13/2/2006
I think this one is going to be a geeky post - if you've got no interest in cloning hard disks it may be worth skipping this :-). However, I do feel rather cheered by the process - it goes a little something like this:
I popped over to ebay and bought us a 160GB hard drive, cos the old 20 gig one on the family computer was getting very tight for space. Then the problem becomes that of copying all the contents of the old drive onto the new one - you cant just copy the files and folders, because of various bits and bobs relating to the MBR (basically Window$ wont start if you dont follow some other approach). So I do a quick bit of googling, and find that disk cloning is entirely possible, and can be done with free software too (thats free as in beer, not free as in speech). In the end I used XXcopy.
Obviously the process didn't go entirely smoothly, that would probably be against God - its certainly not the natural order of things where computers are concerned. However, the only major problem I ran in to was with floppy disks (suprise surprise) and it seems that its all the fault of the particular drive. Not to put too fine a point on it, the floppy drive in that computer is f*cked. Once this had been established, though, it was but the work of a moment to swap that drive out and put in a working one for the time, and it's hardly a long-term issue given how frequently any of us use floppies (thank heavens for USB drives).
To cut a long story short, after that it all went according to the instructions from XXcopy, and we now have an enormous hundred and seven gigabytes free (until that, in turn, proves too little...). And, into the bargain, I get the 20GB hard drive to put in one of my old boxes that I play around on - given that they have an average hard drive capacity of about 6GB this is a big step forward. Problem is, now I have to chose which one to upgrade - but that's the good sort of choice to agonise over ;-)
6/2/2006
Mr H (head of 6th form) has just introduced me (among others) to the terrors of Oxbridge applications. I dont want to go for at least a year and a half, probably 2 and a half years, but I already seem to have immediate deadlines. One of the worst parts of it is I don't really know which college I want to apply to, or even for certain which subject (torn between theology & natural sciences [because those two naturally go so well together...]). The horror of the thing is that it seems so difficult to get in, and thus competitive, that every other applicant is potentially your opponent - it's made me so paranoid :-(.
And now I cant even find Mr H to ask him the questions I need answering... all is woe ;-)