I had been using the same 5400 RPM 2TB HDD since 2013. Stupidly leaving everything most important to me 'backed up' on a single disk out of laziness. The less lazy side of me had the utmost important things encrypted and cloud stored in the event that the worst took place, but I was certainly going to take a huge hit in the event that the drive died.
Well, in actuality, the drive has been showing signs of failure for well over a year. Growing increasinly slower and unreliable in recent weeks, with me fully aware of just how limited its time really is. I attempted to synchronise the Monero chain on this dying, slow drive which ultimately took nearly three entire days, only for it to fail and become corrupt. Of course I cracked and purchased new drives, finally.
This past week has been nothing but stressful. Replacing the drive itself wasn't the difficult part, not at all. It was the installing of Windows 10. I quickly realised that I only had a backup drive containing my most important files, and it would be impossible to boot an installer from without losing everything. I spent the entire night figuring out what I could do, until I thought: well, why couldn't I just load the Windows Installer onto an SD card, connect it via USB and install from that?
So, I did that. Having removed the dying drive to ensure it wasn't recognised, I loaded up the installer on a 128Gb SD card and was met with the depressing signs of life from Windows 10. Thought at the time I was really happy that I'd actually managed to sort things out. Now, it's worth noting that I don't really need an SSD for most of the things I do at my computer. These days I'm not really into videogames and I don't use many intensive programs that would even require the power of an SSD, but I'm certainly going to get one to improve general coin synchronisations.
Staying up until 4AM to get the installation over and done with, I was told by someone that the next year of my course was starting in the morning, at a sharp 9AM. Having not been told and totally unprepared for the course, the dread of dealing with Windows 10 is still not over. Alongside having to load everything back onto the new HDD and get, I've formatted the older drive to see if I can revive it a little and setup a Linux distro installation for taking over my more casual uses and developments. Funnily, the Linux installation with an old, dying rotational drive was significantly faster and easier than Windows 10 on a newer drive.
Alongside this, I've also been developing a fun little project within the cryptocurrency space that has been taking up quite a lot of time. With education starting again and an operating system to screw around with just to make functional, I'm really looking forward to getting these things done and returning to the grind of creating. I'm really excited to soft launch the project and provide some innovative concepts to existing areas of crypto and help communities thrive.
Until then, I guess I'll have to screw around with stopping Cortana and Edge from shitting up my screen every five seconds while mildly seething.
It should only be another ten or fifteen years then windows ten will be history just like windows 7, new things to look forward to. What do you think they will call the next windows version? I vote on Pillars of Destruction for a code name.
I really have zero faith in the next Windows being any better. It'll just be riddled with even more ads and spyware. More catering to touch screens and live services over a quality experience.
The days of the stand alone computer are slowly being eroded. It is almost to the point now if you are not connected your computer is nothing more than a doorstop.
The last update of edge has some interesting features, but I still find it annoying. Also Windows has a feature about memory defragmentation, which is good for HDD but is slowly killing SSD's.