Recovering, one program and peripheral at a time

Here’s the first image shot by my freshly re-installed Logitech 250 webcam this morning.

I’m clawing my way back from a hard drive crash that necessitated the purchase of a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive and reinstalling all of my software.

I lost a bunch of photos in the crash and some other data, but it looks like I’ll be able to rescue almost all of my iTunes library, which would have otherwise amounted to the largest monetary loss.

It’s also an opportunity to update drivers and be rid of stuff that was slowing down my computer or otherwise impairing its performance. I’m not happy about it, but I’m not despondent either.

I had never opened the box on my Dell Studio XPS computer before yesterday because Dell said that would void the warranty. It’s out of warranty now, so no worries. I had some initial difficulty getting the computer to see the new hard drive and called the WD tech support line. The techie suggested I shift the drive to the other hard drive bay and call back.

Imagine my surprise when I realized the case has only one hard drive bay, despite the fact that I was assured it had two when I bought it. WTF?

Fortunately, I have external hard drive mounts to accommodate four more drives, plus USB ports to run several others.