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Brain SurgeryDecember 01, 2006 On the Anxiety Escalation Scale, setting up a new computer is right up there with having brain surgery. Hell, it's right up there with performing brain surgery -- when you're not a brain surgeon. By Tuesday morning, the monitor box and the CPU box had been sitting on the floor for nearly a week, a new editing job was due in that afternoon, and I was fresh out of excuses. I took a deep breath and started backing up my old brain. I'm not one of those responsible people who regularly does whole-system backups. Once hard-drive storage capacity passed the one-gigabyte mark, it defied the imagination of someone who still thought that 3 1/2-inch floppies hold a lot of stuff. (Compared to the 5 1/4-inch version, they do; and hell, the first PC I ever worked on was a TRS-80 with two 8-inch disk drives. The diskettes for those babies were the size of dessert plates, but by current standards their capacity was smaller than a weight watcher's portion of pecan pie.) Morgana IV was bequeathing to her successor her external Zip drive, but how many 100MB Zip disks would it take to back up more than 5GB of cyberstuff? I know how many dozen are in a gross, but when it comes to megas and gigas my brain boggles. That's why I have a computer. Once all the relevant folders were backed up, I asked the cyberdeities to preserve and protect my data, and to pay special attention to the ridiculous number of files in Outlook Express. I'd never managed to successfully transfer OE files from one computer to another. "Never," I reminded myself, meant "twice." Third time's the charm, I thought, and was comforted, even though I know damn well that whoever thought so never encountered Outlook Express. And while you're at it, gods, would you make sure that my new computer doesn't laugh at my old Zip drive? You can tell just how much I trust the brilliant bug purveyors at Microsoft. I dismantled Morgana IV and carried her most important parts to the other room; printer, UPS (uninterruptible power supply, not the biscuit-bearer in the big brown truck), surge protector, and Zip drive stayed behind. I started unpacking the boxes. My old brain was disconnected; my brain-to-be was spread across the floor. Cables, speakers, keyboard, mouse, more cables, plugs, instruction sheets, instruction books, CPU (with the floppy drive I ordered extra, and the parallel port they added for free so my four-year-old HP LaserJet 1200 will still work), registration cards, warranties, more plugs, and my very first LCD monitor. Where to start? My mouse pad was too dingy for my new sparkling black mouse. I washed it. Now the Lippizaners in the picture are white again. Hardware setup has gotten easier over the years: cables and ports are color-coded so you won't plug the speakers into the mouse hole. Wire management remains a challenge, but fortunately I'm not Martha Stewart and clutter doesn't bother me much. When tangles threaten, twist-ties come in very handy. The monitor worked. The printer worked. The speakers worked. I set up my ISP connection; when that worked, I stopped feeling like Robinson Crusoe. Next step was to download an up-to-date copy of AVG, my antivirus software. On my dial-up that took an hour and a half. By then it was 10:30 p.m. and I was ready to call it a (very good) day. First I installed my Zip drive. When that worked, I knew in my heart that the brain transplant would succeed. I transferred a few folders to prove it, then set up my screen saver. Pictures of Rhodry, Allie, and their friends faded one into another on my monitor. The monitor might be new, but it was no longer strange. Next morning, surgery (continued) hit the rock-and-stormy passage. Quicken 2006 wouldn't read my backup floppies from Quicken 2000. The setup wizard wouldn't release me from bondage till I pretended to be a new user and set up a new account. I refused. No way was I going to rekey eight years' worth of check registers and credit card statements, and I wasn't going to fake out the wizard by creating a dummy account. The real bad news, though, was that my Outlook Express folders and address book declined to leap into the new OE. When my horse balks, it usually has something to do with my own qualms; quite possibly, I reasoned, computer files work similarly and their lack of faith was related to mine. Deep down I was convinced I was going to lose all that stuff. Clearly I needed an attitude adjustment. I spent the afternoon among equines and equine people. Fortified with a big salad, topped generously with Chatham Village Garlic & Butter Croutons and a splash of Newman's Own Parmesan & Roasted Garlic Dressing, and one of St. Sam Adams's drinkable icons, I returned to the fray. I consulted various oracles, including the Microsoft website, and tried to understand, intuit, and otherwise extract meaning from their advice. I reconnected Morgana IV on my bedroom floor, sans printer, sans surge protector, but avec Zip drive. I backed up my Quicken files again. Again Quicken 2006 sneered at them. I sneered back: uninstalled Quicken 2006, installed Quicken 2000. Quicken 2000 re-embraced its wandering data files, and voilà, a working, fully laden checkbook. Outlook Express took a little longer, mainly because Windows XP was being cagey about where it stashes OE data files: a search for the telltale .dbx extension turned up nothing. Finally I read the runes aright and first my address book, then all my folders and files appeared in OE. Wow. Not only was I irrepressibly pleased with myself, I'd managed to learn a fair amount about how Windows XP organizes its affairs. The only remaining snag was that my floppy drive couldn't read my ancient bootleg Tetris disk, but that was minor: a legit copy could be downloaded for not much. Thursday morning -- was it only yesterday?? -- I rescued one last folder from Morgana IV, then backed up the folder with the Tetris files in it, on the off chance that it didn't require a disk. The off chance smiled: Tetris is mine again. All that remained was the formal investiture of my restored brain. I cleaned all the setup paraphernalia from the floor and my keyboard table. I arranged copy stand, candle, paperclip-holding goblet, pencils, pens, and a framed photograph of Rhodry and Dis Kitty. I posed Elmer the Horse on the UPS; he used to sit atop the monitor, but this monitor isn't wide enough. Then to the monitor I affixed the 22-cent Morgan horse stamp that has identified every Morgana since the first of that name, who came into my life in December 1985, when you really could mail a first-class letter for 22 cents. The stamp is creased and faded, the image barely discernible, but no matter. The transfer is complete: long live Morgana V!
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