Opening the box — An Elegant Sufficiency

When I was a child, there was a TV game show that involved a choice: take the money or open the box, which of course involved members of the audience shouting persuasion to make one or the other choice. I couldn’t remember the name of the show but even now, if I hear the phrase “open the box” there’s a little bit of my brain that goes on to say silently “no, take the money!” Isn’t it silly how these things stay with us?

Today, I’m sitting at my desk, looking through hundreds of folders for a couple of photographs. One of them was to illustrate this post - it’s more or less the view I have from my chair right now, with one major difference.

A week ago, I seemed to be sitting here quite a lot, followed by a few days when I sat here hardly at all. Now I’m back with an ever so slightly different view and, it has to be said, in a rather better temper! That’s because just over a week ago, my desktop PC began to do strange things. I’d reboot it and found that it was taking longer every time until the inevitable happened. It didn’t reboot at all.

Over the next couple of days I think my Hero and I experienced all emotions imaginable. Primarily hope, soon followed by despair and finally, thankfully, relief. Yes, everything was backed up so the purchase of a replacement was made and we hoped that all would be well.

In the meantime, I kept things ticking over using my tablet. It was a particularly busy time with a couple of projects I’m involved in and I needed to keep on top of emails with colleagues, not to mention keeping up with Arthur 💕. In between, I was watching one of the series of presentations on the BBC Maestro app, about painting portraits with Jonathan Yeo (who has coincidentally been in the news these last few days) I tried to keep away from my desk, knowing that it would only bring about frustration!

Thankfully, delivery of these things takes no time at all and within a couple of days there was a large package at the door.

There was another box inside and several more boxes inside there; it was a veritable Russian doll of a box in fact.

In no time at all, the old machine was out of the way and the new one sat there waiting to go. Yes, they looked remarkably similar even though the youngster was replacing almost the same product bought nine years ago, having spotted them in the Microsoft store in Chicago following our 2015 Road Trip. When we arrived home, I ordered one of the Surface Studio PCs for my Hero’s birthday and we soon purchased one for me too. Until the last week or two, the two of them have purred away, working beautifully until both began to slow down a few weeks ago. I guess we knew they were ready for replacement, but we always try to postpone the inevitable at times like this, don’t we?

That afternoon, my Hero sat down and began the mammoth task of reinstalling everything. After all it was all backed up. Wasn’t it?

Well, yes…except stuff didn’t seem to load properly and each time he reached 77% the reinstall process stopped working. It looked like the backup was corrupted.

There followed despair. The idea that everything had been lost, including photographs, documents, emails and contacts left both of us feeling utterly shell shocked.

However, I don’t refer to my dear husband as my Hero without good reason. Over the next couple of hours he mulled over the issue in hand and a thought crept into his psyche….Windows 11. Quietly he downloaded a different file manager and tried installing all those backed up files once again.

Ta dah!! It worked.

Not only did this new PC upload everything beautifully, it had all my settings, my file structures and eerily, seemed to know my passwords too. Over the next couple of hours we recovered our composure and dared to hope…

Two days later, I’m editing photos and writing a blog post. Sure, some things are a little different - just as well, for we’ve moved on a few years since 2015, haven’t we? But I still have my lovely large tilting screen that switches into a drawing board when I ask it to and of course, it zips along like lightning compared with my old, steam powered machine.