Jinxed

The only possible explanation left is that I was a very, very bad person in a former life. I hope I had a good time practicing my particular brand of evil, because I ain't now.

It would appear that the motherboard on my general office machine (the Athlon 700) has given up the ghost. This is quite distressing, although to be honest it doesn't owe me anything as it's taken an absolute pounding for the five short years of it's life. It's not worth fixing now and I guess it would be hard to find a new motherboard and processor to drop into the case anyway.

Current plan is to get the spare Compaq 1Ghz PIII up on it's feet but I'll need to get a CD from work containing all the drivers etc. Then purchase a cheap hard drive caddy to mount and strip the data from the two hard drives from the Athlon. I'll then use this caddy and one of the hard drives as backup equipment. I really need to copy my iTunes database as I certainly don't want to have to go through the task of ripping 359 (latest scores on the door) CDs again. The iTunes MP3 database is stored on the Beast and weighs in at 27Gb with more to come. All in all I probably have about 60Gb of data that I need to permanently backup. I have a loan of an external DVD writer at the moment from work so I may also buy a wad of discs and burn the data to that (I like the idea of having something physical). This is most depressing or maybe it's a sign that I need to purchase the Mac mini and be done with it, hmmmm....

Added to this latest disaster and my brief woes with the wireless router blowing up (my fault, but all fixed now) was the death of our Freeview box in the bedroom. As I settled down to watch something a couple of weeks ago up popped a message saying there was an update available to the firmware and would I like to download and install. So I said yes and off it went downloading the update through the aerial, unfortunately after the automatic install the box never came back to life. Much shouting and swearing ensued (but, strangely, it still didn't work). Next day Lesley phoned up the supplier and told them it was broke so they agreed to send out a new replacement and when it arrived we were to put the broken one in the box and return, no problem. To cut a long story short, the new box arrived, and after installing I realised what the problem was with the old one. We use an ancient TV in the bedroom where the Freeview box is used and it doesn't have any SCARTS. After the update had downloaded it reset the stored settings which consequently meant it would only work through a TV SCART socket. I reset it using the new TV in the sun lounge and all was well again once retuned to the old TV. A happy ending after two weeks with no Freeview..

Category:

• Technology
• Computer