Three days in a row I manage to arrive early for Morning Prayer in College, but I still need more sleep to compensate for it. Another day of rain, commuting between St Mike's an CBS office. I enjoy the contrast between the two environments and the things I have to deal with in both. The Principal's laptop started to give him grief this morning, and he was convinced it had died, and was about to send it off to Staples to be repaired. I asked if he's back up his data, and he hadn't, so I volunteered to try and access it using my treasured Linux on a USB stick to de-cant the vital stuff. Fortunately I had a empty spare 8GB drive and crossing my fingers that it would suffice, set about the task following the evening's Methodist Covenant service in chapel. It's one of my favourite liturgical celebrations for its unique prayer content.
When I switched on his laptop I was greeted by the usual error reporting black and white page that gives the option of running a repair or starting normally. Often the fault report related to an imperfect or an interrupted shutdown, that has left a few files open that should be shut. Windows 7 is quite tolerant of such small faults and repairs them on the fly as it boots up and re-opens your choice of programs, so it's the first thing to try rather than run a repair job which takes hours to complete a faultfinding scan before showing you any options. It's a pain, because it tricks you into thinking the machine is dead, rather than working scrupulously. The user interface could do with improvement to help tech anxiety management.
It booted up normally. I ran a virus update and check scan, then decanted five gigs of data to the empty stick. USB sticks are slow after using a portable hard drive, it took forty minutes and I was late arriving home for supper with one of the new Steiner teachers as a guest. Next mind, it was satisfying to have avoided a data disaster.
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