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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Wednesday 1 December 2004 (Day View)

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01.12.2004 – Wednesday 1 December – Relaxation & Computer Woe

• I slept in quite late, enjoying the fact that I had nothing else to do and no reason at all to get up. Some would call it boredom, but I call it absolute relaxation – I believe the only difference between the two is in the mind.
  After waking (obviously), I moved the PC from inside out into my van, and installed the hard drive I’ve brought up. When starting it up, it tried to check the third partition on the disk, which I cancelled, but after Windows has started, I realised that only the first two partitions of the new drive had worked – the third was being seen as an empty (although formatted) partition, so I rebooted and let the disk-scanning thing do its work. It took half an hour, during which it did many file allocation adjustments and recovered a considerable amount of “orphans”, and after which the drive appeared to have all its files again. Unfortunately, though, the files themselves don’t actually work. There is, or was, sixty gigabyte of music on that drive – there now appears to be about fifty gigabyte of corrupted files that won’t play, and ten gigabyte of random chunks of music that do play, but which are all chopped up and not even remotely related to their file names. I am not sure what happened, but I am not very happy about it. I’m also worried that this could mean the entire drive is on the way out, and I could lose the data on the other two partitions. Halfway through the disk checking process I noticed that the CPU fan wasn’t actually spinning – it was just jerking a little bit. The heatsink was too hot to touch, but I assume that it’s been this way for a while – it seems unlikely that it would just die the moment I get here, so hopefully the processor can handle not having a fan.

Evening

• I went for a walk down to the Home Rule Bridge and had a look at the creek, and then back up to the local hall, where I met Shan on his way home from work, so got a lift down to his place. We had a chat for a while, found that one of his fish had died, found an old Pentium processor fan that might fit on my heatsink with a bit of modification, and then I walked home, had a lovely Mother-made dinner, pulled the top off the heatsink and managed to sort of jam the new fan in. It isn’t going to work remarkably well, but might stop a meltdown.