Does not compute

Well, that was a fun weekend. The computer I have at home has been making a terrible noise for some time (imagine the old tone you used to get when the TV stations shut down in the evening), and I thought it was time I did something about it. Now when a computer makes a whining noise it can be one of two things: the cooling fans (which are easy to fix and cheap to replace) or the hard drive (which is impossible to fix and still reasonably expansive to replace). Naturally this is me we’re talking about, so I realised after a bit of poking about inside the tower that it was time for a new hard drive.

I looked it all up on the Internet and discovered that it was quite easy. What I had to do, according to those diagrams which make everything from changing a battery to changing someone’s liver seem straightforward) was install the new hard disk, copy everything from the old one to the new one, take out the old one and Bob would be my uncle. No problem, right?

Wrong. I killed it. I put the new drive in OK, but then when it came time to restart so I could copy the old one to the new one, Windows wouldn’t load. Nothing I did, including putting everything back exactly how it was, did any good. And before too long the thing wouldn’t even start up at all.

Decision time. Now if we’d been in the UK, I’d have waited, taken it round to some tiny computer store and got it fixed (luckily I’m no Gary Glitter so I’d be more worried about them getting my banking details than anything else). But we’re in France – and the PC is at the centre of our lives.

That’s no exaggeration. Here’s list of things we use the PC for:

• The radio
• The news
• The newspaper
• The TV (via bittorrent)
• Games and things for Isobel
• Playing CDs

I’d been thinking about getting a new one for a while, actually. We bought this one in Singapore and it’s getting on a bit – plus of course it doesn’t really do them all that much good lugging them round the world in tropical heat before leaving them in storage for the best part of a year. It’s CD writer had dies a few months ago, it needed more RAM, blah blah blah.

So I went to get a new one. And it’s fantastic. The hard drive is 400% bigger, it’s faster, it has all the RAM I need and best of all, it’s as quiet as a mouse. Obviously I still have to find a way of getting everything off the old hard disk, but to be honest it’s just a bit of music, some photos and a couple of invoices that I really need – thanks to backing up reasonably regularly.