Well, remember how I nearly lost all of the information on my website the other week.

I also remember having some issues with my hard drive a month or so before that.

My hard drive crashed approximately a week ago, what a downer. I haven’t made any backups of the information on there, which is very sad. Even worse is that although most of my information can be brought back in one way or another, a lot of Ava’s stuff is on there too. It’s really my responsibility to keep it backed up, so oh well.

I have been forced to do upgrades to my computer, even though I would rather wait for a later date.

I got a new motherboard, an ASUS P4S800D-X which gives me a few more options which I didn’t have before. I now have a video card, a Leadtek with nVidia GeForce MX4000, it beats my onboard graphics hands down, which is cool. It was actually the cheapest card I could find at the computer store.

The other addition is two new hard drives. I bought 2 Maxtor 120GB SATA drives. I got two so I could set them up in a RAID 1 configuration (mirroring) just to be on the safe side. I think a DVD burner might be on the list of things to get in the future, just for the ease of backing up lots of information.

On the hard drive front, I am sending it to a hard drive repair place. They have a clean room and engineers who work on hard drives. Price for just looking at the drive NT1100 (about R250) and then a quote for the repair which can run from NT10000 to NT40000 (R2000 to R10000) or so. I will send it in and discuss with Ava when we get the quote to see if we will repair it, or at least salvage the information. OUCH!

The company is Lin Wei Data Recovery.

The computer is noticably faster with the new motherboard as the old motherboard was only a 667MHz board, which made things run down on notch.

I also went for a ride (off-road) last weekend, but was disappointed when I found that my bottom bracket was coming loose. I will have to fix it before I go riding again. I don’t take care of my bike and kind of just expect it to work all the time. Time for a little loving care.

I, on the whole, am getting on well. It has been a little tiring with the computer issues as they lead to late nights figuring out what to do or what has to be done next. The computer is now working and that side of things will be back to normal.