Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Catharsis
I’ve been writing for catharsis. Thought about sharing, but nah, this is for me. And that’s what a lot of catharsis-writers fail to realize. Have I ever told the story of my high school friend who, when I was home visiting from college, felt it necessary to read aloud from his novel-in-the-making? He had just finished reading The World According to Garp and it showed. His writing was one part faux-Irving, three parts teenage angst. I can still remember my gratitude that we didn’t have a loaded gun in the room.
We finished the computer room today. Our gaming computer had a fried hard drive, so we popped for one that was Newer! Bigger! Better! The repair dude said, “Man, I am SO glad you didn’t trash it, because that is a sweet box.” When a computer geek says “sweet box,” everyone knows he’s talking hardware, and the geek doesn’t even realize he could be talking about something else.
But don’t get me wrong. Geeks rule. We got this box a year or two ago, mostly because Jake and I wanted to be able to work on World of Warcraft quests together. Of course, now we’re bored with WoW (only took us three years!) so the impetus to have two good gaming computers is no longer there. Still, Jake’s “good computer” is getting up there, and the computer I’m using right now is older still — maybe six years old? Karen would know. Old. About 100 in computer years. It boots up like a 286. So old that when you put a CD in, out comes a poof! of dust.
And yet it’s MY computer and it has tons of MY stuff on it, including stuff I can’t back up. Paint Shop Pro, for example. It was shareware, once upon a time, and then I began buying the upgrades. You can forget about original disks. They don’t exist. And now I’m stuck. If I switch to another computer, I’ll have to buy all new software.
There really ought to be a thing where you stick one end of a cable into one computer and the other end of the cable into the other computer, and you hit a button that says “Clone A to B” and it turns Computer B into a carbon copy of Computer A. And then everyone would whine about how they screwed up and meant to turn A into B, not B into A, and now they’re ruined! And everyone else would snicker knowingly and say, sotto voce, “Noob.”
Not that I would ever make an error like that. You know why?
I’d make Karen do it.
D.
You mean like a Crossbox?
Will a Crossbox transfer programs, too, or just data files?
When I got my desktop mac, I hooked a firewire cable onto my MacBook, stuck the other end of the cable into the new mac, and a little box popped up asking me if I wanted a file transfer and if so how much of one.
Send it all! I said. And it made a folder on my desktop with EVERYTHING that was on my laptop. Everything. A full copy of my hard drive. When I need something, it’s right there. I don’t even need to remember passwords, preferences or product codes. Yeah, it took me a couple of hours to get things like my music files shifted to the right place, but it’s been great knowing I don’t have to re-install my old Photoshop that I haven’t upgraded since 2001 or download all of my album cover art again.
Surely PC has something similar. Somewhere.
ever think she wanted u to make her do it – they rule lol
Apparently just data files. The box says it’s not recommended for transferring programs.
Then again, who believes what the box says?
Then again, I’ve never tried it.
At least, not on a PC. Well, I haven’t tried a Crossbox on a Mac either, but I don’t think it would work on a Mac. Of course, we don’t need one, because we’ve been able to do all sorts of things PC users only dream of. 😉
Norton Ghost will copy an entire hard disk. I bought a usb hard drive and used it to create an exact replica of my main drive. If the old one goes pop, in theory I can plug the new one in its place and be right back where I was. You could do that and still run your paint shop pro etc off the usb external drive.
I used a partial backup not so long back when I picked up a dodgy virus. What took me two weeks to get the computer ‘as was’ before Ghost took me two hours.