none of my music was on the drive, but it was my only internet access point. my router disappeared in the move to windsor. best i can tell, it got thrown away in a pile of boxes. my pcs are both running custom images with the dhcp ripped out, so they need a router to connect. i've been moving over files on a usb key (which also literally crumbled the other day).
so, what it really means, worst case, is that i need to prioritize replacing the router.
one of the more annoying things is that my youtube password is on the drive i can't currently mount. so, i need to put that part of things aside.
right now, i'm on a 90s laptop that has proven itself virtually indestructible. but it's slow, because it's ancient. and that's going to probably limit me slightly in what i can and cannot do in the next week.
i have plenty of things to work on. there just might be a lag here in updating.
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i've had a lot of bad luck with storage over the last few days and it's probably going to be a few days, if not longer, before it gets entirely fixed. i'm typing this from a compaq evo that was manufactured in the 90s, that's missing half it's keys and in all honesty probably belongs in a museum.
but note that it still boots. that's better than i can say for two far newer laptops that are even made by the same company. proof that everything was better in the 90s? fuck, this thing has *rust* on it. laptops with rust is a weird idea, but think of it like a reliable old chevy. it was probably actually even manufactured on this continent.
i even have an old quantum fireball drive that came with windows '98 on it that still boots. yet, the hard drive in the fancy windows 7 machine that my dad left me imploded after less than a year. it's not that we can't do better than this, it's that it isn't profitable to make electronics that don't break after a year. it's fucking pathetic, really.
it started yesterday when one of my usb drives just snapped. nothing out of the ordinary happened, it just disintegrated - almost as though it was timed to fritz out after the first. it might actually have been designed that way. engineers actually take full credit courses in a concept called "forced obsolescence". they spend as much time designing things to break as they do designing things to work. because profit. it's fucking pathetic.
i snapped the plastic off and the solder just gave way. nothing complicated about it, no fault on my behalf - it was just designed to break. just cheap garbage.
this morning, i take the laptop out of sleep (as mentioned, it's practically brand new) and the video spazzes out into static to reveal a blank screen. wait. fuck. reboot. nothing. memory is fine, but the hard drive test is failing. again, there was no strain on the device. worse, it came with no warning - it wasn't clicking or whirring or buzzing. it's almost like it has a timer in it....
i'm running it through a chkdsk right now, which should hopefully be done by the end of the week, and it looks like, in the end, i may get away with a corrupt boot sector and a reinstall; hard to say at this point, but it appears like i may be able to partition out the bad part. but, there's no reason for this. it's just badly designed (accidentally on purpose) garbage.
the laptop is sort of gravy. it was a gift, to replace one that came to me on a grant (another compaq with another dead hard drive). if i can't get it back up, it just means i'll have to get that router fixed sooner than later. it's not devastating.
in the mean time, it's this museum piece with 650 MB of obsolete RAM that is the one that's still kicking - rusty joints and all. and hp/compaq should be fucking embarrassed about that. except not. 'cause profit.
12:00
(it turns out it won't be necessary to actually partition anything out because chkdsk does that in the mft. i did know how mfts work, but i wasn't clear on whether the information coming at me related to the physical sectors or the mft; it's the latter. which makes things easier. a chkdsk is enough; the file system will take it from there. and, thankfully, it does seem, right now, that the corruption is just at the front of the mft.)
i should point out that i've got the disc split into a small operating system partition and a large file partition. it seems like that's going to save my data, even as the os needs a fresh install. which is why i did it like that.
15:00
1% after 10 hours. 1000 hours is 42 days. and that's just the os partition. it'd better pick up.
it doesn't look unusable, so far. even if i can just get what's there off...
...and this ancient 90s compaq actually isn't bad once it got tweaked to a bigger pagefile. it can only handle a few tabs, sure. but it's at least as functional as an iphone...
if you want to run a 90s computer on the existing internet, you'd better get used to adblock. i don't need more RAM, websites need to stop loading their pages with crap. seriously.
as an aside, i get why i need to block twitter. i think its useless, but it's popular. why, though, do i need to block aol? why are websites still linking to aol? who uses aol? it's a 90s computer, not a time machine back there...
bonus: one can block entire commenting systems.
17:00
