February 1, 2009

HAT hung to dry...

Year of the Ox begins inauspiciously. My personal computer crashed. Completely. Was not wearing its seatbelt so it is dead. (I've resorted to borrowing my brother's computer for small chunks of time to do things like check email and to write this post. Other than that, I feel a bit bereft.) I am crossing fingers and toes and hoping that the Ox will bring me some luck soon -- because I haven't seen anything yet. It is quite difficult to go without a laptop, and I'm missing it terribly. This is a major lesson.

My laziness was the problem. The external harddrive that I owned was not compatible with Vista running on my new HP (only 6 months old!). Instead of doing something about it, I kept thinking nothing bad will happen; I'll have plenty of time to get a new hard-drive, I thought. Well, I was wrong.

Lessons I learned:
1) Back up everything immediately after purchasing a new computer b/c you never know when your laptop will die. Even new ones.
2) Don't buy HP. I trusted HP, and despite everybody telling me that it's not a good investment, I believed that it would work and that it would work well, and believed that I could be faithful to it, and it to me. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
3) Think carefully before rejecting the warranty that they offer. Think very carefully.
4) Don't assume you understand the stupid error messages that appear on the screen.
5) Email every important document (e.g. Board of Trustees meeting minutes!) to yourself at another email address. Don't focus so much on consolidating your "assets" into one place b/c it'll all be GONE when your computer dies.

I do not recommend purchasing an HP. Don't let it fool you.

Thank you, year of the Ox, for a wonderfully challenging beginning. After this, the rest of the year must be a breeze.

ox,
hat

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