I re-booted, it was back to when I first got it. I've had to start everything from scratch. I only lost a few current things I had in files on the desktop. Thanks for visiting and your comment.

    Dan,
    My situation is the same as yours. It would be nice if our company went to Mac OS and gave us all iPhones! And then I woke up...

    BTW, I drove past Kelly's Olympian today. I'll have a picture on the next post.

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