Wednesday 24 September 2008

Pic of the day: Actually it is designed for lying flat, I just stood it up for the photo.

A terabyte here...

...a terabyte there, a terabyte everywhere with Western Digital "WD Elements" 1TB USB external hard disk.

The computer shopping fad has officially begun. This was to be expected, since I had more money in my bank account than I needed to pay my bills. Also, I haven't bought a new desktop computers since last November. No, I haven't bought a new computer today either, but this just may be a preparation for it. The new external hard disk has room for nearly 1 TB of data, or 1000 GB. (Actually we computer people tend to think in binary when it comes to data storage, so to us 1 TB would be 1024 GB, each of which would be 1024 MB, and 1 MB would be 1024 kB, with each kilobyte containing 1024 bytes, 1 byte approximately corresponding to one character. That's a lot of characters to write; but if you store multimedia, you don't need a lifetime to fill it up.)

The first thing I did after unpacking it was to back up the old "grandfather computer" in the living room. I call it so because it is two "generations" older than the computer I currently use the most. No, wait. Actually that was when I had the Oblivion Monster, which melted down last November and was replaced by the quad-core I have now. So it is really a great-grandfather machine now. I don't use it much. It is painfully slow, because like most idiots I kept upgrading the programs to ever new versions, which were of course made for newer computers. Actually I think it wasn't all that fast when it was new either, but we were not used to better back then. And I had already begun my habit of buying cheap low-end computers twice as often instead of saving up (or borrowing, back then) for the newest. Today, even cheap computers are fast. I love living in the future.

My plan is to load the WD Elements disk with all the contents of not only the grandfather computer, but the old bedroom computer which is now almost never started up (because it crashes if I run anything heavier than a browser). Then the Dell laptop which is currently pretending to be a desktop. It is a Dell, it has already begun breaking down before the warranty is expired. (Norwegian laws give a longer warranty than Dell does.) But since only the screen is breaking down, I can use it just fine as a desktop, albeit a slow one. I already have a newer laptop, the touchscreen thingy. I bought that during the hiatus, I guess.

Some time after all that backing up, I have a vague feeling that I will buy another desktop computer. If so, it will take over the duty that the old desktop computer had, running laissez-faire sims neighborhoods while I do other things, and being used by my imaginary female companion while playing City of Heroes. I may have different Windows accounts for each of my old machines (some of which also had more than one Windows account, the bedroom machine in particular had contents from even older machines). This is mostly for The Sims 2, which lets you have separate data sets for each Windows account but use the same installation of the game. That way I would be able to continue stories from long ago but with all the newest expansion packs. Of course, before I have time for that, it is likely that Sims 3 is out and I will quietly forget it all. Sims 3 is expected in February already. But that is very, very far into the future. Who knows what the world looks like then, if we are even here.