Bob Is Dead, Long Live Bob

Bob the Wonder Computer, as some of you may know, suffered some kind of computery stroke a while back - all of a sudden, he froze up, and when I got him unfrozen he was moving as slow as a politician keeping a promise. OK, maybe he wasn't that slow...

Any way, I managed to copy all my Word files (all my stories, songs, poems, stories, letters, documents, and stories) to disk and to a flash drive so I could keep pecking away at things on any computer, which is a good thing because if I'd lost them? You'd still be hearing the screams.

I also got my photographs onto disks, except for October of 2007 which said it copied successfully but then the disk came up blank...after, of course, poor T had begun wiping Bob's memory clean, so...sigh...bye-bye, photos of the spider climbing in the jack-o-lantern's eye, lovely dark silhouette against the orange, glowy light of candle and pumpkin. Bye-bye, photos of family carving the pumpkins that year. Bye-bye, pictures of Evil Genius in his dinosaur costume, trick-or-treating around the neighborhood.

Still, it could have been worse.

I was able to write on Bob, and even play a game or two, if I didn't mind incredible delays in booting up, opening files or moving between active programs. I could not, however, get online. Y'all, I need my Internet. I'm pretty sure there's a minimum daily requirement of vitamin I, without which I will shrivel up and die.

Something had to be don to poor Bob. Something drastic. Something had to be done or I was going to have to sell one of T's kidneys to the highest bidder and go get a new Wonder Computer...but I love Bob and am loathe to part with his geriatric self.

T, possibly fearing for his kidney, possibly because his lizard brain was tingling with that warning that people get when someone close to them is a breath away from running amok through the neighborhood with a sharp object and a crazed gleam in their eye, or possibly because he felt sorry for me and my beloved Bob, hatched a plan.

He wiped Bob clean, effectively killing him from the inside out, and reinstalled Windows.

He reinstalled Word.

He reinstalled AOL (don't start - I've had AOL since practically the beginning, with the same screen name all these years, and no matter how craptastic it can be sometimes, I love it and am not moving on until you pry it from my cold, lifeless hands).

Bob is back!! He's not the Bob I knew and loved, but he is some version of himself - at least for the next month, until Windows will shut itself down because I cannot register it (it's not pirated, bootlegged, or stolen - much like me, it's dysfunctional, cranky, and confused about its existence). Sometime between now and then. I need to find the money and spring for a new copy with a working registration key. Hmm...where's T with that kidney?

Lessons learned? Always back things up. Always check the backed up thing on another computer. Then check them again. Flash drives are easily portable and have as much or more memory to them as my entire Bob - I got an 8 gig one for less than ten bucks, and it's can clip to my key chain. Bob has a 20 gig memory. I'm not telling Bob about the flash drive - I don't want him to feel bad about himself. It's not the size of your hard drive...

Also keep a new version of Windows handy, because selling a kidney is harder than you think - eBay disapproves of that sort of auction.

Bob is dead, long live Bob.

Thanks, T. You done good.