A new laptop: Hopefully the answer to my computer problem

After a lot of attempts to solve my computer problems, I finally decided to buy a refurbished Acer laptop that was fitted with a more powerful processor and more solid-state memory than my existing HP one. It arrived on Tuesday, and since then I have been slowly setting it up.

I now have a working laptop that can save files to OneDrive and that has the latest version of Microsoft 365. I am currently transferring all my files over to OneDrive and – as a backup – to the hard drive on my old desktop computer.

This may seem to be a bit of a 'belt and braces' approach to solving the problem I had, but I'd rather have multiple locations on which my files are stored than to risk losing some of them in the future.

Now that has been done, I can start working on a number of projects that have been in a state of suspension since the middle of January.

Back to Square One?

After trying many of the potential solutions to my computer problems that I could find on the internet, I finally found one that works for me. It isn’t perfect, but it meets my requirements for the present.

I have opted for a combination of 512GB USB flash drives to save the files I am currently working on as well as the files that I want to be able to access on my laptop. In addition, I will have a backup on a removable hard drive. I am also going to reactivate my old desktop PC as it has a 1Tb hard drive that I can use as an additional device on which to save files.

Eventually I would like to store my backup files on OneDrive (or something similar), but rather than try to do it in a rush, I want to take my time and get it right.

Thanks to everyone who gave me advice and support. I am now able to move forward … and I already have several wargaming topics that I want to write blog posts about.

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According to THE GUARDIAN newspaper, the phrase 'Back to Square One' originates from the 1920s and 1930s when football fans regularly listened radio commentaries of matches. To help listeners follow play, the pitch was divided up into a grid of imaginary squares, with Square One being one of the nearest to a goalmouth.

The pitch plan published in the press for radio listeners of the match that took place at Crystal Palace Football Ground (Selhurst Park) on Saturday 29th January 1927. The Corinthians (a non-League team) played Newcastle United in the Fourth Round of F.A. Cup, and Newcastle United won 3-1. This was the first football commentary of an F.A. Cup match broadcast over the radio by the BBC, and took place a week after they had broadcast the first commentary of a First Division match. This had been between Arsenal and Sheffield United and the result was a 1-1 draw.

The phrase may also have originated with games like ‘Snakes and Ladders’ where players can end up sliding down a Snake to the start of the game’s track (i.e. square one).

Two steps forward, one step back

I thought that I’d finally cracked my current computer problem … but it turned out that I hadn’t!

I spent yesterday setting up my OneDrive to be the repository for my recovered files so that I can access them from the cloud regardless of which computer I am working on. I had to move from Office 365 Basic to Office 365 Personal in order to get access to 1Tb of storage space, and then I began the process of moving the files onto it … but then I started to get a number of error messages telling me that there was a problem with OneDrive and that that I had to restart my computer.

After I had done this numerous times, I then got an error message telling me to reinstall Office 365 Personal. When I tried to do this, my computer informed me that there was insufficient memory to do this!

At this point I switched my computer off and walked away. I see no point in banging my head against a brick wall, and have learned from experience that if I persist with trying to solve a seemingly intractable problem, I get stressed … and the more I get stressed, the more likely it is that any solution I try won’t work.

As the title of this blog post makes clear, I feel as if every time I take two steps forward, I have to take one backwards.

Recovering my ‘lost’ computer files is turning into a much bigger job than I thought it would be

I am continuing the long, slow process of reclaiming my ‘lost’ computer files and saving them into my new file structure … and as I am doing it, I am discovering all sorts of stuff that I initially thought that I had copies of but that have actually gone missing.

This task is taking me much longer that I thought it would take and until it is completed, I will only be writing blog posts as and when I can. I have a couple already written in draft form, but they need tidying up and I don’t want to spend time doing that when I could be getting my computer problem sorted.

As they used to say on the TV years ago … normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

‘You don't know what you got till it's gone’

Apologies to Joni Mitchell for borrowing a line from the lyrics of her song, BIG YELLOW TAXI … but it sums up how I feel as a result of the recent failure of my laptop’s removable hard drive.

I have spent a large part of the last forty-eight hours trying to retrieve as many files as I can, and so far I’ve recovered about 95% of ‘lost’ files. However, what has really annoyed me is the apparent randomness of the files that I’ve not been able to recover. For example, the Wargame Developments membership database has survived intact inside the WD file, but the spreadsheet that records the organisation’s accounts for the current year - and which was in the same file - is completely lost. Luckily, I had sent a copy of a recent version of the spreadsheet to the Assistant Treasurer, and I was able to use it as the basis for a new version of the spreadsheet.

After the initial panic, I began to think that rather than ‘weeping and gnashing my teeth’ (its seems to be my day for quotes!), I ought to seriously consider what file structure and files I need for the future.

To be truthful, like most people’s computers, the organisation of my existing files was borderline chaotic. I followed the directory structure laid down by Microsoft, namely having directories called Documents, Pictures, Music, and Videos, and within which I had created subdirectories with names like ‘Blogpix’, ‘Blog Diaries’, ‘WD Files’, ‘Books’, etc. My files were then saved in the most appropriate subdirectory.

I have therefore decided not to copy everything that I have managed to reclaim onto my new day-to-day hard drive but to transfer files as and when I need them. I will also save these regularly used files onto my Cloud account so that I can minimise the possibility of a similar failure depriving me of valuable files.

It’s a plan … and hopefully it will help me turn what was otherwise a disaster into something positive.

A massive hard drive failure!

Yesterday, my laptop’s removable hard drive failed!

I have no idea how or why this happened, but without any warning my laptop was suddenly denied access to the hard drive. I tried all the recommended methods of repairing this … but none of them worked.

This could have been a massive disaster, but luckily I’d done a backup before Christmas and I’d only lost about a month’s work … which made it somewhat less of a disaster!

However, I’m so long in the tooth that I dredged my memory and remembered that I could get access to the files on the hard drive by using command lines, and that once I had done that, I should be able to copy the missing files onto a new hard drive or USB memory stick. The only problem is that this is not the quickest method of copying files and it looks as if I have a couple of days of laborious work ahead of me.

I suppose that I could have avoided this by putting everything in my cloud memory, but every time that I’ve tried to do this, I’ve failed. I have now learned a very valuable lesson, and once I have salvaged what I can from this mess, I will try again, hopefully with greater success!