Well this weekend has been a total bust when it comes to the technology I use at home. I’ve spent the better part of the weekend trying to get everything back in working order and its taken hours to get there (I’m still doing updates right now). I was hoping for a nice quiet weekend of playing video games and watching movies but I guess that didn’t go exactly to plan.

First thing that went wrong was my iPhone completely crashing. I don’t know what caused this to occur but while I was out with my wife, my iPhone would only show the Apple logo. No matter what I did to try and get it unlocked (and there isn’t a lot you CAN do with an iPhone away from a computer to reset it), it just wouldn’t budge. I decided to turn it off and head home and do some research on trying to get it unstuck. No matter what I read the same solution kept on popping up which was to reset the iPhone and reinstall everything. I own a 32GB iPhone and its almost full so needless to say it took quite a while to get everything in order again. Doing a restore from scratch requires moving a lot of my icons on the iPhone around since it was restored in alphabetical order and I certainly don’t use my apps that way. On top of all that, I had to re-jailbreak my phone and install all the apps that went with it. The configuration wasn’t so tough like a Windows Mobile phone but it was still a pain to do on a Saturday afternoon.

On Saturday night my desktop computer started acting really funny. It was all slow and it wouldn’t do anything when I tried clicking on programs that I normally used. I decided to try a few things from my old tech support days to try and get things running again but nothing I tried worked. I also started to notice a clicking noise from my hard drive which normally isn’t a good sign. I ended up deleting my entire C:\ drive (good thing I don’t keep data on there) and tried re-installing Windows 7. I had to let it run all night long in order to install properly and that was another indication something was wrong because it doesn’t take that long to install Windows. Once everything loaded up, I tried to run a disk diagnostic on the drive and lo and behold I found bad sectors. Rather than risk it, I decided to replace the drive. My HP desktop was my first new computer in years so I had to read up a little to figure out the specs and what kind of hardware was in it so I bought the right kind of drive. Cracking that baby open was a cinch and I only needed a Philips head screw driver to take the drives out.

I was able to isolate my C drive and remove it and I went to Best Buy and got a new drive (1TB too!) really cheap. I’m currently in the process of trying to put all my programs back on my computer but I know that I’m going to miss something while I’m doing all of this. I’m getting the bare essentials first and then I’ll work on my nice to have apps like my VM’s. Needless to say, this weekend has been pretty painful. I’m considering buying Acronis True Image to make snap shops of my computer system drive so I can do restores. The trick is trying to get everything I used to have on my computer and then taking a snapshot. Plenty of people tout the system restore point but I’ve had nothing but trouble using that feature so I’m going to look elsewhere. Windows 7 Ultimate does have a newer back up feature but I don’t think it takes images of your drives. Now what I really need is a SATA enclosure or something so I can try and wipe out my old drive.

Oh well, at least I was able to upgrade my computers storage so I can put even more crap on it. I will probably be slow in reinstalling everything, I want to play some Assasins Creed II this weekend