CONNECTION ADDICTION

Being disconnected from a machine, if it were an iron lung, for instance,  poses serious consequences. Being disconnected from my computer, the Compac Laptop I've used almost exclusively for my blog these past two years, has left me anxious and insecure. How can I function without this device? Silly, I know. I have approximately 4,000 pictures on this machine. An entire book manuscript is in my Compac. It seems a good portion of my recent life's effort resides there, and I had no idea how upsetting it would be to contemplate its untimely death. It put-put-putted, grew hot to the  touch, and began gasping its last breaths.

Yesterday, after doing some online trouble shooting, we took it to the Geeks.  The processor, the likely culprit,  slowly "frying", even they can't fix.  They would have to send it out.  I decided to buy an external hard drive, download everything and load it into the little Toshiba I bought last December before I went to Thailand.
  I'm very grateful to that little machine-now. I've been able to blog somewhat over these last few weeks, without the resources encapsulated in the Compac. The mini-Toshiba glitches with an over-sensitive finger pad; I couldn't get my email because of connection problems. It doesn't show my pictures in a comfortably large format. But, it saved me from making a hasty decision on my long term replacement and contains a 140 gigabyte hard drive.

I own an external Western Digital hard drive, pictured above. It weighs about 2 pounds, has a 500 gigbyte capacity and is nearly full. Kind of boggles the brain that at one time "we" thought 64 megabytes was all we would need on a computer. (Remember Commodore 64?) Next to the Western Digital sits this tiny, about 6 ounce, Clickfree Drive. It also has 500 gigabytes. Its advertised as clickfree because you plug it into your old computer and it automatically downloads everything you have. It was like trouncing down memory lane to watch all my pictures load by list, Atchafalaya Alligator Tour, Chiracahua National Monument, Old Family Photos, flit, flit, flit. Oh, rescue feels soooooo good.
Two hours on the phone with AT&T and my connection problems are solved. Hey, I'm back in business.