It’s human nature to not truly appreciate the value of something until we’re denied either in part or in full it’s presence in our lives. The last couple of weeks, I’ve been learning that about my computer. It is easy to be complacent about the use of it, the instant access it gives me to the internet and the data I store on it. I could even say I was somewhat smug about the fact that I had a desktop sitting idle while I used my laptop as my primary system. I wouldn’t be without my computer, one way or the other.

A couple of weeks ago, my laptop’s hard drive decided that I had apparently overworked it long enough and it started crashing. The sudden appearance of a whine coming from the drive was my major clue that it was dying. Thankfully, about a year ago, I bought a rather large external hard drive to store older files on. I hadn’t transferred older files in a while but there it sat. Read the rest of this entry »