New year, new harddisk - you know how it is.
My desktop/workhorse PC is only two and a half years old, but it works hard, and the hard disk was getting more and more errors, and actually,
Evesham were cool about just replacing it, although I had to wait from December 17th till today. But hey.
So, just because I'm list-driven and derive a certain degree of geek pleasure from all this (provided I have trusty technical support, which I do), here's where I'm up to:
spent an hour or so trying to connect to the web, till I discovered that the engineer had left the RJ45 cable unplugged
turned on my Windows firewall
downloaded Windows updates
installed MS Office, OneNote, Visio, ProjectDoodar
downloaded Office updates
downloaded Firefox 1.5
reinstalled all my Firefox settings/tabs etc with MozBackup, which I can't recommend enough - easy to use, and just wow
downloaded Norton from my extended licence (easy to search on Symantec store with email address and last five digits of credit card)
reinstalled BackupDirect, which I also can't recommend highly enough. I pay #20ish a month to do a nightly incremental offsite back up, and it's easy to use, intuitive, and has the most amazing customer service (I happened to have the MD's mobile number, so called him to check where to get the reinstall, and I got a susbequent email and callback to check I was ok. Also, the reinstall prompts you for keys/passwords etc and is dead easy to use)
downloaded all my data (took an hour or so), just my email to go now
downloaded itunes
reinstalled that great del.icio.us toolbar thing for tagging on the run
So, all that's left is:
recreate my fiddly, idiosyncratic IMAP outlook settings, with two mail providers and local archives. This is the thing that stops me getting a "real" job - I have my email just the way I like it
install iTunes, find my music and make everything work again
move all the data to my newly partioned hard drive
install and configure my Palm
configure Norton antivirus
download Adobe acrobat reader, which I'm slightly scared of, because it gave me a hard time in November
check data versions... couple of recent projects have been worked on on my USB drive, as it was all getting ropey
remind BackupDirect to timetable backups
get all the icons on the desktop the way I like them
find that nice 1970s BBC2 screensaver
eat chilli
My expert technical support buddy is worried that he might not be singing for his supper.
So far (touch wood) just not as stressful as I thought it might be...)
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