ENOUGH MASSIVE COMPUTER PROBLEMS TO TRY A MAN'S SOUL

THE HARD DRIVE CRASH

You may have noticed that I have not posted for a while.  This has been a nightmare experience for me this semester in the realm of computers.  First my four month old Western Digital bookshelf hard drive crashed with all of this semester's artwork and research papers and part of last semester's.  I had been backing up, but had not gotten around to updating my backup, as backing up tended to lock up my computer.

It happened while I was installing my new Epson 3880, for which I had been saving up so I can print my work 17" wide.  My art is meant to be pretty large, all digital, and weekly trips to the commercial printer were getting too time consuming and expensive.  I got it just in time to have nothing left to print on it.

I got nowhere with the Computer Tech.  He charged me $80 and told me the data could possibly be recovered at a place in California with a deposit of $900.00, which is a bit out of the budget.  I called Western Digital, who told me "too bad for you", and seemed not to be at all disturbed that this four month old drive failed.  "Send us back the defective drive and we will replace it, but sorry about your 2-1/2 months of work.".  Last week I got a call from Western Digital as a follow-up on the call for service and I politely let them know what I thought of Western Digital.  The guy on the other end of the phone said "Can you hold a minute?"  He came back after about five minutes and said "I am a graduate student, too, and understand what this means to you.  I took the liberty of talking to my supervisor, and he has agreed to provide data recovery and a new hard drive to you at no cost."  They are emailing me a prepaid shipping label, so I may get back my artwork, probably too late to be of any help this semester, but I will be glad to have it.

THEN THE COMPUTER DIED

My computer had been slowing down for a few months, and six weeks ago, its condition became critical.  I was able to limp it along for a while, but any Photoshop file big enough to be a .psb (which includes most of my works) so locked up that it literally took 20 minutes to cycle between brush strokes in Photoshop.  Then the email and word processor started locking up.  I borrowed some money and ordered a new computer with enough RAM to do the job.  It showed up last Wednesday, and I stopped everything I was doing to install it, all the programs that have to go on it, and the Bluetooth printers that have to hook up to it.  I worked over the weekend on it, and still it took until 4:00 yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon to get it all running. I thought it was 100%, but today I found that no current file would load into my archaic Word 2003.  It took me another two hours to figure out and download the "converter" from Microsoft.

SUCCESS

I was out of pocket on my ability to do work for nearly nine weeks.  Now I would say I'm going to have to work double time to get my work done by the end of the semester, not to mention the work on which I am behind in my business.

Please wish me luck.  I will need it.

Richard