Crashes

This has not been a good time. Last week I had a cold which this week turned into a chest infection. Eldest son, who was visiting last week, also caught it and now tells me he’s been diagnosed with pneumonia.

On Sunday I redesigned the StAnza website (http://www.stanzapoetry.org) and uploaded it. Then my computer crashed. Monday morning it was crashing often and catastrophically, losing all my email settings and much else besides. I took it into my local computer shop and the advice was to back up everything I could and take it back in for a hard disk wipe and reinstall. It took hours. Five gigs of music takes a lot of backing up for one thing, but – all my documents, all my photos – everything! Nightmare.

Got it back this evening, and I’ve been trying to put Humpty Dumpty back as a much smaller and better organised egg. I had to decide which programs to re-install and which to dump, since most of the crashes were due to conflicts between programs and drivers. Fortunately (once bitten…) I have an external hard disk for backups, so I’m keeping all my music, photos and backed-up docs on the external disk from now on.