21st Century Blues

If this post ever makes it on line, it'll be a testament to my sheer stubbornness and willpower.

As I'd been suspecting all week, my computer, my new (or newish) laptop PC that I bought in November 2012 after my old faithful desktop finally bit the dust, crashed.  It generally won't start up, and on those few rare occasions that it does, it just makes clicking and beeping sounds for a few minutes and then turns itself back off.  I can't run anything on it, and I can't access anything on it, including all of my music files and MP3s, my collection of dharma talk podcasts, all of my photographs going back to scans of my childhood pictures, and my financial records, including everything I need to file my tax return.

I bought a new laptop today, a big 17-inch HP that looks and feels pretty steady, but it's been a challenge all day today to set everything back up, including re-loading Microsoft Office, Adobe, Google Chrome, and trying to find my old bookmarks and remember all of the passwords that were stored on my old computer.  Add to this the challenge of working for the first time on Windows 10 (my old computer was Windows 9) and a virus protection program that I have to manually turn off and then remember to turn back on every time I want to download a new program, and you have the basis for a tedious afternoon (although the frustration does take my mind off the other problems and challenges I've been facing).

I do have another old laptop that I keep for emergency purposes and do have some limited backup on, and for most of the day today, I've been transferring files and data from one to the other.  The broke-down laptop is at the shop now to see if they can recover data from the hard drive, but in the meantime, I'll just have to see how much I can live without.