The Trials and Tribulations of Upgrading Computers

           Taken from an email from Graham Raven

.......... "look, what's the worst that can happen?" said Mike "I
swapped a hard drive in class at college, dropped it on the floor,
kicked it against the wall, put it back in a machine and it still
worked!" (honest?)

My old machine wasn't up to handling Dark Basic you see, and as
that's - fingers crossed - my chosen programming language to be, I
had a wee problem. Then Mike had this brill idea of upgrading his
old machine, for me, on the cheap like!

I should have known of course, 'twas an omen! I should have made
due sacrifice to the god of computers - read a whole chapter of
'How to program in VB5' (without my glasses maybe) or surfed the
internet for two whole days without sleep. The computer demons
sniggered, unseen amongst the chips and circuits. I forced a

smile, it would be all right, sure it would be all right (fingers
crossed, grin brightly!)

My old computer, name of Lucifer (!), was dismantled by Mike who
stripped away several bits and bobs and inserted them into his old
machine. Mike's old computer was transformed, a 133 became a 233
with added memory and two hard drives!

You can feel it can't you? The shiver of Impending doom!

All went well seemingly, until we actually tried to read from my
old hard drive, my beloved old hard drive ex-Lucifer, my old hard
drive with oooooooodles of Word documents, images, programs, etc,
etc, etc. on it. (all of which were fully backed up? Hmmm?
erm....)

"There seems to be a problem," announces the computer, "Would you
like me to fix it?"

Hmm, (I say with a rapidly fading nervous smile), yeah, fix it.

"Oh!" says the computer "There seems to be several problems.  Do
you want me to fix them?" The blood rapidly left my face and I was
already feeling weak at the knees. "Get on with it!" I muttered
through what were now gritted teeth.

"Oh (expletive deleted)" said the computer "there seems to be 30
or 40 problems, etc, do you want me ...?" (or words to that
effect)

We told it to sort them out, a process which was seeming to take
an eternity. I was actually considering cutting my throat (well,
formatting the hard drive) when the blessed machine made for a
dramatic climax before putting me out of my misery

"Er, you've got 99,000 bad sectors" it said, give or take a couple
of hundred - and then it went very quiet!

Drive D had ceased to be, it was an ex-drive. Its contents were
nil.  There was 1.3 gigs of this 'nil' in there somewhere, but
there was nothing there all the same! (apparently!) We formatted
the deceased drive, but it seems that it was suddenly so sick that
it was beyond repair, fit only for a paper weight (or kicking
against the wall!).

Thankfully, the customer files and all my work on my RPG game
(years of work!) had been backed up in triplicate!

Now I've got Mikes old, re-vamped computer and very nice it is
too. It now has just one hard drive of course, and I've got a lot
of work to do replacing all the lost info, letters, etc., which I
used to have. This isn't entirely bad I must say, I'd wanted the
'crap' deleting from my hard drive for a long time but haven't
known just what I could, and couldn't delete. That problem has
been solved now and I've got a clean slate to start with, but it
hasn't helped my correspondence one little bit!

@~Has anyone else got a computer 'tale of woe' to tell? If so,
@~please send it in!
                              - o -