It’s always something. My marvelous home-built computer was wobbling last week and, finally, fatally crashed (sigh).

Fortunately yours truly had matters (mostly) in hand. I had not just backups but a backup computer. In fact, I had a home-built machine purpose-built to run 64-bit Windows Vista already built, installed, and just waiting for some good time to put it into service.

And, on top of it, I followed the advice/marketing of the guys over at Luxology and bought a Drobo storage system to which I had just recently backed up my entire work directory (which includes all my novels, stories, screenplays, Business stuff, et cetera).

As my pretty machine had given me some intimation of problems earlier, I also went out and found good backup software for my e-mail and Firefox bookmarks (I can’t recommend MozBackup too much!)

The bad news was that the new computer, having sat for several months, decided to get snarky and wouldn’t boot, had to be re-installed and was generally determined to let me know how much it did not appreciate playing second fiddle to a lesser (but quieter) machine.

The machine in question and I spent many, many hours undergoing therapy (none involving hammers or other acts of man-machine violence, thankfully) until we finally came to a suitable arrangement. That is, it worked and I was happy.

Now I’d built this newer machine partly because I was expecting to do a lot more graphics work and needed more horsepower (faster CPU, more RAM, faster and bigger hard drives) and I knew that for some of the things I wanted to do, I’d need to bite the bullet and move up to 64-bit Windows.

But… By golly does it fly! This computer is way noticeably faster than my old (and still respected) computer.

Now, of course, my laptop has started acting up. I am, at this time, just giving it lots of TLC and reminding it that there is a recession, that it’s really not that old and that I was never really expecting it to run cutting-edge graphics packages and that I’ve only been looking at other laptops for fun. (Fingers crossed.)