Technology woes

My PC is sick. It’s been doing stuff it shouldn’t do, and then finally the display resolution went a little queer and I couldn’t do anything with it (oddly it happened after watching an episode of David Tennant’s Doctor Who on DVD… an intergalactic conspiracy or just a dodgy BBC DVD?)

After a couple of weeks of nothing but a few clicks, flashing of L.E.Ds, and the whirr of the power-supply, I bit the bullet and restored my PC from its manufacturer’s setting.
It works again, but I lost all the files and installed programmes. Now usually this would have caused me to cry out in despair – but experience has made me prudent.

I’ve been writing by computer since I was 12 years old – when I started bashing out short-stories on my Dad’s old 086PC (a computer with nowt but 50k of memory - without Windows - on a jittery word-processing package). Over the last 21 years I’ve had several computer malfunctions, some disastrous that wiped out short-stories or novels in a single spasm of machine-code, causing me to weep in misery; once I even obliterated a keyboard in my fury.

Whether you believe it opulent or good sense, I have two computers now – one that I use for the internet, and one that I call my “clean-machine” where I do my writing. The latter is a laptop (takes care of mobility issues) and is never hooked up to the internet, and nothing is ever imported. I’m too paranoid of viruses and dodgy programming code to risk fucking up the finished novels, drafts of books in progress and ideas stored upon it. Sure I back up – once every week – but like I said, I’m paranoid.

Thankfully it’s the internet PC that’s having the “senior moment”. But it has forced me to resort to internet cafés to load blog entries and I’ve had little chance to update the Macmillan New Writer’s blog.

My internet provider is sending me new discs to install, so service here and there should resume. In the meantime, the Macmillan New Writers blog has attracted some more members, and has an interesting debate around “writing to music”, which I’ve also written about here…