What a disaster

We needed to buy a new computer for our manager to use in her office which will soon be built in a corner of the packing shed. I ordered one from the Dell website and it arrived last Thursday while Terry was out. I spent a couple of hours that afternoon setting it up for her, installing programmes and making sure it could access the files she would need on our network. Then Terry came home and saw this lovely spiffy new machine with Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 and a 19” monitor (internet ordered special) and decided that it would be better if his old machine was put in the rather dusty environment of the shed and the new one was put on his desk. That way if the dust overwhelmed the computer too quickly it wouldn’t matter so much. Fair enough.

But as I’ve written before, I’m still trying to get the new website finished and I begrudge any work time not spent on it. So I asked him the next morning which had priority, getting the new machine ready for him and his old one ready for the shed or working on the website. He decided I should work on the computers. Oh, dear. It was hot, I was tired, I was working on two computers at once and it was a disaster. I clicked on the wrong button and managed to delete ALL of our email from the last ten years! That email has followed us from machine to machine, from Eudora to Outlook to Pegasus to Thunderbird and we haven’t lost any til now… fortunately we had a back up, unfortunately it was 3 days old and it wasn’t easy to restore. it took me four hours to get things back to nearly normal and we had lost 3 days worth of email including some seed orders. Oh Well.

It took all Friday and all day Sunday to get the new machine set up for Terry and the old one set up for our manager. I backed-up all the data off the old machine onto an external hard drive and wiped all unessential programmes. It certainly zips along now. And I found mention of a dust filter for pcs in New Zealand PC World so we’ve arranged with our handy computer tech to install one for us. So maybe the computer will last a while in the shed after all.

One thing we did on Saturday was to install the curtain rod and tie back for the new curtain over the ranch slider. Don’t you love the fabric?