It all went fine. Done in under an hour, activated and loading speedily. I restored the drivers, installed a couple of programs and then we went down the path of getting the OS up to date with patches and updates.

When I started Windows took up 2.6 Gig of the hard disk. When I finished all the updates (which again took the best part of six hours) the space used was up to 9.1 gigabytes.

Fair enough, this was a full update, skipping no patches or upgrades. A couple failed and I didn’t update the graphics card driver (I did this first time round when the computer was ‘repaired’ and the graphics went haywire) but this is still a lot of hard disk space to relinquish.

Many megabytes of bandwidth and a threefold increase in space, and it’s taking a lot longer to load up. Was it worth it? I ask myself.

And I tracked the CD/DVD problem down to software – or to be more accurate the lack of software. It happens when I uninstall software. But as I uninstalled about four or five packages at the one time I can’t point an accurate finger at the culprit. And I’m not inclined to uninstall them one at a time to find out which one is causing the problem. I can live with a few programs that I hardly ever use sitting on my hard drive.

I haven’t been reading much of late – a little too busy with other things – but I’ll try and catch up; or at least complete the short story collections I’m working through. I found a great writer that has really impressed me. Rhys Hughes. He has a story in the Philip Jose Farmer collection The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer and I bought one of his books on the strength of it. The Postmodern Mariner. It’s a collection of short stories and I have honestly enjoyed all that I have read so far. I can’t say that for every collection. Mostly I enjoy one or two, sometimes several, but there’s always a story that doesn’t quite hit it in every collection. But I haven’t come across it yet in The Postmodern Mariner.

I tried again to recover files from the U3 flash drive but no luck. I sent a couple of letters off by registered post last week and they weren’t in the back up before I lost/destroyed the USB drive. I have a print out of one but not the other. The program I used to hunt through the deleted files found all sorts, but not the files I was looking for. It found files from years ago but not a few days ago. And some of the dates on the files it did find were weird. 2135 and such.

I close this post with the old/new computer only on number 28 of the 58 updates.

I was quite pleased with myself.

Of course, the gods wouldn’t let it lie.

Today on my laptop my U3 disk wouldn’t load. Here we go I think, it’s finally snuffed it. I had recently bought a four gigabyte one as a replacement because the one I have been using the past few years was giving some errors here and there and felt very fragile. The program wouldn’t load but the drive was still accessible. So I play around with that. I copy all the files to the c disk of the laptop and fiddle around with the U3 drive. No luck. It would not load any portable programs and the files downloaded from Sandisk wouldn’t recognise the USB disk as a U3 drive.

I even tried programs from the temporary folder on the laptop hard disk but they wouldn’t work either. I reformat the drive and try to reinstall. No dice.

It’s about this time I realise it isn’t the fault of the U3 drive but the laptop. It is not recognising CD/DVD drives: not the internal one, not the external one and not the USB one. A quick check of the system shows me that it can’t find or load the drivers. Vista couldn’t find any drivers online or any solutions to the problem.

Ghost I think, it’s saved my bacon before. And, without thought, I load the Ghost CD and restore the laptop to last week. It’s halfway through when I realise that I hadn’t copied back the files for the U3 from the laptop c drive.

Norton Ghost does a ninety nine percent job of restoring the drive. I get a blue screen and then some Vista program called System Repair or something appears, spends ten minutes doing nothing and then loads the computer up. It’s back to the way it was last Sunday, but seeing as I don’t keep any files on the laptop that’s ok.

They’re all on the USB. Which has been re-formatted.

The recovery programs I tried were rubbish, listing only files with numbers. And there’s no way I’m going through four thousand files and renaming them. So I turn back to the backup disk and unzip the back up of the USB. I back that up manually using my copy of SecureZip. As it’s a manual backup by me it’s not as regular as the machine backup by Ghost. The latest I have is from late last month so I’ve lost about two weeks worth of information but it’s better than losing everything.

But I’ve got my old computer back again, and I might use that for a few things. Antics now has a workaround via the forum and I might stick Antics on the old computer – I did purchase the parts and build it to high specs so I could run Antics on it. And as I said earlier even though its three years old it’s still good specs: 2 gig of RAM, 2.4 gig processor, 250 gig hard drive, graphics card. That’s an OK spec even for now. It runs Windows XP which I still prefer over Vista and – as I made a point of never installing unnecessary software on that computer – it still loads and runs blindingly fast.

Another plus is that computer is where I have the program Sophocles. I bought it and then a few years later the company disappeared altogether. The software was Internet activated; you got a code from the guy and all the features were then enabled. And he was quite cool in that you could go back to him any number of times for another number. I only had two numbers; the one for the computer and another for the new (at that time) beta edition of the software.

