I spent most of the weekend trying to clean up my ancient computer. It has been going so slow of late and I could not get it to cleanup files or defrag, due to lack of disk room. I borrowed an external hard drive from Adrien (my middle son) to copy all the files under my documents to it, with the intention of then deleting them from my hard drive C; giving me more room to play with. However as they say, the best plans of men and mice!! First of all, my computer refuses to stay running for more than an hour or so, sometimes and this was one of those times. I started it copying the Mydocs folder, pretty straightforward one would think, but my computer has had the hard drive replaced a couple of times, so it has my docs folders under my docs folders under my docs folders, all in all about 27 gbs worth, so when it locked up, I have to spend about a hour trying to figure out just what stage it had got to, before starting it up again, as I did not want to repeat what it had already done. So I get it going again and this time it seems to be doing well, till just about the time I was ready to call it a night and go to bed, hopefully leaving the computer going all night and it would be mostly done when I arose late on Sat morning, no such luck, it decided to lock up again, somewhere in the middle of Sioban's Tigger folder which contains hours and hours of music, buried in a mountain of folders and sub folders, so some hours later after much printing of folder contains and comparision between drive C: and the destination drive F: I have pretty much worked out where it had got to and with some fiddling around got it on the copying pathway again. Anyway this set the tone for pretty much all day Saturday until late evening, when I was starting to feel rather hopeful (after it had been running continuously for about 4 hours) that it would get the job finished before conking out again, disaster strikes .....
the lights are no longer flashing on the external drive, It would have to happen just as Adrien had appeared in the Lounge room. Of course "it is all your fault" "you have left it running all night" "you have burnt it out" was the reaction. After a quick check of plugs etc, it appears that I had not "burnt it out or anything so drastic, someone (probably Fudge) had dislodge the main power plug. It the meantime 'middle son' had gone stomping off to his bedroom with underbreath mutters, about how I have destroyed his precious hard drive. Anyway after considerably more time and checking (after I reconsidered throwing the whole kit and caboodle out the window) I started it off again. Somewhere in the early evening on Sunday(without any more rubbish) it finally finished. I was missing about 300 files somewhere in the exchange but by this time I had had enough and I had checked it so many times, I did not know whether I was looking at C or D drives, I decided that to hell with it, What was missing now, could go to God in that cyberspace hole where socks, hair ties and cutlery disappear to, for all I cared. I deleted file by file, with a feeling somewhat like sweet revenge, from the C: drive. All in all I reclaimed 17gbs all that work for less than half the drive capacity, "Well better than nothing". Then I decided to really push the button, and try to defragment the drive, something I have been unable to do for many a month. Low and behold it ran all night, without failing and I awoke this morning to a completed defrag. It did not really give me much more space, but it did give me a great feeling of joy. Who would know that one could get so much pleasure or sense of achievement from getting a basic tool on a computer to work. God how my life has changed since I was young.
However there was one spark of light in the whole weekend, I got a flickr email from someone who had spied my communion photo on my flickr site and who came from my hometown of Naas. It was great hearing from someone "from home" so to speak. He is a great deal younger than me, but still knew some of the people I did, so it was really good to touch base. Maybe he might be able to put me in touch with an old school friend or the like as he still has family living there.
No comments:
Post a Comment