My Computer Gave Up the Ghost

Last Monday morning I opened my laptop and pressed the on key, nothing happened. I checked the charge light, which showed that it had a full charge. I tried everything I could think of to get the computer to start up. Nothing worked. So, fearing that I had a major problem, I took my computer to the on-campus computer help desk, which is really an office. All other offices on campus require their employees to wear a collared shirt and tie. Not this office. They come as the are. But it seems like these guys know their stuff, so I didn't care. I waited for quite a while that first day that I came in before I was able to be seen by one of the employees. He took the laptop and started messing with it. After a few preliminary tests, it became clear that the laptop was dead.

That is never good news. But I tried to take in in stride. He then proceeded to take the back panel off. He was then able to pull out the hard drive and plug the drive into an external drive reader that tested the drive to see if it was still good. It was. Thank you Heavenly Father. There are some very important music files on the computer that I would be very sad to lose.

Following reassembly, I left the office with the sad knowledge that I was in need of a new computer. Sad? I guess not really in and of it's self. But sad because a new computer is not in the budget. The idea of a new, faster computer probably never gave any normal person heartburn.

The options in Rexburg are pretty limited... to say the least. Fortunately I was already planning on a trip to Salt Lake that same weekend. Lots more options there. Spend several hours visiting stores, looking up online pricing and reviews of models that I was looking at, and visited four locations to browse their catalog. After pondering options, budget, and what I wanted, we returned to Best Buy and bought my new laptop. I am very happy with it. It has a ten inch screen, which detaches as a tablet, and runs very fast. The only thing that was a disappointment was that it had fairly limited on board storage. External hard drive. Problem solved.

Now I am sitting in the computer help "desk" again. I have been here for about three hours now. What am I doing? I am copying the files from my old hard drive to my new hard drive. Estimated time remaining to copy the rest of my music: 2 hours. Maybe I have too much music... Nah. Nearly 14,000 songs for a total of 44.55 GB of information in my music folder. Not bad. There has got to be a faster way to move files than this. Compounding my frustration with how long it is taking is the fact that the tech guy felt that the Mac would be the easier, faster option... I am not so sure. Blame the Mac. It's pretty much always safe to blame the Mac. Right now there are 5500 files left to transfer over. The file count is descending at a rate of about one file per second. Do the math... 1.5 hours remaining. I wish I had homework to do while I sit here...


Don't forget your daily dose of Music!