Denise Goldberg's blog

Thursday, September 17, 2009

A computer kind of day

It was a good computer day, and it was a bad computer day. How can that be?

I think I'll start with the good. I'm posting this blog entry with my new baby traveling computer, a Dell Mini 10. Oh, you're right, my old baby PC was still in excellent shape. Sometimes computer envy rears its head though, and the thought of a 10" screen instead of the 7" screen on my old eee reached out and captured me. My new toy is slightly larger in size; if I remember correctly the difference was only 1/2 to 3/4 of an inch, not much. The bigger screen is wonderful, and the keys seem to be a bit more comfortable. The old computer is already traveling with a new owner, currently heading for a wander in Scandinavia.

It was a bad computer day too. I got home from work and powered my laptop on. The screen looked a bit odd as it was reloading its memory, and then, yikes! It spit out a nasty error... nmi parity check, memory parity error, hardware malfunction. Needless to say that doesn't make me happy. I did some searching for the error, and I've seen reports of both a hard drive problem and a memory problem.

Luckily, I have all of my files, photos and more, on an external drive plus backed up on the web. So I'm calm. I'm not happy to need to be dealing with this now, quickly, but I know that I won't lose anything. Calm...