Reformat

A geek post . . .

I have been intending to reformat my desktop for about a year. It just gets harder and harder, though, because I bought the system in 2004. So the system restore brings me back to 2004 and I spend a weekend updating it. But it became necessary.

I had restarted the computer and was informed that some system file was missing or corrupt. It was quite a dark feeling for about two hours because I had not backed up my pictures, music, and such for a few months. With my (scratched) system restore DVD, though, I managed to get in and get a prompt. The fixboot command looked good and that must have worked, because I was able to get in upon restart to backup all my crap.

Did I mention that my DVD was not only scratched, but the DVD drive is about to die? It makes really loud noises and seems to go slower than it should (can't watch movies on it anymore). Despite this obvious difficulty, I popped in the system restore DVD and reformatted the muther. Slow and noisy, it managed to reinstall everything. Literally about 100 Windows Updates later, I'm up and running better than ever. Or at least as good as in 2004.

While doing all this, I kept thinking about a long term solution. There has to be something better than my 2004 PC, right? After all, I'm on video card 2.5 (replaced the fan on the first one, then the first one went out . . .and now this one's fan is about to need replacement). The only CD/DVD drive is shot. The hard drive is hanging in there, but does a lot of work and could go out any day (I use the computer as a DVR to record tv shows and watch them later). Time for a new computer! Except I couldn't find anything better. But that will be the subject of a future post.