Car wash and fixing the broken laptop..

Not many folks found the actual post for yesterday since it was before the Precious Moments pictures so I will repost it again tonight.....  Since all I did today was work on these same issues with the computers again.

Yesterday....

Lets look back at today and see what we did..... Uh, well I went over to the car wash and drove the oldest car thru the line..... It hadn't been washed for a couple of months and it needed a good dusting and cleaning...

We left the Toyota out in Mesa, because there was only two of us and we drove the motorhome back to KC. Loyce drove the truck.. Most of these vehicles have some age on them now, as the truck is 6 models back now and the one I washed today is 8 models back of new.. But we don't have a lot of miles on most of them, but I still dream....

But back to reality, I needed to continue on my computer project. I have been recovering the pictures that were lost from my hard drive crash. Almost everything is stored on other devices, but its hit or miss what is on where...

I have been copying them all onto the newest laptop from a thumb drive, but that proved rather slow as the drive is only 4 gig. So it was off to the computer parts supply store this afternoon looking for, well, parts!

I purchased a new hard drive for the laptop that crashed... It was 500Gb and that was what I found.. The 5400 Rpm was cheaper than the 7200 and I'm slow too, but the old one that crashed was 4400 from looking at the label on it. So it was an upgrade...

Also I purchased a 500 Gb usb portable drive. It was $70 and made by Samsung... You just plug it in, and it has the drivers and stuff right on its disk... or perhaps in a memory chip, but the computers loved it instantly mapping it as the next available drive in the sequence... F: on one machine and G: on the other, but who cares as long as it works!

I had flopped the broken laptop upside down and extracted the old hard drive out of its bottom before I left, to make sure I didn't get one that wouldn't do the job... (should have done that with that fan switch the other night.)

Then I bought a big stack of DVDs for $15. I think there were 25 in the package. But they were Phillips brand, so that seemed OK.

Back here at the house I was merrily making Emergency Recovery DVDs on the newest laptop, while I was installing the new hard drive into the broken one. At one point I was making recovery disks and using the recovery disks that I made two years ago to reinstall the programs on the older computer...

The portable hard drive transferred files between machines seamlessly, but it takes a bunch of time to go thru the process... It read 102 on our weather station, so I wasn't wanting to be outside anyway...

When you do finish your recovery of the older machine, it is returned to the state that it was in when you took it out of its box brand new... Full of the bloat ware that came with it, and without any of the software you normally use.. It takes quite a bit of time to go out on the internet and find the programs that you normally use and then install each of them..

I used internet explorer just once to download Google Chrome, and with that and a signon, my bookmarks and tabs were instantly restored... To my knowledge chrome is the only browser that does it that way...

So I am using the older machine to write this tonight and I am happy to be doing so, because the keyboard is much more familiar to me. And I am all blabber fingers with less errors...

Still it will take a long time to get the rest of the programs downloaded and installed that were on the old hard drive. Perhaps I won't need to do all of them, but it will dawn on me that I don't have Skype when I try and call someone, so that will be when it gets installed... And so forth as I try to use the old,,new,, computer..

And after I had washed the car this morning, it began to rain about supper time, so I had to run and put it in the garage.. It's black, and the rain spots it all up, so I will need to wipe it down now... But it looked really nice for several hours.....!

Retired Rod