Crashed!!

Posted on November 11, 2011

For those who are keeping up with what’s going on, my main laptop suddenly locked up on Friday, November 4th.  I happened to be cleaning out and sorting my inbox at the time, and was on an email dated October 12th when it happened. My mouse pointer would move, but suddenly wouldn’t activate anything, and none of the keyboard keys would work! All I could do was unplug it and pull the battery to shut it down. When I rebooted, and went back into my email, I discovered that all of my inbox from October 12th forward, had disappeared into Cyberspace!

After doing all kinds of diagnostics, including running several new programs of malware and spyware detection (suggested by my IT person, (this on TOP of the McAfee Internet Suite that I already run) and also trying a system “restore” back to an earlier time, we have come to the conclusion that something in the processor has failed. It doesn’t act like a hard drive problem, as it still boots up OK, and sometimes will run for as much as two hours… and then suddenly will lock up again! I have always used one of those tilted mesh-screen platforms to set it on, so that it can breathe easier, so heat buildup doesn’t seem to be an issue.

The only thing I haven’t tried is reloading the entire Windows XP program, but I’m not sure I can keep it on long enough! In the meantime, while it was on, I made sure I backed everything up to both an external hard drive, and I also use Carbonite, which I highly recommend to EVERYONE!

I have heard the excuse that their external hard drive back up is good enough.  NO IT ISN’T!  What happens if your house gets blown away by a tornado, or burns down? What happens if someone breaks into your house and steals both your computer AND your hard drive? What happens if you have everything in your car, and someone steals it all… possibly including your car? YOU’RE SCREWED!

For a measly $59 a YEAR, it’s very cheap insurance to have EVERYTHING (including emails) backed up to a storage facility that no storm, flood, tornado, fire, or thief can get their hands on!  Even if you back up your files manually, you can’t possibly remember to do it every single time, or to back up everything that you should be backing up. With Carbonite (dotcom) you don’t have to worry about it! It backs up everything automatically, in the background, in between your own keystrokes, when you aren’t using your computer for other things. Therefore, it won’t slow it down!

So how does this relate to RV’ing, camping, or minivan campers? Think about it… if you have a computer with you, the odds of having something catastrophic happen to it are far greater than when it’s at home! We had one slide off a dinette seat while going down the road one time, because we forgot to move it. It landed upside down and jarred and destroyed the “read” head on the disk. That was in the B.C. days… before Carbonite! In your case, your car or RV could be flooded, involved in an accident, broken into, catch on fire, be blown away, or any number of other things! Then what good is a physical on-site back-up going to do you?

Even with all that, I am temporarily at a “slow-down”. I am on my wife’s laptop right now, and I don’t want to load it up with all the stuff that I had on mine. I can access certain things from my external hard drive, but it’s not like having them on my own computer.

Speaking of my own computer, I have since ordered a brand new full-sized laptop with a 2-gig RAM and a 500-gig hard drive, and all the bells and whistles that I will need as I move forward to do more videos and photo work for the CCRV site and blog. The bad news is, it may not be here until the 22nd (hopefully sooner) (fingers crossed), which is going to severely limit my progress until then, and even after that, it will take me another couple of days to get everything back to normal again. Since it will have Windows 7, instead of XP, there is also going to be a certain learning curve with it. And that is even considering the convenience of being able to load nearly everything back on it, through Carbonite.

Everything takes time, even when it’s convenient.

Meanwhile, the rain fly / privacy cover for the TailVeil has arrived, but I won’t unpack it until I get things back to normal again. I want to do a video (and photos) to show how it arrives, and what has to be done to use it.

The guy who is going to take our garage sale leftovers is supposed to return from Hawaii on the 12th (tomorrow). And then it will be Monday or Tuesday (his normal pick-up days when his store is closed) before he can come get the stuff.  So soon after that, we should be able to clear out the garage and start working on the reclining couch/bed for the minivan.

But at the moment, I don’t even have access to my subscriber list addresses, so please, if you know someone else who is on the list, refer them to the blog for updates. As soon as I can import the Outlook Express files to the new computer, I should be able to send updates again.

I thank you all for your patience!