Gaming Laptop V1.1
Apr. 21st, 2016 04:44 pmMy gaming laptop has returned with a brand-new hard drive, and though it’s taken a couple of days of copying files and re-installing things, it is (knock wood) pretty much back to normal.
The first time I set up everything it was exciting: New computer! New OS! Arrange everything to my liking! The second time was just a chore, because I had everything set up just the way I wanted it, and now I had to do it all over again. This, mind you, is totally irrational, and if I buy a new desktop to replace our existing (six-year-old) one, I’m sure I’ll be excited again.
I had this irrational hope that only the SSD failed and I wouldn’t need to put everything back on the HDD. (The former has the OS and installed programs; the latter has all of my files.) This turned out to be wrong, as they apparently replaced them both. It wasn’t a big deal—I have backups of virtually everything—but it was annoying. As far as I can tell, I lost a couple of months of my expenses log and video game log (which I can reconstruct, it’ll just be a pain), and there might have been a few links or random downloads that I’ve forgotten and therefore won’t re-find.
Speaking of irrational hopes: Apparently I put too much faith in the Steam cloud to keep my saved games. At least for the couple of games I pulled down (notably ARR’s much-loved Crash Drive 2), my achievements and playtime were saved, but everything in-game is gone. So now I’ll need to unlock everything again. (I’m glad I wasn’t midway through a 60-hour game or anything; I lost a bunch of partial playthroughs that are relatively simple to make up or that I’ll use as an excuse to cull the games. It’s just irritating.)
And once I have all of the files re-organized, it’s been six months, so I probably should update my primary backup drive again.
The first time I set up everything it was exciting: New computer! New OS! Arrange everything to my liking! The second time was just a chore, because I had everything set up just the way I wanted it, and now I had to do it all over again. This, mind you, is totally irrational, and if I buy a new desktop to replace our existing (six-year-old) one, I’m sure I’ll be excited again.
I had this irrational hope that only the SSD failed and I wouldn’t need to put everything back on the HDD. (The former has the OS and installed programs; the latter has all of my files.) This turned out to be wrong, as they apparently replaced them both. It wasn’t a big deal—I have backups of virtually everything—but it was annoying. As far as I can tell, I lost a couple of months of my expenses log and video game log (which I can reconstruct, it’ll just be a pain), and there might have been a few links or random downloads that I’ve forgotten and therefore won’t re-find.
Speaking of irrational hopes: Apparently I put too much faith in the Steam cloud to keep my saved games. At least for the couple of games I pulled down (notably ARR’s much-loved Crash Drive 2), my achievements and playtime were saved, but everything in-game is gone. So now I’ll need to unlock everything again. (I’m glad I wasn’t midway through a 60-hour game or anything; I lost a bunch of partial playthroughs that are relatively simple to make up or that I’ll use as an excuse to cull the games. It’s just irritating.)
And once I have all of the files re-organized, it’s been six months, so I probably should update my primary backup drive again.