Friday, April 28, 2006
Laptop Crashes are Bad for Blogging
The title pretty much says it all. Actually it leaves out a lot of other things that come to a grinding halt when one's laptop dies.
Roughly 6 weeks ago, the LCD on my work laptop decided to flake out. Fortunately the hard drive was fine, but the experience reminded me how disruptive it is to switch machines (yes, I bought a new one) and to setup the environment.
I thought that the environment setup was going to be easy since I used it nearly every day. However, I had forgotten many of the tweaks and gotchas that pop up along the way. And of course, much of the setup process was not written down.
So here is my list of lessons learned so this will be less painful next time...
Roughly 6 weeks ago, the LCD on my work laptop decided to flake out. Fortunately the hard drive was fine, but the experience reminded me how disruptive it is to switch machines (yes, I bought a new one) and to setup the environment.
I thought that the environment setup was going to be easy since I used it nearly every day. However, I had forgotten many of the tweaks and gotchas that pop up along the way. And of course, much of the setup process was not written down.
So here is my list of lessons learned so this will be less painful next time...
- Keep key software together in a well-known place. I eventually found everything but digging through boxes and piles of stuff isn't very efficient.
- Keep license keys to key software together in a well-known place. I use a wallet program, eWallet, for storing a lot of this information. Unfortunately I wasn't always good about putting everything in there. Also, install your wallet program on another machine and keep that wallet reasonably up to date.
- Write down clear instructions for non-trivial setup steps. No, I didn't do a good job of that this time either, but I sure wish that I had. Remember, do as I say, not as I do.
- If you can afford it, have a backup machine that is as current as possible. I got the old laptop repaired so I have one now. This laptop will probably become another home computer, but I'm yanking the work hard drive and saving it for the next time this happens.
- Backup everything that is critical and then test your backups. I backup fairly often so this wasn't an issue. This fact gave me a small amount of comfort when I first realized that my laptop was crashing. If the hard drive had crashed then these backups would have been the only thing that saved me.
