Computers suck. Official.

I arrived this morning to find a ‘tested for electrical safety’ sticker on my PC. I don’t know how you test for electrical safety but I guess it’s something technical like passing a current through it and touching the sides to see if you get electrocuted.

It looks like it passed, which is a comfort, but it did nasty things to my hard drive and killed my PC.

I spent the next five hours rebuilding it with Leo. Three motherboards, two sets of memory, three graphics cards, two hard drives and and two processors later I gave up and dropped my hard drive into a completely new PC.

No luck.

Five years of documents, contacts, emails, photos, music and work turned into a highly technical, and not-too-pretty paperweight.

I’ve got a backup… somewhere… but it’s a month or so old and where I stowed it for safe keeping… well, that’s anyone’s guess. There’s a lesson to be learned here, of course. Especially as I signed off an email the other day with the words ‘back up, back up, back up’.

The irony of the whole thing is the new PC hasn’t been tested for electrical safety.

It does mean I now have a nice zippy machine. It’s effectively been a downgrade, taking me back to a 900MHz processor, but without all the usual junk on my hard drive it flies along.

I’ve downloaded new copies of OpenOffice, Mozilla and AIM and I have acres of empty hard drive to play with.

I’ve lost the 10GB of ripped music, of course, but it was all completely legit and burnt from my own CDs so that’s easy to replace - one bonus of taking the piracy-free approach to digital music.

So, out of disaster comes opportunities.

The only opportunity I would really rather be able to do without is the chance to rebuild my contact list… from scratch.

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