Hardware

So Jfer's old Dell Inspiron finally kicked the bucket. Her hard disk had a head crash at which point we figured out that we hadn't backed up her machine for over a year! And recovering the data would take $1200! Um, thanks but no thanks.

Obviously, I hadn't learned anything from that one unfortunate incident when, in the late '80s, I did a del *.* on my dad's PC whilst at C:\ rather than in a sub-directory like I thought. That was before my dad discovered the concepts of sub-directories, so I really, really screwed up a lot of his stuff...

Anyway, I had been thinking about coming up with a reasonable backup solution for our computers at home. One that didn't require user intervention (i.e. plugging in an external USB drive on a regular basis) so I started looking at NAS devices. After a bit of research, I decided to go with Infrant's ReadyNAS, because of it's ease of use, RAID support, flexibility and raving reviews. And it doesn't hurt that it comes with plenty of Retrospect licenses for both Macs and Windows. Right now, I've got a couple of 500MB drives in it, and it may be a while before I have to add on.

As far as Jfer is concerned, she lucked out and got a new MacBook out of it. I also got a great Parallels and Windows XP bundle which integrates very nicely.

I must say, Jfer's Mac is a sweet, sweet piece of hardware. Much, much faster than any of my computers, both at home and work. I hadn't used an Apple laptop in a long time, and this is definitely much nicer than any of the PC laptops I ever used. It's a bit freaky when you run XP in full screen mode on it. The only thing I miss is a proper right-click button on the track pad, but you get used to the two-fingers-and-click gesture.

I guess one good thing out of all of this is that I no longer have to worry about coming up with a birthday present for her.