What?!

Our computer died, that's what.

It had been struggling to keep up for about a year now. A year of us going 'la, la, la not listening!' because there were other more pressing concerns, like food, shelter and princess clothes. Still, the fact that our entire library of photos was stored on a hard drive that was sending out routine warning messages was a bit alarming. Our 'start-up disk' was nearly full, which sounds dire even if you don't know where to look for a start-up disk.

I deleted some of Lance's arty photos.

This created the barest flicker of improvement. We soldiered on for a few more months but the warning messages became more insistent, the proclamations more dire. Our 10 year old G5 was beginning to rev like a classic car. It would lie dormant for hours and then make churning data crunching noises at 3am. It was obviously finding some of our content hard to stomach.

I deleted photos of Lance's side of the family. ** For those of his family members reading this blog. Not you. Never! Duh!

It was no good, the end was clearly nigh. I invested in a back-up hard drive. It dutifully copied all our excel files (all seven of them), it manfully ploughed through our .docs. It turned to our jpegs, our vast back catalog of Anna and Lucy baby pictures, and threw in the towel. I think there may be 16,000 images and quite frankly who knows if they were on the back-up hard drive or not. I could never say for sure, and tried not to think of that movie of Anna's first steps being fried in to oblivion. I thought I'd backed it all up - but 16,000 images - can any hard drive the size of a pack of cards capture all that saccharine cuteness?

The final death throe came courtesy of MyLittlePony.com - I kid you not. Every time we booted up our printer it would spit out 15 copies of Rainbow Dash before that critical lease document. Obviously an Apple has it's limits. One morning it refused to boot up. Our computer was in a coma. It took us about three days to admit defeat, three days of us hoping we could surprise it in to action, of pleading our financial straights to a dead machine. My blog was hanging by a thread. 3, maybe 4 people around the world started casting around for something else to fill that 5 minutes of a Tuesday morning.

Fortunately we have an Apple store in this swanky gelt-hole of a town. We hightailed it there and asked for the smallest Cox's Orange Pippin of an Apple. They sold us a Mini, liberated and transferred all our files (yay!) and then told us our screen was most likely too old to connect.

*Sigh*

So now we have an iMac, and a *free* printer that they threw in for our troubles.

I resolve to post a lot more frequently, two maybe three times a month (!) so the google ads on my sidebar (please click!) will make it all worthwhile....

In the meantime, if any of you have any photo storing suggestions - I'm all ears.