Clean Up, Clean Up

After putting up with slower-than-molasses computer using, I decided to reformat my laptop. But first, I had to transfer files from my computer to The Man Beast's.

TMB was good enough to create a folder on my desktop called 'To Transfer' (that Man Beast...he's so creative with names, isn't he?). He then told me to put everything I wanted transferred into that folder.

Easy peasy, right?

Well, it would have been except for the fact that I haven't backed up my computer in several...um...years. Two to be exact. But in Computer Land, two years is a long time. In fact, my Dell Inspiron 1501 is practically ancient. But it suits it's purpose and even though I'd love a new computer, this one will do.

After looking through hundreds of pictures, tons of documents (many of them my own work from my homeschooling days), and some slide show movies, that folder was over 14 gigs. Total transfer time: 4 hours. Ooops.

Today, while the kiddos and I were at church, The Man Beast reformatted my computer. But I couldn't get on it right away. No way.

Next came the installation of the various programs. Then TMB decided he wanted to download Linux and install it onto the PS3. That was an eight hour download, so we had to conserve bandwidth. That meant no surfing for Iva.

Long story short, Linux didn't exactly work (he's going to try again tonight after we go to bed). So, I've spent that past couple of hours deleting 4,000 emails from gmail so that I could import them to Thunderbird (didn't work), importing my address book (worked) , my bookmarks(worked) and my RSS feeds (didn't work). I figure a 50% success rate on importing material isn't too shabby.

And as far as my hundreds of pictures - I'll keep those on TMB's computer and use his burner to burn them to disk.

My goal is to keep this lovely, ancient dinosaur as clean as possible. We'll see how long it lasts.

Oh, FYI, for those who might not already know, Thunderbird is a Mozilla product. It's a free mail client that is very similar to Outlook (not Outlook Express). I use Mozilla's other product, their web browser: Firefox. It is tons faster than Internet Explorer ever thought of being and all the computer geeks says its more secure. Whatever that means. All I know is the interface is almost exactly like Internet Explorer - right down to the tabbed browsing - and is super fast.

I'm all about fast. I'm a very impatient person. Check it out: www.mozilla.com

Until next time...