dad PC

I've made a bit of a potential minor catastrophic blunder.

Well, actually I've made a series of relatively small blunder that have combined and could give me some fairly serious problems.

I should start at the beginning.

My dad currently uses my sister's old desktop PC.  It's very old - I built it for her more than a decade ago, and it was only mid-spec when it was built.  It's therefore getting quite creaky - particularly as my dad is a bit of a one for installing random bits of software and doesn't know how to optimise the system.

So, for example, his penchant for saying yes to installs he doesn't actually want/need/know what they are means he has to have the virus checker doing constant scan and that of course uses up a good chunk of the available resources (virus software seems to be quite prone to becoming bloat-ware under the assumption that everyone is running the latest-spec equipment), slowing it down further.

He's also been getting into digital photography and so wants a system that could handle processing and manipulating big digital photographs.  He therefore asked me a while back about getting a new machine and I recommended either buying one from PC world (or similar) if he wanted a cheap route to upgrade or me building one if he had a bit more cash as I could build one with specs that would help him, rather than lots of rubbish he didn't need that you get if you spend a lot of money in such places.

He agreed and went with a budget of £1,000.  I then put together some suggestions and we refined it and it came in at about the right budget.  It was a bit of a beast of a system in terms of processor, ram and hard-drive, but nothing special for the graphics, case and other bits (he's already using a bigger monitor, so he's keeping that, and we're also re-using his DVD burner - both are recent additions to the old machine so aren't that old, but also he doesn't need anything more).

Anyway, that was all fine and good, but I had a bit of an issue with timing, but also with finances, so he transferred the money, but I didn't have the time to buy stuff, plus some of it wasn't in stock at the time.  However, I did something particularly dumb with the money too.

I prefer to use credit cards online for the additional protection they give, but instead of putting all the money onto one card and therefore freeing up an appropriate slot, I spread it across multiple cards.  Why the hell I did this looking back I don't know - it means multiple orders and therefore multiple postage, so will cost me more.

Also, rather annoyingly, I've now come to buy the bits and the price of every single bit has gone up slightly.  Not a lot - a few pounds, or tens of pounds- but enough to give me some additional issues.

It also doesn't help that I didn't really think sensibly about my car tax and insurance: I should have done 6 months instead of 12 for the car tax and split the insurance into monthly payments - both would have cost more in the long term, but wouldn't have taken big chunks out of my cash reserves.  The stag do also cost a lot more money than I thought it would - I haven't added it up, but it was at least £500, all of which had to be paid in cash as it was all paid for by the best man and then re-paid by us: I couldn't book anything individually, which I could have put on a card and therefore given myself some free-space for my Dad's PC.

The upshot of all this is that I now have an annoying situation where I am going to have to pay more for my Dad's PC than he has paid me, but I can't go back to him with the above problems because he's under the impression I've already bought it all.  What I might do is make a substitution - there are one or two bits that I picked as slightly better than he needs (the GFX card in particular) in order to make the budget up so I may go cheaper so it cancels out the additional cost.  Not 100% honest, but he will never play a game on it so he doesn't need anything with any grunt.

mini heat wave

So we seemed to have a mini heat wave while I was taking my long weekend.

It was nice that it didn't rain on me, but the heat made it a bit unpleasant.  It was actually another case of my classic comment on British weather that it comes with exclamation points.  I mean the change was so sudden that it was quite a shock.

I have to say I found the whole weather extremely nostalgic.

It was, to coin a phrase, just like the weather we seemed to have when I was a kid.  Well, no, actually, not when I was a kid proper, but when I was a teenager.  My recollection of my teenage years (around the GCSE and A-level kind of time) was that the weather during the summer was constantly like how it was this last weekend - hot and cloudless during the day and not really properly easing off during the night.

I don't know if that's really an accurate reflection of how the weather actually was, but it's how I remember it.  I remember days of going around friends' houses and having barbecues and lazing about and then smoking pot and getting drunk in the evening.

This weather was so reminiscent of that period, particularly as the smell of barbecue was filling the air when I went out for my walks around the estate.

As for other stuff I did it was all pretty unexciting.

I gave the car a thorough clean, including giving it a polish.  Usually when I do these mega cleans I find them quite tiring because I do everything and so it take hours, but I also end up using muscles I don't normally use much so I then have several days of aches and pains.

This time I didn't find the doing as tiring, but the after-ache was really bad.

I also decided to do a load of backing up.  In the end I did my hard-drive based back-up routine, but didn't get the time to also burn the DVDs I usually do as well.  I like to be thoroughly backed-up having had several bad experiences of drives crapping out and taking everything with them.

I'll probably look at burning the DVDs this next bank holiday weekend, though I am currently anticipating I will actually have to work part of the weekend.  This isn't so much because I have too much to do it's more because the timing of things other people are doing mean it just won't be finished in time for me to do anything prior to the weekend.

I decided to do the back-up because I actually had a bit of a worrying moment the other week when I plug one of my drives in and it came up as if it was a new disk and asked me to format it.  In the end I got around it, though the drive ran incredibly slowly.  However, I think looking back on it it was because I used a USB3.0 slot that the motherboard has and I never installed the proper drivers for those slots because I don't have any USB 3.0 peripherals, so it ran at the default USB 1.0 speed.

At least I hope it was that - if not, I've backed it up anyway.

back up

Before I went away I did a bit of a back-up.

I've got some USB hard drives I use for backing up everything.  This can take ages to do, as I've the best part of a terabyte of stuff to back up.  In all honest, I therefore tend to do an incremental back-up on some of it.

For most I delete the old backups and redo the whole lot, but for other folders where I know I've not changed anything I keep them as is.  If I've only done a few small changes I try to identify where they are and transfer those over.

I've come to this process after some real horrendous backups in the past.  My machines are obviously quicker nowadays, so that helps, but previously it has taken days to copy things across when I've just done the whole lot.  This time it took about half a day, most of which was just setting it going.

I also tend to use my laptop nowadays, so it doesn't tie up my main machines.  I can do this because I use a single large hard drive to store most of my stuff on.  I do have stuff on hard drives on my machines, but every week I ensure I move or back-up everything to the remote HDD.

I also try to keep a secondary back-up of the important things on CD & DVD.  Mostly this is things like scans, but there's some other stuff on there too.  This was the part of the process I didn't manage to do during my last holiday.  I will, however, make sure to do a full back-up at Christmas.

Indeed, I may well do a refresh of my back-ups on CD & DVD.  recordable CDs & DVD apparently have a lifetime on them of about six years or so.  I don't think I've ever had any actually degrade, but after I heard this I decided to redo the back-ups every so often, as loosing the content would be a disaster.

Also, because recordable media is so cheap and easy to get nowadays it's hardly a massive cost.

Backing stuff up is really important.  I've lost loads of stuff before because I didn't have proper backups.

My dad also recently learned this lesson as he lost almost all the pictures he had taken as part of his trip to the Canadian Grand Prix.  He basically transferred the stuff to his computer and then deleted it from the camera memory card.  He then was trying to process the pictures and (I really don't know why) was using the recycle bin as kind of storage area.

There's loads of errors there:

• he'd deleted the version on the memory card (!)
• he was working on the versions he'd transferred to the machine, instead of making copies and working on those
• he was using the recycle bin as a temp folder (!)
• he hadn't made and sort of back-up

To be fair I hadn't gotten him fully set up to do back-ups yet, but then why was he forging ahead with fiddling about with stuff until I had?

Of course they say you only really learn some lessons after you've had the disaster, and I think he's learned his lesson.