Day 1403

Didn't wake up till 11.20. Watched Star Trek - The Squire of Gothos - excellent stuff. Somehow I knew that was the name of the ep as soon as the planet appeared on the pre-credit sequence, despite never having seen it before.

Got back to work on the computer; went out in the afternoon to PC World and got Upgrading and Repairing PCs. It cost £46, so I was pretty wary, but it is the best value manual I've ever bought. It clarified the hard disc prob (essentially that I had one drive upside-down!) and by 5pm I had the new 1,079M drive working. Copied the entire contents of the old 560M across to it. Got everything working and the box closed by 8pm - about 25 hours for the job.

Then I chanced on the 'Hard disc troubleshooting' section. It said a common fault with hard drives was the heads sticking, and that a cure was to jerk the drive (the whole thing) so as to unstick it. I applied this to my own 32M hard card - success! I was really pleased. My own computer is now up and working again. UaRPC has paid for itself already.

All this left me in a very positive mood and ready for next week.