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Monday, February 8, 2010
The Machine Age or Paying the Price
It’s funny how quickly humans can come to rely on and then take some things for granted.
It wasn’t that many years ago I remember struggling along with 14.4 bps modems to upload meager web pages with little functionality. Today, at least those of us with real broadband access, move along at the speed of light among an internet with streaming audio and video. The Internet has become content rich and bandwidth dependant.
In December CCN suffered a hard drive failure on the main of three computers. The machine began glitching and then an error message on boot up told me the drive was failing. As luck would have it, I had installed an identical 500 gigabyte in the machine. I transferred everything to that drive and purchased a terabyte drive as a backup. Everything was working fine until last week.
At the first of the year I began moving files and creating new ones for 2010. Remember I said it was funny how humans take things for granted. Back in the 14.4 modem days I couldn’t ever see that I would fill a 100 megabyte drive, now I regularly move files larger than a gigabyte. And that was the cause of last week’s problem.
Moving large files makes large holes in a hard drive making defragging a real necessity. I’ve been trying to do that monthly, but end of year maintenance caused me not to get it finished in January. By the first part of February I was having problems with everything slowing down: web pages, machine functions, you name it. The result was to forego publishing last Tuesday to concentrate on machine issues.
I’ve been trying to catch up ever since and this past weekend I think I finally did. Now if I can just devote some time to other projects.
Robert Jump
Editor
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