Computer back, me happy
February 27, 2007
It’s astonishing how the Internet is just so important and necessary in my life now. It hasn’t even been a week and I sure felt the loss of the constant stream of mostly useless information. I think most importantly is the ability to contact people by the press of a button, rather than the vast amount of ‘knowledge’ available that makes me want to be on the internet so much.
Anyway, less than half a year ago my 120Gb external hard drive stopped working. It wouldn’t start up and Windows couldn’t recognize it as anything. On it was a lot of my archived files. Basically all my pictures, movies, music, games, and applications were stored there. They were basically all gone. (I have some stuff backed up on CD but for the most part, my years of careful collecting and filing were gone). That was really painful.
I had some stuff stored on my laptop so I wasn’t completely lost. I put off getting a DVD writer or another hard drive just because I’m a lazy asshole.
To teach me a lesson, my laptop hard drive decided to stop working last Thursday. The night before I heard it making strange sounds and it wouldn’t boot up correctly a couple of times. I took this to mean something bad so I quickly backed up my most crucial files (mostly porn, some password protected files, some old NES ROMS, you know the drill). Sure enough, the next day the computer didn’t even recognize a hard drive being installed.
At this point, I had lost all my data now.
The lady did some checking on data recovery services. Get this – the quotes:
- The 120Gb external HD: 450,000 yen
- The 30Gb HD: 350,000 yen
Grand total: they estimated an 800,000 yen cost to recover the data. That’s $8000. I can take many great vacations and make new memories.
It was weird though, when I realized I had lost all my data, instead of most of it, I felt a surprising level of relief. It was liberating in a sense to not have to worry about all those 1s and 0s stored on a spinning magnet. Still I was denied my daily dose of news and email so the pain of being have to face Japanese TV and (gulp) talking to the wife made me yearn for the Internet.
After some careful whining and nagging I managed to get the wife to allow me to buy a new computer! So on Saturday we went down to our local Dospara and ordered a nice shiny desktop. It’s due to be here in about a week and it’s filled with all the new goodliness. I am so going to buy some cheap game that my laptop couldn’t handle and play the hell out of it.
March 1st, 2007 at 15:17
You might want to look into some freeware applications that might still be able to pull something off those drives. I’m not sure how well they work if Windows can’t even recognize them…
March 1st, 2007 at 20:10
Tried many of those kinds of applications. Nada.
March 3rd, 2007 at 11:49
Yay for a new computer! I think there’s a new Command & Conquer coming up, there’s your new game.