Bah I say

[bladespark]

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is I'm having oodles of costuming fun. (Yay for furry stuff!) Got the stage one go-ahead on my Bremen Town Musicians for work, doing a set of ears and tails to sell off around Halloween, and found nifty, fun, cheap yet good wolf fur at Wal Mart. Huzzah!

The bad news, however, is pretty bad. My lap top is showing symptoms of oncoming decline. It's secondhand and not at all new, and the floppy disk drive just died. I could replace it, but that would cost about as much as the thing is worth right now. So I'm not going to. I'm starting saving up to get a new one, and meanwhile I'm praying very hard that I'll find a way to get everything off of this one. I'm hoping that it was some kind of glitch and that if I turn it off and let it rest some more it may work. *corsses fingers* I /think/ I've backed up all my stories, but I'm not 100% certain... And losing one just now would be bad.

Any suggestions on retrieval, anybody?

Comments

Sure.

[poncelet.livejournal.com]

>Any suggestions on retrieval, anybody?

Sure. I lived with a breaking laptop twice now.

If your laptop has a network port in it, use a cross-over RJ-45 cable to connect your laptop to a PC and copy your files. There's a PC at my new apartment if you don't have access to one. Then just copy everything to that drive, compress it, and E-mail it to yourself. It'll sit in cyberspace forever.

If your laptop doesn't have a network card (stone age!), then you have other options, but it gets pretty hard. If you have a USB connection, I can find you a USB wireless network adapter that we can use to connect you to my wireless network. Then the files can be transferred the same way.

Mark, the king of crisis control.

Re: Sure.

[bladespark.livejournal.com]

Huzzah! I may resort to asking for your assistance, should the current scheme to retrieve stuff fail. Several of my friends have gotten copies of my recent works, generally because I've done a lot of "cross over" stuff in the FLEET universe that involved their characters and/or star nations. So I'm collecting the assorted bits from them. If, after that, I still don't have it all, I'll probably turn up on your doorstep, laptop in hand. (Currently I can't call ahead, you know, becuase of the phone losing thing mentioned elsewhere.)

Re: Sure.

[poncelet.livejournal.com]

Regarding my contact information, you can find it here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/poncelet/13222.html#cutid1).

Mark

Re: Sure.

[siece.livejournal.com]

While you're asking people, you might want to drop a line to 5 Star Support (http://www.5starsupport.com) for ways to salvage your laptop. Quite a lot of most laptops are solid state, which means that while parts that move[1] or undergo semi-reversable chemical reactions[2] might wear out, most of it should go on working pretty much forever, barring repeated application of hammers, alpha radiation, or other blatant abuse. You may also want to consult the < a href="http://www.siece.net/help.html">help section of my website for tools to correct software bourne problems.

[1]ie, floppies, CD ROMs, and very old hard drives

[2]ie batteries, high frequency AC lasers, and missile control systems