Preparedness for when

GreyQueen

Wow, MG, that looks gorgeous. I wants one! Do you have a pattern, please?

maryb, as of Tues evening, I've had a clone of my entire hard-drive on a removable hard-drive, done by my Computer Wizard. Not at all sure how it was done ( I was watching tho) but I feel safer for having it. Removable hard-drives seem to be sold on the high street at 500 GB size. Bearing in mind that my pooter has an 80 GB hard-drive and 57 of those are empty, that's a lot of unused giggly-wotsits. The clone, and a space for another clone, have been partitioned off within the 500 GB drive.

I'm not quite sure why they required to be separated from whatever else I might want to save on there in the future (nuatha, do you know?) but I expect it's like having a cutlery tray in the kitchen drawer, to keep the data from getting tangled up. I mean, if your spoon-data and your fork-data got entangled because they were rattling around in a huge data-drawer, bad things would probably happen.........:rotfl:

When the Wiz comes back in a few days, I'll ask him to explain in simple words and take notes.

I don't intend to buy another PC before I have to and this one is too feeble to support the newest versions of Windows. Hence getting it fixed as necessary - the Wiz will have a new power unit in a few days, when he's finished with his latest batch of freelance work.

Trigger's Computer - it's perfectly adequate for my needs and it's not worth anyone's ruptured back to drag away. CRT monitor weighs 21 kg. It's a S@msung and has a lovely pic, though; I watch rented movies on it from time to time.

Re electricity usage, my tiny household is using 2 kWh per 24 hours. That's an old desktop for a few hours a day (with the monitor powered off if I'm away from the screen for more than a few mins), a very efficient Miele fridge and a A rated tabletop freezer. Plus an energy-saving bulb in each room, only one of which will be on at a time.

I boil the kettle on the gas stove, use a leccy toothbrush, and light use of an iron and vacuum plus running the washer about 10 times per month.

I've paid a price premium on my appliances to get the most energy efficient models I can find at the time, the rationale being that leccy will continue to climb in price over the life of the appliance. Overall, I think my judgement call is working well for me.

I guess with more money being spent on electricity, the energy effiency rating of the appliance will be of more interest to shoppers looking to replace their white goods.

Frugalsod, I'm glad you've confirmed that you can make fridges and freezers run more efficiently by limiting the opening and closing of the doors. I do this and people have taken the p before now, as in not believing it makes a difference. You've vindicated me. Blinking crazes me when I see people opening a fridge door for the milk and leaving it open whilst they put the milk in their tea in an unhurried fashion.

jk0

I have done a lot of similar things to you GQ with one exception: The kettle.

The reason being that while a gas hob kettle costs less to run, there is wear & tear on your cooker control every time you have have a cup of tea.

Now, imagine how many electric kettles of water you could boil for the cost of one cooker control repair?

(I also have a gas hob kettle in the cupboard for power cuts, & am trying to persuade my mother to let me buy her one.)

[Deleted User]

Memory_Girl wrote: »

Elantan - its done!!!

And it works brilliantly!!! Ten minutes boiling and five and a half hours in the beastie and Beef n Barley stew was done to a turn. Hot enough to eat too!!!



Now - no more challenges for a while - got a poorly DS1 this weekend to take care of

Time for a gin I think!!!

MG

That looks great. I have a commercial variation of this made in NZ called a "Quarter Acre Pot" and use it all the time. I just use slow cooker recipes for it.

nuatha

GreyQueen wrote: »

maryb, as of Tues evening, I've had a clone of my entire hard-drive on a removable hard-drive, done by my Computer Wizard. Not at all sure how it was done ( I was watching tho) but I feel safer for having it.

(What she's not saying Mary is that its only taken since Yule to do it )
Have you also got a bootable CD/DVD with the cloning software on?

Removable hard-drives seem to be sold on the high street at 500 GB size. Bearing in mind that my pooter has an 80 GB hard-drive and 57 of those are empty, that's a lot of unused giggly-wotsits. The clone, and a space for another clone, have been partitioned off within the 500 GB drive.

in your oodles of wotsits you have space for a couple of Microsoft downloads http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=25129 and http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42220 These are XPs Service Pack 3 and Windows Security Updates respectively.