When the software disappeared the Internet came to the rescue with a way to ‘activate’ on other computers, which involved saving out the registry entries. This allowed me to ensure that I can still use the software but only the beta version as I couldn’t access the original version on the old desktop computer. Now I can and I will save out the registry information so that if the computer goes down again at least I can continue to use that piece of software.

Finances are a little to the fore at the moment. I’m trying to cut back on spending everywhere but I did splash out on an upgrade to LifeForms. I visited their website and noticed it had been redesigned since the last time I was there. So, I checked the software. Huzzah, new version out.

I went from version 4 to version 5. I first got a version of this software free from a magazine yonks ago. Last year I purchased the full version and, although it is a great piece of software, version 4 was old and worked best in Windows 98:  it gave some errors in Vista.

The new version has been updated to work well in the newer operating systems but the interface is the same old friendly one I’m familiar with. And the upgrade was very cheap too.

I’m going to look into the blogs I follow and see if I can prune them back a little. It seems some of them I hardly read at the moment. And since I moved to using Google Reader for following blogs I hardly ever comment on blogs now. I pruned the blog list a few months back and although I haven’t added any recently it’s time to look at them again.

Passing the shop I noticed through the window that all paperbacks are 3 for 2, even all science fiction paperbacks. So I went in and had a look. They have changed a lot of their stock too. I looked at PK Dick books but there was only Do Androids … which I already have. I remember seeing Rendezvous at Rama by Arthur Clarke some weeks ago and nearly bought it but there was no sign of it this week. None of the Classic SF interested me either. As usual a lot of the SF was actually Fantasy and I’ve never been much into that.

I had a look around the crime and mainstream sections too but there wasn’t much of interest, so I went back to the SF section and bought three Neal Asher books. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve read from him so far. So for my three for two I bought Line War, Brass Man and Shadow of the Scorpion. At the moment I’m halfway through an old pulp, The Spider – I got a reprint of two novels from eBay for under a fiver including postage – but I think I’ll let myself sink into one of Asher’s novels afterword.

I bought another Sandisk Cruzer drive but the U3 installer insists that it isn’t and turned its nose up at it, refusing to acknowledge its existence let alone install the program on it. So I installed the free portableapps menu on it and copied over files and documents. It meant downloading some programmes again in portable app format instead of U3 format and that ran away with a fair amount of bandwidth, but it does come with its own backup program. On the U3 drive the program that I use to backup comes in two flavours, low volume free and unlimited paid for.

One of the good things about using the portable apps instead of U3 is that it lead me to a site where there was a program that allowed you to use Windows Live Writer on a portable drive – I’m using it to write this post – along with a few other programs I looked at before but never tried. Unlike U3 – the U3 website has totally gone now and I don’t think it will be back – all the portable apps programs are free. U3 had a lot of free programs but also a lot were paid for. The prices for the programs ranged from dirt cheap to bloody extortionate.

I haven’t read a novel in weeks. The last one was Ghosts of Manhattan, a pretty decent story of a hero in an alternate world at the early part of last century, even if it was about a third too long. (It was while reading that book that I noticed –some- books nowadays have at least 1 1/2 line spacing and not single line spacing: when did that start and how come I didn’t notice it before?) Since then it’s been short stories all the way; the Captain Midnight hardback edition  (paperback edition) ordered a few months ago has arrived, The Worlds of Philip José Farmer 1: Protean Dimensions signed by six contributors also arrived this week and I’ve dipped into that, and the latest issue of Interzone dropped through my letterbox this week too.

Norton Ghost came to the rescue. I slapped in the disk and loaded it up, less than an hour later my computer was in the state it was five days previous. It does automatic backups every Sunday and am I glad of those? Yes I am.

I checked the programs I have on the computer – some of them are dependent on activation – and they all ran fine. A little weird in that the Windows update history is completely gone. My computer says it is up to date but there is no list of all the updates that have been installed over the years.

And as I store all documents on my U3 disk I don’t have to worry about losing any recent files.

I never found out what the malware/virus was. I have malwarebytes on the system which I run every now and then. I’ll get a couple more as a precaution, maybe try and find one that works in real time. I’ll also see about getting a different firewall and not relying on the one that comes from Microsoft. Although it’s good it’s sort of anonymous and so a little unnerving as I’m unsure of what it’s blocking and what it’s letting through.

