Tech Woes

This has been a tragic week for me and my machinery. A worst case disaster kind of week - my main computer died the death. There I was, innocently finishing Wordle the other day, and when I did, I tried to click off to a different page and Chrome starting spinning. Then it stopped responding - anything. The mouse would not click; I could not even force quit. I finally turned the machine off and on - and got a ? for a disk icon. Not good. I ran a disk repair, and got it to reboot - but Chrome launched automatically, and more or less immediately froze again. Another restart, more disk repairing - I even tried reinstalling the system - no go. An error, hardware it would seem. There is no getting around it - the disk on my rather ancient Mac mini has given up the ghost.

It has been a bad year for me and technology. I already had to replace my iPad, then the receiver I had attached to the TV - now this. Not to mention fixing the screen on my laptop. And just adding insult to injury (though this might in fact be the real injury here, other than to my wallet), I do not have a backup since last January - though I am pretty sure I did an interim backup over the summer. Except - note the theme of this post - the disk I think I did it on won't mount. Good times!

I will try not to dwell on the fact that everything I did this year on the computer is gone. There are some lessons to be learned - the obvious one being, back up, back up regularly, and don't be afraid of redundancy. The other lesson - the one that is about to cause my poor credit card to grown under the strain - is more mixed. The fact is that mini served me very well, for a very long time - 11 years basically. It has grown troublesome in the last couple years, mostly due to trying to get new software to run on it - but though that has been a nuisance, the machine kept on going. What I mainly use - surfing the web and writing - have been as good as ever. Why change? Until the thing dies and you have to replace it. (This complaint probably applies to the iPad and receiver as well - the iPad was ancient, though it didn't die alone, it required gravity and a heavy object landing on it. The receiver was old, a cast off from a friend - who replaced it with another cast off. This does not apply to the laptop, which is less than 2 years old.)

Replacing this machine is going to be a pain. The money is annoying, but not terrible, and I was angling toward buying something new anyway. It is a pain because of the stuff I use with the old machine, that I will have to get working on this one. It is all old - mostly USB - which is no longer part of the basic Mac. So to use the keyboard, mouse, camera, external storage, even external CD drive I have - I need to get a pile of adaptors. Nice. When I upgraded my laptop a couple years ago, I went through the same thing - adaptors and so on to connect monitors and thumb drives and keyboards and the likes - that was less annoying since that is a secondary machine. Though of course the adaptors I bought are not the ones I need for the new machine. Knew that was coming.

All right. I am not going to belabor this. I will pay the piper, find the right connections, get what data I can find back on the thing, and move on. I will probably have somewhere sleepless nights thinking about it - and might even come back in here to opine on the state of computer technology today (mostly about its increasing fragility - try to imagine the equivalent in 100 years of finding a shoebox full of old photographs in the closet) - but you deal. But boy, that's a lot of dealing in one year.