I'm not quite sure why they required to be separated from whatever else I might want to save on there in the future (nuatha, do you know?) but I expect it's like having a cutlery tray in the kitchen drawer, to keep the data from getting tangled up. I mean, if your spoon-data and your fork-data got entangled because they were rattling around in a huge data-drawer, bad things would probably happen.........:rotfl:

I'd do it that way to minimise the chances that they'd be accidentally over written - but I'd also be using two physically separate drives. Generally I would do a backup of the system, a separate backup of the data (on different partitions) then do the whole thing over with a separate drive.

When the Wiz comes back in a few days, I'll ask him to explain in simple words and take notes.

I don't intend to buy another PC before I have to and this one is too feeble to support the newest versions of Windows. Hence getting it fixed as necessary - the Wiz will have a new power unit in a few days, when he's finished with his latest batch of freelance work.

Makes sense to me - there again I have a couple of older machines in regular use, as in too old to be able to run XP.
Throwing decent working kit away has never made any sense to me, its neither environmentally or pocket friendly.

GreyQueen

Morning all.

Thanks, nuatha. I have a copy of pmagic on CD which is what my Wiz was using and boy was he cross that they've started charging for it; went back to the Aug 2013 version to get it for free. I need to ask some more questions and slow the Wiz down to my speed (or lack of ) of thinking to understand it. I'm clever, but not in an IT way.

I've had SP3 for donkey's years, or is this a new version? And not sure about Essentials, I use it anyway and it updates itself, will it stop updating because it's running on an XP pooter?

I'm glad you have elderly pooters running. I think you'd like my Wiz, he's a very alternative sort of bloke, does lots of techy stuff for gigs plus outside broadcasts, works on small biz computers in the middle of the night so they don't lose valuable trading time.

He also uses old computers at home, although he's running Linux apart from one he keep on Windows for those times he does coding. Because he isn't selling stuff, and he mends pooters for favoured peeps for 'a drink' plus cost for the part (and if he has a usable old part from his salvage, he'll want to use that for free) he isn't motivated to tell you that you need to junk good hardware. We've previously had a long discussion about whether this pooter could be uprated to Win 7 or 8 but with a 1.8 chip it would be very awkward. It's happily running twice as much RAM as the manufacturers intended, tho.

Gosh, when I think that in 2002 this was state-of-the-art and a powerful gaming machine and now it's a dinosaur. Moore's Law, eh?

And you are quite correct; I've had that spare drive parked on my desk since 31/12/13, and it took me months of procrastination to get as far as the techy shop.

jk0, hear what you say about the burners but I have an old gas stove, have had it since 1998 and it was a 'good used' one back then from a shop. The kettle goes on the fast boil oversized burner, which is only used for that and big quantities of water such as a pan for pasta or rice. Shows no sign of weakening thus far, and the battery-powered ignition is fine.

I still have the elderly electric jug kettle and it still works, as a back-up, if necessary. But I live in a very limescale prone area and the working life of electric kettles is very brief. SuperGran, who lives on the other side of the Towers, rants about kettles as they don't last her more than 12-18 months regardless of whether they are the dear ones or the cheapest cheapies. even with descaling treatments and those wire balls inside them. And she drinks far less tea than I do. She perseveres with electric kettles as she only has an electic stove.

My mother, across the region, was so taken by my gas top kettle that she bought one just the same as she'd been trashing leccy kettles due to limescale regularly, and we are a family which hates waste. I find that the dome-shape of these, with their wide base bringing the maximum amount of surface into contact with the heat source is very efficient. I cook on the gas, inc baking bread, as well as boil the kettle and am using 1 unit of gas per month, which is a neglible expense.

Today, I'm having a leisurely start and then running some errands (making sure not too much of my money is in da bank) then will go up to the allotmentino. My autumn-sown broad beans are the talk of the town and flowering. If the flowers all set pods and the pods fill well, I should have a bumper crop. I think my Dad, a keen gardener, disapproves that I 'got away with' sowing them like that as we had a mild winter. He keeps going on about how lucky I was to get away with it. But I have had them overwinter before and seen them about 8 inches tall wearing little hats of snow and they survived a few days of bitter temps.

