h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

One of modern life's scarier moments:

DO YOU WANT TO PERMANENTLY AND IRREVOCABLY ERASE ALL THE DATA ON THIS DISC? ONCE STARTED THIS PROCESS CANNOT BE STOPPED [Y/N]

Did I back everything up? I'm sure I backed everything up. Documents, pictures, music, videos, Firefox settings, bookmarks and history, took screenshots so I can set things up again the way they were...

*Gulp* [Y]

I did back everything up, didn't I?

A question that makes everyone suffer from OCD.

Without wishing to get all TMI, certain nameless parts of me tightened audibly when I pressed the button.

Runtime: 00:52:09
Time remaining: 05:52:06

Maybe I should have started this earlier in the day

I'll go all TMI.

I used to play pool (8 ball) with some folks and the wife had a wonderfully rude term for how her husband's often outrageous antics would affect her.

She would say, "Billy, sometimes you make my butt wanna suck a lemon!"

Runtime: 01:10:39
Time remaining: 06:59:16

For every 15 seconds the time remaining goes down, it then goes up by 45. Definitely should have started this earlier. A whole lot earlier, like at the Big Bang if that's how it's going to continue.

I think it might have been verifying the first pass.

Time remaining: 04:03:38

haven't we had this discussion before? I mean about your computer telling you how long something will take.

If you want to know how long it will take - the real time - the computer will spend so much time processing that calculation that it would take much much longer because the processing power has been diverted.

Or something like that. I think it could have been Pastey who said it?

That must have Pastey - I don't remember that. That wouldn't have applied in this case anyway.

Any road up. It all went smoothly, until I remembered that once I've got the operating system reinstalled I need the drivers for the motherboard's soundcard and ethernet, and the video card's drivers. Were they in the box where I keep all my driver/installer discs? Were they buggery. I've got the discs for my old video card, plus a heap of hardware I'll never use again, but not the two I need.

I managed to download the drivers for the sound and ethernet using the laptop, but I've yet to find the video drivers so I have a pretty crappy looking monitor right now. I've also got about 90 Windows updates to install

But the biggest problem I kept coming up against last night was with Zone Alarm. When I installed it and restarted the PC, the monitor went blank after I'd signed in, all except for the arrow cursor. And yet it worked fine in safe mode. I uninstalled and reinstalled ZA twice more, same result, so right now I'm running on the Windows firewall, but I have to get ZA up and running somehow - I want that control over which programmes are allowed to access the internet. Perhaps it'll work after I've installed the video drivers. Or the Windows updates.

Found the installation discs The drivers I've already downloaded for sound, video and ethernet are probably more recent than the ones on the discs, although I'm still not getting the aero glass display. I'm not sure what's going on there.

Gosh once you up and running again look at https://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
found it usefull myself

http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/
works better without the "s" http

Interesting.

Experiencing a Windows or hardware crash doesn't worry me anything as much as it used to, and it hasn't happened for years anyway, apart from the odd hard drive failure, and that only happened inside a RAID setup so I didn't lose any data - just shoved a new drive in and waited (and waited, and waited) for it to rebuild. 99% of my data is on external drives, and that's all backed up in the RAID box.

I built the PC myself and started with a clean slate. Ive got it just the way I like it, not the way a PC manufacture thinks I should have it, and with none of their bloatware. This time though, I had to upgrade from Win 7 Home to Win 7 Pro because, and non-s can walk away now, Home doesn't recognise dynamic discs. A RAID system is dynamic, and even though Home had no problem with it when I was putting it together, and until the drive failed, after it had rebuilt itself the PC couldn't see it, except in the disc manager, and I couldn't get into it.

I haven't switched it on yet, so fingers crossed. There's already more than a terabyte of data on it, out of eight terabytes of capacity.

And the first PC I ever owned had a 4GB drive If personal transport had improved the way that computers have since the beginning of the century...

WE'D ALL HAVE OUT FLYING CAR BY NOW!!!

Incidentally, I must once again sing the praises of MozBackup It's so comforting to know that when you reinstall you can easily and painlessly get your old Firefox back in a trice, with all settings, cookies, bookmarks, history, add-ons etc just the way they were before

Also incidentally, it's interesting how Firefox's spellchecker is unfamiliar with so many current words, such as Firefox, Google, spellchecker and download, yet has no problem with an archaic and very nearly obsolete word such as trice.

Also also incidentally, you do know I meant OUR, and not OUT, don't you.