Wrestling With Computers

It's a rare rainy day here in Fernley, which is just as well because I spent the final day of this four-day weekend fighting with Lisa's CF-29 Toughbook, downloading 157 updates (not an exaggeration; that's the actual count, and it took about three hours for them to download and install), and otherwise try to get the machine back to a semblance of what it was before she dropped it yesterday. We sort of have been able to get most things back into it, but it has not been easy. This is why we use DriveClone as our backup system. Besides any data we might lose, configuring computers is such a pain that being able to swap in a replacement drive that has all of the settings the way we like it is a huge win.

I only wish my work machine could be cloned, but the security software they put on it makes it impossible; the hardware signatures don't match and the clone will neither boot nor even be readable as an external drive. Which is to say that the "security" features make it more likely that I'll lose data someday, although I do regularly backup the data files to an external drive.