Saturday, April 30, 2005

I Never Thought It Would Happen To Me

No, this is not a letter to Penthouse Forum. I haven't had too much trouble with my computer in the past. The last 24 hours or so have made a bit of difference to that fact. Actually, it has been going on for a bit longer than that.

Over about the last week there has been the occasional "Operating System not found" message generated. I thought that it may have been my wife, as she can be a bit of a jinx around technology, but it wasn't the case.

Last night the computer just wouldn't start and I was greeted with this message every time I tried. I pulled things out of my computer last night that I have never done before. After trying to boot from a CD and being told that XP didn't exist and that I had no hard disk drives, I spent some time swapping power cables, parallel cables and hard disk drives, and came to the realisation that my HDD with the operating system installed had died. Oh shit. Oh big shit.

I believe that I have a six year warranty on the parts of my computer and pulled out my receipt. Yes, I am the type of bloke to keep that sort of thing. No technical support from Gateway on the weekend.

I checked the newspaper for some HDD prices and rang a mate at Austin Computers but found that he works for another branch across town now. Bought an 80GB HDD for A$75, cheap enough I thought to get me out of trouble. Considering I bought an 80GB HDD from Austins a couple of years ago for A$201 it didn't hurt so much this time around.

Installed it, put XP back on, installed many of my programs again and I am back in business. I guess that I didn't lose too much on the drive as I had moved most of the files I wanted to keep and it was mainly OS files. I guess I have a clean install now and not so many unused application files. Good opportunity to get the latest versions of the applications that I use anyway. I am grateful that I have had my computer for so long before something like this has happened.

4 comments:

NewYorkMoments said...

Hammy,

I'm hoping you could help me out with a bit of trivia:

Since Australia was colonized by British convicts, why is it that that Aussie currency is A$ and not pounds???

I'm waiting at the edge of my chair for some enlightenment.

Thanks!

Hammy said...

We Aussies could say the same for you Americans.

Australia used the British pound until Valentine's Day in 1966 when we switched to decimal currency and the metric system. Old people still talk about how many quid something used to cost. Actually, instead of talking about litres/100 km I would rather use miles per gallon for my car's fuel economy.

In the early days of Australia's white settlement rum was usable as currency. I'm not sure when we changed to the Imperial System exactly.

Not all of the settlers to Australia were convicts. My family came out for the gold rush - obviously nobody made it rich as I am not exactly living in the lap of luxury. Many wealthy Brits came to Australia to get land - something that was difficult to do in England.

Hammy said...

The Australian Dollar, which used to be worth three American Dollars and is now languishing around the 76 cent mark, is also known as "the little Aussie battler", with good reason.

It only took 65 years following Federation of Australia for us to get our own currency. Our own identity can't be too far away.

NewYorkMoments said...

Thanks for the info, Hammy.

The group who came over on the Mayflower were even worse than brutal criminals, they were religious zealots! Thank God there's not a drop of mayflower blood in my veins.