Computer problems!

[kaelaria]

Just thought I'd share my recent adventures in computer land as I sit here eeking data out of a dying drive...

First a little background...I had been in the IT world for more than a decade till a few years ago when I went full time photographer. There's nothing I can't fix, but that doesn't mean I enjoy it! As an IT geek I always had the latest and greatest, and built all kinds of wild systems - pretty much the best there was at the moment, just for fun. This includes overclocking, watercooling, etc.

As a photographer, processing these huge 30MB raw files and 1GB+ tif files showed me how my IT knowledge could come in real handy! So when I switched I built one last system (so far) that would last me, and surprisingly it has - mostly due to the IT industry really slowing down development the past 2 years.

Until 2 weeks ago I had been running a heavily overclocked dual core and 3GB of ram. Not much of a system you might say, and to an extent you would be correct. However, I was still running 32 bit XP, so for the most part anything more was wasted. I had been putting off Vista due to speed and driver issues, and 64 bit was out of the question for driver and compatability reasons. Every so often I would dual boot to try new stuff out, and would always go back to XP in the end. Well, FINALLY this spring, enough of my apps, drivers and plugins were available for Vista 64 that I decided to upgrade. There are still a few 64 bit issues, but at least there are work arounds until new software versions come out (mostly Photoshop Plug-ins). My printer drivers and hardware is all good now.

So, I not only went to 8GB ram, which was what I was REALLY looking forward too (I could use 10x that amount if it was available) but went to a quad core CPU. Long story short, it turns out the particular revision of my motherboard was great with dual core, but pretty unstable with quads, and OC a quad is horrible. Unfortunately I can't find my receipt for it so I can't get a free swap, and had to buy a used one on eBay (coming Fri). The 8GB of ram in the meantime was 50% bad out of the box and I had to RMA 2 of the 4 sticks. Now tonight, one of the three primary internal drives decides to take a dump! And of course, it was the one drive that had stuff on it I had not re-backed up due to my stupidity. I use a 4TB external array for backup, and had just reformatted it to better take advantage of Vista. I had recopied everything except this one drive and was going to later. Murphy was an optimist.

LUCKILY, after 4 hours of coaxing and error corrections, I am able to eek it partially back to life and have been copying what I want off it little by little at about 5% speed in between crashes, freezes and errors. This may be the last tie it ever spins up again so I'm staying up all night to complete it before swapping it out. 5 hours to go. Yea.

So the moral of the story? BACKUP, and **** happens.