Category: Modern problems

The new SSD drive is in the other half’s computer and apparently working correctly.

It’s updating the NAS backups now. The OS installation was a pain in the butt because nothing worked as expected but once again I’ve “won”.

The restoration of the data took 6 hours, (I let it cook overnight) thankfully it wasn’t a matter of piecing all the files on the drive back together.

As I’ve said before, your computer is personal and that’s okay. But having files spattered all over the drive with no coherent plan or filing system is difficult for another person to navigate or help you with. You’re welcome to toss stuff into your computer in any way that you like, but don’t come to me for help when you’ve lost a single Word document whose name you can’t remember, in a sea of 200 GBs of other documents that you should have deleted or archived a decade ago.

As an aside, I transferred the other half’s mess of a document folder to their home folder on the server. It’s very busy indexing all those files now and hopefully will provide a little help the next time I hear the dreaded, “My computer has lost a document I really need, can you find it for me?”

“Sure babe, I’ll get right on that. Fix me a tall drink, make me a steak, and then leave me alone.” 

After all a man deserves a last meal, right?

There are PDF files of music that look like important scores in a buckshot pattern in every conceivable location on that poor machine. I’m half tempted to go through it like Jesus went through the Temple.

I have a masochistic curiosity to find out if organizing the files into a more coherent directory structure would improve the operational speed of the system…

But I’m not that masochistic…

There is one bright spot. At least I can take control of their computer from my desktop and I don’t have to be seen swearing under my breath or shaking my head in frustration. That’s a mercy because I have no desire to fight about it while I’m cleaning up the mess.

It’s possible that the drive failing like it did, effectively rendering all their data inaccessible while we were waiting on the replacement drive may have provided an education.  Ever since I brought the new server online I’d been saying, “You should probably put your important docs in your personal directory on the server. That way if something happens you can still access those documents via your ipad.“

My advice wasn’t heeded, and so there was a week of uh, tension. It didn’t help that I said, “You know, there’s a reason I make these suggestions.” I can’t imagine why things were tense, Ahem…

I am going to run a duplicate search routine on their home folder. Just for the sake of freeing up space. I may regret it later but when I see 1000 plus files in a Downloads folder I have to question what the hell is going on.

I hope everyone has a good week.

After 11 years, we’ve decided to retire the venerable HP all in one printer.

The machine pretty much works, although its ADF feeder is prone to jamming.

Our reasoning was the cost of ink cartridges. A full set costs about $100. The cost of a new printer isn’t much more.

I have a nice Canon all in one printer sitting in a storage facility but it’s been sitting there for a year and once again we’d have to spend $100 to get cartridges for it. There’s also the unknown about its status. I’d never intended to have it sitting idle in storage for so long and at this point it may need a printhead replacement. Which means it’s cheaper to just replace the whole machine.

This led to the inevitable conclusion that buying a new unit with a warranty was probably the best solution.

After shopping around a bit, we decided to go with one of the new Epson tank machines. Costco was even having a sale on an acceptable unit.

This little thing is pretty dang neat. It’s smaller than the HP or the Canon, and produces really clear crisp prints. I like the no print cartridge aspect. Instead you just fill the tanks up from a bottle of ink. The bottles are much cheaper than cartridges and this thing is rated at something like 7000 pages per fill. This is a full color machine similar to the HP and Canon. The majority of our printing is black & white and the Costco version thoughtfully includes 3 black refills in addition to the Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow.  

The cost per page in just about equal to my nifty laser printer. The only reason we didn’t just go with the laser printer only is because it doesn’t have a scanner and it doesn’t know how to talk Airprint which is very nice if you need to print from your iPad or iPhone.

The new inkjet can print duplex (double sided), and the scan/copy speed is acceptable. It’s not going to win any races, but for occasional use it’s more than adequate.

I can even see a day when the Canon laser finally dies that we’d just go to having one printer. I like having the laser because when I’m writing it’s fast and cheap to print a manuscript.

If you’re in the market for a new machine take a look at the Tank versions of inkjet printers. You’re going to pay a bit more out the outset for one, but you’ll recover the costs over the life of the printer in supplies.