drcpunk

We have a new computer on order, and we are trying to fix the hole in the bucket. That is, we are trying to back up a laptop that refuses to connect to the net, a usb hard drive, or a usb card reader, or to read a card in its card slot.

The good news: Except for the music, my files are backed up on various cards and flash drives.

One might wonder why this stuff wasn't all backed up before. Well, the music and programs were, except that then my laptop wasn't working well with the old external hard drive, so I tried to reformat it. Only after this failed several times did it dawn on me that maybe it was the laptop, not the hard drive, at fault. I am thinking I had a decent backup of all but recent data (and I have the recent data), and I foobared it.

I did a back up to cards and flash drives, but did not have enough space to get all the music, let alone the programs. mnemex points out that I am probably better not backing up the programs, but reinstalling them from scratch, given that we're not quite sure what gives.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Date: 2008-10-29 06:25 am (UTC)

From:

jl8e

no subject

What computer did you decide on?

Wasn't it still speaking to the Ethernet last week? If so, you can probably file-share the rest of your files to another machine.

And yeah, from everything I know about Windows software, you want to reinstall from scratch. They splatter files all over the place, plus registry entries. A straight copy is unlikely to work.

Date: 2008-10-29 02:15 pm (UTC)

drcpunk.livejournal.com

We did eventually manage a file share. The computer was talking to the Internet at the beginning of last week, but then stopped. When

ebartley came over on Monday of this week, it was no longer playing music, or at least, no longer working and playing well with headphones. Yesterday, it stopped working and playing well with flash drives and usb cards, and usb connections in general.

My initial idea was to get an Asus r1fa1 tablet.

mnemex agreed that this was better than having Dell build a laptop. Then, he looked around and suggested a Lenovo. After more looking around, he found several Toshiba tablets that might fit my specs. I thought that the best was the M700-57005X. But then, we found the Asus r1e c1, which seemed better. I'm not quite ready to jump to a Mac.