Well it had to happen one day, hard drive failure. I must have seen it
coming although there were no signs from my trusty four year old home built
PC, as I had ordered a new one a few days earlier. It suddenly wouldn't boot
fully into Windows. Not overly concerned as the data on the hard drive was
probably ok at this point, I went through my usual recovery tricks of XP
repair, rescue disk ,booting from various Linux disks and so on. Couldn't
even get to restore through DOS or Safe mode. But they all just continuously
started up then powered down just before they got to the Desktop. Now
previously I had helped my daughter (they don't do backups do they) recover
data from a non-bootable HD by using an IDE to USB drive converter - a
brilliant idea that worked well. So I got out the same kit and it fried my
HD! I think the 12v power supply must have failed and put out too much
voltage. (I thought it might be worth mentioning to warn people to be extra
careful if they need to go down that route).
Now luckily I had backed up all of my images (20 gigs worth!) 3 days before,
My and my wife's Docs a few months before and emails seemed to be still on
the Virgin Server. So not the tragedy it could have been but as you know- a
big pain starting a new system up from scratch which brings me on to my main
point - Windows 7 !!
After reading some reviews that it was much better than Vista I thought it
was probably time to upgrade from my longstanding and sometimes troublesome
XP. How disappointed I was. My first reaction is that it is less intuitive,
dumbed down and has actually lost features like a calendar and Outlook
Express. The Windows LiveMail I am using here is so cluttered and full of
stuff it's very unfriendly. This brings me to a question that has often been
asked and which I have previously taken little heed of in the past:-
What free email clients are any good? Simple is good as long as it deals
with Newsgroups.
Now to catch up with the weather - did someone mention cold while I was away
;-)

Dave