Back on air
Well that been an interesting couple of weeks. The evening after made my first lj entry, I decided to upload the software that had come on a cd with my shiny new digital camera. It was going so well ... until it said 'reboot now to complete the installation' So I did as I was told. Partway through the reboot I got a nasty blue screen and an even nastier message saying that my registry was corrupt. Oh fuck, I thought. After some experimentation the bellinghman said that my only option was to reload the operating system, so I did.
The next couple of evenings was spent reinstalling various bits of software, and getting into a panic when I discovered that the Discworld 2004 membership database had mysteriously become read-only and I couldn't export it to update the membership page on our website. I say read-only - it would allow me to add new records, just not export the tables out of the database. Eek! I was having visions of having to create a new database and re-enter all that data...
Then just before last weekend I walked into the computer room first thing and discovered that my pc wouldn't 'wake up'. The only thing i could do was hit the power button and restart it. When I did, _something_ inside it was making these horribe 'I may be thinking about having a head crash' noises - well that's what it sounded like to me, anyway. Oh fuck, again. As soon as the machine booted, I copied all my vital stuff to the server. The bellinghman happened to have to go to World of Computers, so picked up a new hard drive for me, thus a chunk of last weekend was spent installing it and all the software again. The old drive has been left in as a spare - it will doubtless turn out that there was nothing wrong with it, but I couldn't be 100% certain after hearing those nasty noises.
I also solved the weird database problem by creating a new database and importing the tables and forms into it from the old database - that was a relief when it worked!
So my machine should now be happy, with a nice clean install of everything on a nice big new hard drive. My old drive was an 8gb - the _smallest_ one World of Computers sells now is 20gb. My first home pc had a 40mb hard drive and I remember thinking 'So much space - I'll never fill all that....'
In other news, the project for which I am Administrator got formal approval for its funding last week (all £8.5million of it) , so I really do have a job for the next 3 years, which pleases me.
Oh, and the pond is even more full of frogspawn than when I last wrote, but at least they've stopped bonking eachother...
The next couple of evenings was spent reinstalling various bits of software, and getting into a panic when I discovered that the Discworld 2004 membership database had mysteriously become read-only and I couldn't export it to update the membership page on our website. I say read-only - it would allow me to add new records, just not export the tables out of the database. Eek! I was having visions of having to create a new database and re-enter all that data...
Then just before last weekend I walked into the computer room first thing and discovered that my pc wouldn't 'wake up'. The only thing i could do was hit the power button and restart it. When I did, _something_ inside it was making these horribe 'I may be thinking about having a head crash' noises - well that's what it sounded like to me, anyway. Oh fuck, again. As soon as the machine booted, I copied all my vital stuff to the server. The bellinghman happened to have to go to World of Computers, so picked up a new hard drive for me, thus a chunk of last weekend was spent installing it and all the software again. The old drive has been left in as a spare - it will doubtless turn out that there was nothing wrong with it, but I couldn't be 100% certain after hearing those nasty noises.
I also solved the weird database problem by creating a new database and importing the tables and forms into it from the old database - that was a relief when it worked!
So my machine should now be happy, with a nice clean install of everything on a nice big new hard drive. My old drive was an 8gb - the _smallest_ one World of Computers sells now is 20gb. My first home pc had a 40mb hard drive and I remember thinking 'So much space - I'll never fill all that....'
In other news, the project for which I am Administrator got formal approval for its funding last week (all £8.5million of it) , so I really do have a job for the next 3 years, which pleases me.
Oh, and the pond is even more full of frogspawn than when I last wrote, but at least they've stopped bonking eachother...