Spare Oom PC Woes

Well...looks like the Spare Oom PC is finally on its last legs. It's had a very good run these last few years--I bought it at Best Buy right around Christmas 2009 soon after we moved out to the Richmond here, so a three-and-a-half year run is actually pretty good. I wish PCs would last a hell of a lot longer, but that's another gripe entirely. Still--lots of music listening and downloading, working on novels (including FINALLY finishing the trilogy!), blog posts, and everything in between.

I'm bummed, of course, but not devastated. The PC started acting up a few months ago, when it would occasionally not boot up Windows properly. For me that was a high sign that I should probably start backing things up. All my music has been on one of my externals for the last year or so, so there's no loss at all there. Maybe the original mp3s that I downloaded from Amazon and eMusic (their default download folders are on the C drive), but I always copy them to the external when I buy them. My entire writing folder is on Dropbox, so there's no loss there at all. Any other creative things (scans, artwork, etc.) are on an older external. All my pictures are on that older external as well. To put it bluntly--I learned from past experience and knew that saving everything to externals and/or Dropbox is definitely worth the extra five minutes' work. So yeah...all told, nothing of import is lost if it decides to die on me.

At the moment, it's running the Startup Repair at a glacial pace, and as usual, it will most likely not find any problems whatsoever, and reboot. This is probably the longest it's taken to do so, however, so I'm thinking it's time to start shopping around. In the meantime, if I get it up and running again, I'll start going through the C drive and copying that stuff to the older external as well, so there's absolutely no loss of anything.

That said...I will of course be continuing with the PC. Yes, I know, there are a few of you out there who own Apple products and love them to bits, but I have personal (and professional) reasons for not going that route. Besides, I've been using PCs exclusively since the 90s and see no real reason to switch over now, despite the positive noise I hear from that side. I have iTunes for the mp3s that are exclusive to them, and that's good enough. So yeah--if anyone has any suggestions for non-iThingy computers that you like or have heard good things about, let me know!

I'm also open to Windows 8 and touch screen, to be honest. That's what my Acer laptop is, and I quite like it. I know W8 has gotten a bit of a bad rap from some people, but really, it is what you make it, and once I realized that it gives you a lot more ability to tweak the visuals to your liking, I really started liking it.

If anything, the only real annoyance at this time is redownloading/reinstalling programs if/when I get a new PC. A lot of them I can easily grab from their websites as before (Media Monkey, the latest MS Office, AVG, etc.), and I do have the software for the few I can't (like the NCH audio software). Honestly, that's not a bad deal, it's just time consuming sometimes. Still...it's a small price to pay.


Anyhoo...back to work. Got my laptop going for the tunage, and I think I can get over not downloading the new Vampire Weekend album on its release day, so all's well for the most part. :p