The February-sown broad beans appeared last weekend but the peas weren't up then. I shall be scrutinising the ground for them. They're an early variety but we have had problems on our site on previous years with meece stealing them from the ground. As in about 90% of them. :( I have tried to cut out the labour-intensive sowing them in t.p. tubes under cover bit but won't know if I've been successful. I have more saved peas if necessary so could always re-sow.

We shall see. Gardening is a never ending challenge with a constantly moving set of variables. It's fascination never dulls for those of us who like to be out in nature (and clouting the gastropod parts of Nature with a spade when they're in the veggie patch). We've seen lots of peacock butterflies this year already. Lovely things.

VJsmum

armyknife wrote: »

I don't have a problem with the TV licence, the BBC output seems to be pretty good value for money.

I agree, between the BBC TV stations (which I don't watch that often, but enjoy being ad free when I do); everything on I player and the
Radio I think it's pretty good value too. I appreciate that you don't need the licence for the latter - but how would some of these excellent programmes get made otherwise? I appreciate the moral argument, and some of the collection methods need questioning, but i also think it's a small amount to pay to get the quality of most of what they put out.

GreyQueen

I appreciate your argument, VJsMum, and can see the validity of your point of view. But not all households have equal resources and the TV license fee is a much larger proportion of a poor household's resources than it is of an affluent household's resources.

And, unlike very many other things, there isn't a concessionary rate for those scraping along on something like income support. When I worked as a CAB advisor, people with very limited resources were having to allocate some of those to the TVL.

Yes, we can make the valid argument that a telly is a luxury item, not a necessity. I certainly don't miss having one, and my broadband's cost is 50% below the cost of a TV license and I know which of the two I'd rather have. But many people can't or don't get much out of reading, live alone and lack funds or health to socialise and the TV is an important part of their lives. And the license is hurting them. It has been described by some as a 'tax on the poor' with impoverished people, typically women on benefits, being jailed for license evasion.

We live in a society where killers and rapists escape with non-custodial sentences and we're prepared to jail people for this? Madness.

And, I note when I do look at TV schedules, that the BBC keep regurgitating repeats, sometime decades-old repeats. Surely if 20% or 30% of content was previously produced and and broadcast, we could argue that it was also previously paid for by the license in earlier years, and that the repeats ought to be averaged out and the license reduced by the percentage?

I get annoyed by Auntie Beeb hiding behind the grubbyments skirts when it suits them and wasting the license-payers money on bloated and unnecessary expenditures, whilst also wanting to function as a global commercial player in terms of broadcast and publishing media.

The UK is an international laughing-stock because we have a TV license and an unelected upper chamber.

Si_Clist

GreyQueen wrote: »

Gardening is a never ending challenge with a constantly moving set of variables.

Indeed. In our case it's often a triumph of optimism over experience too ...

Frugalsod

maryb wrote: »

I keep a lot of information on my computer and although I have printed out a lot, there's a fair bit still in digital form which I like to keep available. So backing up my computer is important. Imagine my horror when I realised that I had not actually got round to making a set of recovery discs for my laptop when I replaced it six months ago - bad me!

However when I tried to burn a set, the utility crashes. It's definitely the software not the discs, it gets stuck on initialising or I get a this program has stopped working message.

Am a bit worried about this to put it mildly. I have made a system image on an external hard drive but I don't know if that would be as good as a set of recovery discs. I know it's better in some ways because it would keep all the programs I have installed since getting the laptop. But I find it helps to do a clean reinstall of Windows very now and then and I don't think I can do that without recovery discs.

Does anyone know? I'm summoning up the courage to brave the techy boards - I may be a little while

You actually need to have multiple back ups. A copy on an external drive is good, along with a cloud backup and a CD-R is always easy. Even CD's can fail. If you have a cloud service you can copy all your documents there as one back up and then you only need to reinstall the software if necessary. I would keep all the software for one machine in a box and so if the machine failed you could reinstall all the software on a new machine and then copy back all your data from where ever you stored it. You could clone the drive and reinstall everything at the same time from that.

jk0

I also used to throw away kettles almost as often as you GQ, as the limescale here in Reading is also shocking. I think I have found a remedy:

I always empty my kettle every morning, and re-fill it. I found this out by accident. I only started doing it when it occured to me that spiders might have crawled down the spout overnight.

Present 5+ years old kettle retired recently due to a bad contact with the base, not limescale.