So… working away on Terribly Important Aerospace History Book Project Number Two today on my ~15-year-old Windows XP laptop when it decided that it needed to take a nap. When I tried to rouse it back to functionality, all it was able to tell me was that some Windows file or other was missing or corrupt, and to fix the problem I needed to reboot Windows using the original CD-ROMs. Which have been missing for at least two states.
This has been my main work computer for many years… all of my Aerospace Project Reviews and USxP’s were written and illustrated on it, most of the CAD models I’ve created were done on it. Most of that work has of course been backed up… but, irritatingly, not the most recent. The two latest as-yet unfinished USxPs, previewed HERE and HERE, don’t seem to have been externally backed up because apparently I’m kind of an idjit.
Fortunately, a local mom-and-pop computer repair place was *apparently* able to convince the computer to open in some minimally functional Windows mode, and is – hopefully – in the process of copying over some 47 gigabytes of data to an external data storage device. With luck tomorrow morning I’ll get a message that it’s done and I’ll have everything back. But even then the computer will be a doorstop; the cost and bother of repairing it would exceed its usefulness.
2020 continues to be a stellar year.