The state of my computer(s)
..is not good.
Since 2012 Christmas, I had two laptops - an older, bulkier laptop I had since 2008 and the newer, much lighter and faster laptop hettie_lz gave e as a present. At first, I used both of my laptops equally, but over the next few months, issues kept cropping up on the older laptop and I would up primarily using the new laptop. I kept the older laptop because, well, it still worked, and I never did get around to transferring a decent chunk of my older files onto the new laptop.
Last night, the "field" lap top took a big fall. It wasn't the first time that happened, but this time, it seemed to have broken something important.
The first time I reloaded after it fell, half of the programs wouldn't start right, so I rebooted. But as it started up again, it went straight into startup repair. Several swipes later, it turned out that several important-looking files were corrupted, and no matter how much I tried, they wouldn't be repaired.
Then, I did something that, looking back, may have dug me into a bigger hole. I went into Toshiba recovery wizard. It had an option where it would preserve all the user files but reset everything else to factory settings. Which, while painful, would not be the worst thing in the world. I could reinstall all the pieces of software, but the files were irreplaceable. Or, at least, a decent chunk of what was saved on it after May 2013.
There was some kind of an error during the system restore process. And when I tried to boot it up again, I kept getting an I/o startup error.
This all happened last night. I went to sleep, hoping that it would somehow fix itself in the morning. It didn't. Figuring that it would be better if I didn't break anything else, I took it to a neighborhood computer repair shop.
It's currently being checked. The shop owner said he'll call me by the end of the day and tell me what the problem was.
There are two big unknowns at this point - whether there's any way to put my field laptop in the working order and whether any of the files are recoverable.
At this point, I'm kind of glad I still have my old laptop more or less working. Most of the Urbis Arcana stuff is, ironically enough, on here, since, even after I switched over the field laptop, I still do a lot of my editing on here.And the ones I didn't edit on this laptop were still posted on this LJ. But there is a lot of journalism stuff on the field laptop, which is completely irreplaceable - articles, some of the notes (when interviewing by phone, I prefer to type notes in), some Urbis Arcana backmatter, the couple of stories I've made some headway in, reference photos, photos I didn't upload on Flickr or Photobucket. And it would be nice not to lose the archive of saved podcast episodes - while some of them can be redownloaded, other podcasts are no longer online, or have taken some of the episodes I downloaded offline.
Everything else is recoverable - one way or another.
I can work off the older, "home" laptop, but it's, at best, a temporary solution. Even with memory uprades, it's still slow, and it's getting to the point where its hardware is really showing its age. It doesn't have much in the way of free disk space, and it isn't really the sort of laptop I can just carry with me everywhere, the way I could the field laptop.
I guess we'll know more about it once the computer repair store owner gets back to me.