the return

So I'm back from my holiday.

It was a really good break and I have to confess I wish it had been longer. I also really wish I'd been able to take it all as a holiday, rather than have all the bollocks associated with my room being (partially) redecorated and the shed-based antics.

The holiday itself started with a weekend trip to my Dad's. I'd bought a new monitor for him and so stuff for him to do backups and in theory those are two very simple things, but in practice they turned out to be horrible.

First off, the monitor resolution wasn't available in the graphics card drivers thing, which was bizarre. I therefore decided to download a new set of drivers and install them. That worked okay, except I tried to be too clever. This too-cleverness took the form of trying to uninstall the old drivers first, and unfortunately I uninstalled the LAN and audio drivers by accident.

How I did this I don't know - all I can think is because they were both made by ATI, I clicked on the wrong thing in the list, but I was sure I clicked on the graphics drivers. Anyway, no panic, right? I could just reinstall them from disk.

Except it didn't work - the LAN drivers seemed to install, but the machine couldn't connect to the internet. This took ages with me faffing around, even to the extent of me getting my laptop out the car and testing the connection (it was fine) and downloading a new set of drivers. Those didn't work either.

Anyway, overnight I actually remembered that I'd had the same problem before with this machine and when I uninstalled the drivers and manually installed them, rather than relying on the automatic thing, it worked fine. I guess the automatic installer must put them in the wrong place or something?

Anyway, all that faffing took hours, which did nothing to help my Dad's PC-phobia, but eventually the monitor was installed.

The next task was the back-up and we ran into even more problems. Basically, I'd bought him an external hard drive and a new DVD-burner. The idea was that he can use both to make absolutely sure he doesn't accidentally delete stuff.

Only he'd managed to pre-empt my caution by fucking up massively and deleting almost all of the photos from his trip to the Canadian Grand Prix earlier in the year. He'd even removed them from his camera's memory card, even though he had plenty of room left on it.

Well done that man.

Anyway, there were some left, so I thought I'd show him the quick and easy process of using the HDD to back-up. Only it kept failing. Some of the photos wouldn't transfer across and what's more it was totally random - it wasn't the biggest ones or all the ones from one folder or anything like that.

So that took even more hours of head scratching and searching the web to try and diagnose the problem.

In the end I got so frustrated I switched from my Dad's account to my own and tried to transfer the files. Guess what - absolutely no problems and they all transferred over in about 5 minutes.

So basically he's probably installed something that's causing the problem, but what it is I don't know.

And then there was the DVD burner. We had to buy some burner software at PC world, so I also took the opportunity to show him file recovery software and also card readers as he's indicated he wants to buy separate cards for trips and I had to try and explain how different cameras take different cards.

Anyway, that's when he dropped a bit of a bombshell that it's probably a bit inappropriate for me to discuss here. The basic upshot was that me running the file recovery software wasn't going to be an option, so I left it with him. To be frank, my experience of these things is that they take ages anyway, so I'm not sure I would have wanted to do it anyway.

So yeah, what should have been some nice simple jobs took bloody age and weren't much fun.

And I've gone on a hell of a long time already, so more later.