It's been a month since I re-installed everything in my office. When I did that, I connected the data port of the Uninterruptible Power Supply to Desktop 3. A pop-up in my system tray this morning reminded me how important having a UPS is:

100 million hard drives fail every year. I’ve had my share, including one last Christmas eve.

When was the last time you backed up your notebook? Your home desktop? Your work PC?

500 gigabyte external USB drives are selling for $99 to $129 on sale. That’s enough to back up a notebook and most people’s desktop(s).

InfoComm is a trade show about audio/visual (A/V).

For years it has been the place to see projectors.  They were famous for their projector shootouts back when projectors were $10,000+ and put out a famous 400 lumens (maybe).

By CES (Consumer Electronics Show) standards it is a relatively small show, which makes it large by most other show's standards.

So about half way through the process of PC Mover loading the "moving van" file, Desktop 4 took its final nosedive. This time the drive failure is total and absolute.

Alternative attempts to recover the drive using copies of the files made into the network didn't work either, along the way I think I fried a second drive making me think the problem is in Desktop 4's power supply. So Desktop 4 is headed to complete and total retirement.

The data was backed up. It was the programs (A LOT of programs) I was trying to avoid re-installing.

Last November, CompUSA had a 17" HP notebook on sale for $449 on Black Friday (the big sales the day after Thanksgiving). So I switched from the notebook I had in the Family room to it.

It's called BigHP on the network.

The timing was good, because son Chris' notebook failed in December so he got the old notebook. By pulling the drive from his old notebook we recovered everything he had.