The Changing Face of Computers

Years ago in college interactions with computers took place in special facility, climate controlled and populated by men in white lab coats.  Computer facilities had an air of a scared, hallowed, and special place where through the high priests of the computer facility you could submit your punch cards to run whatever program you had slaved over creating.  Now fast forward to today, computers are ubiquitous, even in the refrigerators at the Painted Pony Resort.  There is talk of the internet of things whereby all our handy appliances will be in communication with each other.  But what happens when your computer goes down and you live in a very rural environment?  This happened a couple of weeks ago when the hard drive on the desktop computer went south.  Knowing the utility of having backups, out came a little netbook which served as a functional backup for a several days.  Then suddenly it too took a nose dive,  a complete recovery of the netbook operating system was useless, it too was no longer functioning.  On to plan C, a very old and slow laptop running an early version of Windows XP.  Since guests were about to arrive and it was imperative that I have communication with the owner back east, the old laptop was the last hope.  After a night of work it was working, sort of.  It was possible to email, in a basic version of Yahoo mail, but nothing else was possible.

After letting the owner know of the communications problems he shipped an old laptop of his while I began investigating the desktop computer to get a list of parts needed for the repairs.  Having no place to work it was out to the open air garage when there was room to work on the desktop tower.  In contrast to the early college experience in the sacred halls of the computer facility, the garage is open to the elements, hot, and has a gravel floor.  So sitting on the ground with the desktop tower placed on top of some boxes and a handy leatherman tool the dis-assembly began.  Off with the covers and after several minutes with the air compressor the interior was clean.  Instead of grounding with straps and wires, I just held the metal case and stood barefooted on the gravel of the garage.  After identifying the important connections to the hard drive, out it came. 

Several days later, when the owners old laptop arrived it was online again to locate suitable replacement parts.  Of course in addition to the new hard drive a new operating system was required, so both Windows 8.1 and a new 2 TB hybrid hard drive were ordered along with cables to allow the installation of a solid state drive received as a Christmas present.  During this time guests came and went and cleaning the estate took up all the time, but eventually parts arrived via UPS and a day was taken to rebuild the desktop computer.  After installing the 2 new drives and loading a new operating system the desktop was up and running.  Loading the operating system as well as other programs on the solid state drive should decrease the amount of work the hybrid hard disk drive experiences and will hopefully lengthen its' lifespan.

Quite a change from the old days when computer access was a lab coat operation, now it is work on the computer where ever there is room, don't worry about climate control and the gravel garage floor will be suitable as workspace.  Special tools, bah, just whatever is in the tool box.

Now it is on to data recovery from the 2 old had disk drives.  Think I'll get the tractor and go out to grub some mesquite from the riverbed first.

The desktop computer back in service with a 700-900 year old Tularosa fillet rim bowl sculpture on top

Addendum:  The cables arrived that allowed the transfer of data from the old hard drive to the newly installed hard drive.  Quite a relief and it was possible to recover all the photographs that were stored on the old drive so all the aerial photographs of the boot heel as well as hiking photographs are now safely recovered and stored.  The hard drive partition with all the programs was bad but the data on other partitions was fine which is what allowed the recovery.