I am back!

[Rook Zimbabwe]

I know y'all missed me and have had a terrible lonely time...

Mine wife said to me on Thursday night... "can I borrow your computer to check my email?"

Well I hadn't shut down yet and she had just got home and was waiting for an email about a new job... I chose to ignore my " I DO LOVE YOU BUT NO!!!" rule. I do remember telling her NOT to open any attachments.

I know y'all can see this one coming now...

long saga short... she got a weird email from a headhunter site and she clicked the "link" and whoopsie???

"Honey!!! The computer shut down..."

With extreme feeling of dread I went to look at a BSOD the likes of which I have never seen in XP Pro...

It started looking like a standard faulty operation... the dissolved into ramdom matrix like garbage soup with shattered colors and blinking non ascoo text.

I forced a shut down. Could not reboot. Bad or missing boot device...

I plopped the XP Pro CD in to the drive and tried a reboot... no hard drive found... uh oh!

long story short... fighting all weeked and finally broke down and bought some kewl parts and built myself a new monster.

AMD HEX core 3.2 w 4GB Ram... 800M SATA and 60GB SState HDD(to hold Windows 7 32 and 64! - dual boot) ATi on board (ASUS I got the box for the model around here somewhere) I can upgrade to a small slot graphics card but this one loves Quake 4 and thats fine for now!

soI am back... thank the elder gods that I backed up my POS software last week... my slotmachine last week. My rouge3D code is here and I can recreate my models in about 1 hour...

MORAL: Just say NO!

[idle]

moral of the story "use passwords and run wife on limited abuser mode!"
Nice sounding box hope you gave her the bill.

[case]

use mirroring software to backup code, i use 'mirror folder" it's nice

[Zach]

Buy a couple USB thumbsticks, there ya go and dirt cheap

[srod]

Sack the wife!

[Zach]

But then she'll take the House, the car, the kids and.... the money for the USB Thumbsticks

[Foz]

personally, I'm a big fan of DropBox - especially when syncing between 4 computers

[Kuron]

I am back!

All good things must come to an end.

J/K WB!

[Nituvious]

I was wondering why there were no new Rook posts. I figured you had been kidnapped by Russian sea pirates hellbent on arctic domination.

So... when your wife asks to check her email on this new rig I bet you let her do it! Anyone want in on this bet?

[GWarner]

I know y'all missed me and have had a terrible lonely time...

Really? I hadn't noticed that you were missing in the first place! But then I haven't been around here as much as I like recently. Hey, but welcome back anyway!

Your story gave me the willies except for one major difference, my system is always fully backed up. Every Saturday morning I do some basic system maintenance like cleaning out the registry, checking for Windows, software and driver updates. Then using Acronis True Image to do a backup my system. If it's the first saturday of the month I do a full backup, all other Saturdays, I do an incremental backup.

The first rule of computers: If it's important make a copy, if it's really important make several copies.

And then there's Gene's rule: Nobody but me touches my computer. You want to use a computer? Bring your own or find a public computer.

The Internet is a dangerous place even if you are only visiting trusted sites you've visited before. You have no way of knowing if a hacker has managed to break into a site and set it up to spread their garbage to unsuspecting visitors. Since I use IE which support ActiveX, a security hole you can fly a 747 through, I have ActiveX disabled for all but those few sites that earned a place in my trusted sites list. And I have my browser set up so that it always runs in a sandbox, that way if anything does get in, I can remove it by simply purging the contents of the sandbox.

I am considering switching to FireFox but after more than ten years using IE, making the change is hard.

Again, welcome back Rook and GET A GOOD BACKUP PLAN IN PLACE! There is no subtitute for a good backup.

[Rook Zimbabwe]

I done have done the backup plan... I have a BluRay burner installed now... present from my former employer/Boss. I completely backed up the current HDD after running FULL SCAN and MALWARE scans on it.

I connected a ZIP drive to it as well and scheduled a backup of my PB DEVEL folder for FRIDAY (but I can plunk it with a desktop gadget button I wrote as well (my C++ apparently isn't all that rusty!))

[GWarner]

Besides my weekly system backups with True Image to USB hard drives, one for even numbered months, and one for odd numbered months. I also have a continous backup running on those folders I consider critical.