I got the laptop thereafter known as Beast on 5 September 2009... and while he's not completely dead after four years, he's not well.
He's had some little hiccups over the past couple of months... I'm not sure whether that's because he's pretty much on for most of the day every day, but the other week I had a "blue screen"... not the dreaded Blue Screen of Death, but an unhappy blue screen never-the-less.
And then today the laptop froze and then crashed back to the same blue screen... but when it went to start again there was a message that came up saying "No Drive Detected".
That's really, really not a message you want to see at 2pm on a Monday afternoon. Or, honestly, ever.
I let the appropriate internal testing run it's course, which took at least 45 minutes... one of the longest 45 minutes of my life, at least in recent times. While I was waiting I had a look online via my iPhone and one of the messageboards I found had someone with a similar problem and once they'd let the test run and then turned the machine on and off again it started working again.
So, you know, one of the few times where the old IT department advice of "turn it off, turn it back on again" actually did some good.
But I'm completely terrified that it could just randomly stop working at any second.
Which is why, once I managed to boot Beast back up, I jumped straight in the car and headed off to Officeworks to get a bigger external hard drive. Actually, I tried using the bigger one I already have, but it wouldn't stay connected to the laptop. Possibly because it's been sitting on the shelf doing a whole lot of nothing for a good long while.
And I'd been intending to buy another one anyway, one that doesn't have to be plugged into the power like the old one.
Granted there was a fairly major sense of panic about the whole operation... thankfully they had the right size, the right brand and the right type... and cheaper than I'd seen them anywhere else recently.
I then spent the rest of the afternoon moving files from Beast to the new external drive. The majority of which were my photographs. The entire photo directory had 83.9GB worth of tiles... 127,260 files in fact. And at least 60GB of that were my photos.
I take a hell of a lot of photos.
Thankfully it didn't take the 7 hours it initially told me it was going to take... it still took about two and a half hours just to do the photos... and then just over half an hour to do everything else. Which tells you everything you need to know really.
I'm pretty sure that there's other things on Beast that I haven't found or copied across, but all the stuff that would make me very, very, very sad if I lost is now on the hard drive.
It does look like I'll be shopping for a new laptop in the not too distant future though... thankfully if Beast does fall over completely, I do have my netbook (which definitely has a name, but I can't remember what it is right now) to keep me going in the meantime.
Cross your fingers for me though... I'm not eager to have to start over again with a new laptop, even though all my files are safe now.
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