Doing Both Less and More than Planned
This post will be really rushed, both because I haven’t written any other this week and therefore it’s mandatory to have this one up before midnight and because I still have other things to do today as well. It’s the fourth personal one in a row and a fifth one will almost certainly come tomorrow, but luckily I still have room for a few of them, so I’m doing better than at certain points in the past, when I was at the very limit of that rule of mine. That said, let me get right to it.
Last time, I was writing about computer issues and my plans to be very careful but also look into it further this week. I’m glad to be able to say that being careful did work, as that problem didn’t repeat itself yet, and also that I finally got around to looking inside my computer again. Didn’t notice anything that could in any way cause it, such as a cable appearing not to be plugged in quite all the way, but still wasn’t able to untie that bunch of cables and loosen the one going into the new DVD drive. Then again, I never expected to be able to do that and the DVD drive isn’t the issue, so that’s not a problem, though I did hope to somehow exceed my expectations and manage it anyway.
On the other hand, I put in the old HDD and copied everything to it once again, as planned, but then went further than that: I actually installed it properly and left it inside, also making a little script to easily update its contents from now on. It’s not like there was any real reason to leave it out anymore, since the new DVD drive uses a SATA cable, leaving this computer’s only ATA cable free and therefore allowing me to put an ATA HDD into its proper position instead of leaving it dangling under the old DVD drive, as it would have been otherwise.
That took quite a while and once again required removing the video card and then putting it back in, since there’s just no room to do much of anything otherwise, but it allows me to make it so I’ll have a full copy of this HDD’s contents, obviously excepting the installed programs, automatically updated every morning on another HDD. Some things could still go wrong, but they’re far more unlikely now, so I can feel much safer about my data… At least as long as leaving this old HDD in won’t cause any problems, because the computer took a very long time to start the first three times after I put it in, though that should have only happened the first time, and it seems just slightly slower even now. But that’s something to watch and make a decision on in time, not right now.
When I found out I’ll be alone today and planned to do this, I was planning to make today this month’s regular “computer maintenance day” as well, starting with letting it verify one large partition last night and then the rest of the HDD today, since I wouldn’t risk losing any data anymore. However, that didn’t quite work out. At first I simply forgot to tell it to verify last night when I went to the kitchen to eat, and then today there just wasn’t time for it. Doing what I said above, cleaning my room, writing this, eating a little and watching the qualifying for this week’s race already took up several hours and I still have a few things to do, including writing something else, and then I’ll be trying to play some more Risen as well, so that’ll be it for the day.
Tomorrow I’ll have another post to write, somehow, and then probably play some more Risen, mess around with a couple of other things… And I’ll probably be moping around and feeling like shit for a large part of the day anyway, for various reasons that I’ll most likely go through in my next personal post, so I won’t be getting around to doing this then either. But there’s always next week, when this month’s “computer maintenance day” was originally planned anyway. Little reason to rush anymore, now that I can be sure that my data’s safe, right? Besides, while my HDD did have some minor issues of its own ever since I got it, it doesn’t show any other signs of failure, so I’m probably still safe either way.