Then, minutes later, in Waterstone’s, I pick up another three for two. Right in front of me as I walk into the store was a signed edition of Transition by Iain Banks. No M in the name but it deals with parallel worlds and the time between the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of the Twin Towers. I remember it had some mixed reviews when it came out last year but it sounded interesting enough for me to pick it up and give it a try.

Although, as it’s a signed copy, perhaps I should keep it pristine (?). More than likely it was a batch lot signed by Iain Banks for Waterstone’s, or for the publishers to distribute to booksellers. But, seeing as he lives a stone’s throw from Kirkcaldy (or, as he has been quoted as saying – with Kirkcaldy being in the constituency of Smiler Brown – a ‘mortar lob away’:) ) there is a also every chance the shop got copies signed by him direct.

The three for two was rounded off with another collection of short stories (supposed to be as rare as hen’s teeth nowadays as short stories ‘don’t sell’ but I’ve picked up a few main stream collections recently) and the 5oth anniversary edition of To Kill A Mockingbird, which was the one I got ‘free’.

Also I have a copy of The Worlds of Philip Jose Farmer to be winging its way across the Atlantic any day now. This is a collection mostly about Philip Jose Farmer and is a limited edition. I’ve been told my copy is number 128 and it’s being signed by the authors attending FarmerCon V.

It seems like I spent most of my time online updating laptops, which for some reason seems to take at least half an hour per update. There is the downloading of the updates then the installing of the updates and then the obligatory reboot; nine times out of ten after install of updates I was informed there were further updates available. And round it went.

Still getting problems with Firefox V2 so I downloaded and installed the portable version of Google Chrome. When I first tried it Chrome it wouldn’t open several sites, including ansible.co.uk, u3.com, and a few others but since then I have been able to access some of them. U3 dot com hasn’t been available for the last few times I’ve tried to access it and maybe it’s gone for good. This is a shame as it’s about the only place where I can get official U3 software which, in my opinion, is far superior to Portable App software.

I’ve tried Chrome and it’s ok; not as fast as people say it is and it doesn’t have any menus. It imported the Firefox bookmarks no problem but I’ve still to get the saved passwords into it. Even though it’s portable the default setting for importing is to look at the browser on the hard drive.

I use Windows Live Writer for blogging (write once blog many times) and I’ve also upgraded that by adding other Windows Live components. The main one being Windows Live Mail. Again it’s quite good. I added a few email addresses and it went and got the emails with no problems – Yahoo involved only entering the email address and password, no POP3 settings or outgoing mail server requests that you get from other email programs.

There was a crack on the screen of one of my laptops. I’d looked into getting it sent off to be repaired but the prices that were being charged would have made it cheaper to buy a new laptop.

Then I started looking into prices of replacement screens alone and it was there that the prices plummeted. Provided I was willing to change the screen myself the cost was a pittence; less than half the price of some ‘repairs’.

So I ordered a replacement screen and looked up some tutorials on YouTube. At first there was a little trepidation: although I’ve built computer systems from scratch for myself and friends laptops are apparently a totally different ballgame.

And they are.

Apart from fiddling around with lots of tiny screws changing the screen involved taking out two plugs and putting in two plugs. Simples. The laptop is better than new, the replacement screen being brighter and with more vibrant colours. To celebrate I even bought extra memory from Amazon. So the laptop wont just look better but should work faster too.

I’m still going through books of short stories. I picked up an Ursula Le Guin collection from Amazon for under a fiver. It only has five stories so they’re technically closer to novellas and novelettes than short stories. Still to get into them: going through one I was reminded of why I was a little turned off from Le Guin the last time I tried to read her work – which was a big thick book – and that is that there were snippets of music in the stories. Personally I found that distracting. I don’t read music. It’s as annoying as reading through a story to suddenly find a quote in a foreign language that is not explained. It gives the reader a little kick which dislodges them from the narrative; and that defeats the purpose of telling a story to someone.

I bought a Robert E Howard book of short stories about a year or so ago. It was only £2.99. When I got it I saw I had read a lot of the stories in it but there were a few that I hadn’t read so I dipped into it now and then. Recently I chose a couple of stories here and there. One I read again was ‘Pigeons From Hell’. I think I first read this years ago when I got The First (or it may have been The Second) Book of Robert E Howard in American paperback.

I don’t care what anyone says, ‘Pigeons From Hell’ is without doubt the best thing Howard ever wrote. It surpasses Conan, Solomon Kane or anything else: his weird fiction, his sword and sorcery, his westerns. It is pure genius. Storytelling, atmosphere, horror. It’s a damn near perfect story, and pretty chilling too.